Lake Effect Snowberry
Lake Effect Snowberry might sound like a wine straight out of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and you'd be right. I loved that book growing up! All I needed to do was become an adult and wait for a huge storm to provide me with the raw ingredient for this tasty wine: snow. On a particularly snowy night in February 2019, we received over 12" of fresh powder all over the yard. This rich seam was mined and the ore melted in the basement. I then dredged up some raspberries and strawberries from the freezer to add to the mix. They're a minor component because I didn't want to overpower the unique flavor of Lake Superior lake effect.
All was going according to plan until I added back in a bit of extra lake effect juice to the mix after the second racking. Giant jellyfish-like blobs appeared out of nowhere and goobered up everything. It looked like all was lost. Where had these formations come from? Maybe there was an imbalance in the pectin, or perhaps snow isn't the best ingredient after all. At any rate, I was able to siphon around the jellyfish and saved about half of the now-tasty concoction. It may have earned recognition as a cursed wine, but the results were worth it.
I bottled this wine in September 2019. It's a solid 12% and as you can see in the photo, rosier than my nose gets after shoveling for hours. It's one of the few wines I've made where I came up with the name before I started the wine, and the label reflects this. If only I had more of this!
