The Fizz #6: Bluet Winery is Maine's tide that lifts all boats.
I spoke to Coco O'Neill and Ed Lutjens at Bluet, a winery focusing on the Maine wild blueberry. We spoke about the nature of blueberries, supporting small farmers, and their take on fruit wine.
For The Fizz issue #6, I drove the hour and a half up to Scarborough, Maine to check out the acclaimed blueberry wine focused Bluet Winery. The United States has a deep history with fruit wine—wine made from fruit other than apples or grapes. Blueberries, pomegranates, blackberries, cherries, plums, and so many others, can be used for wine production, and carry a certain element of do-it-yourself culture and local pride for many communities.
In Maine, wild blueberries are everywhere—I’ve spent countless hours driving around the midcoast in the summer, joyfully foraging blueberries and buying bins of them on the side of the road from local growers. These wild berries are just that—wild. That means they often see no irrigation or chemical intervention. Blueberry fields are almost as common as lawns here, providing ample fruit for local winemakers. Why plant grapes at all?
The Bluet winery is in a warehouse in Scarborough just out of town, and immediately gives you the sense that something interesting is happening here. Originally located in an 1820s barn in Jefferson, Maine, Bluet needed a bit more of a temperature-friendly location for their fermentations—too cold in those old Maine wooden barns. I was welcomed by Coco O’Neill, the sales lead for Bluet, and Ed Lutjens, assistant winemaker and sometimes-cooper for the winery. We talked about the inherent nature of blueberries, supporting the local Maine agriculture community, and the joys and hardships of making fruit wine.
Margot: It seems like Bluet is really focused on staying local. Where do you get your fruit? What’s exciting about it?
Ed: The bulk of it we harvest from four separate farms we’ve been working with. One of the most amazing things about blueberries is that every field has different characteristics. There are upwards of 6 thousand different varieties, so any field can have this multiplicity of flavors. Unlike a grape wine that is cultivated into its particular strain of Pinot Noir or whatever you’re using, all our fields are blends. We’re making blends from varieties we don’t really know about. We’re dealing with wild uncultivated fruit. We’re finding our individual farms taste really different from each other. I hope we’ll work on an appellated series at some point—individual farms. Right now, we blend all of our batches.
Coco: It’s kind of fun to focus in on different plots. I think the appellated series will showcase how expressive blueberries can be—people don’t really think about that. It’s pretty remarkable.
M: It’s great to see your project be so rooted in the Maine community. How do you work with the folks who own these fields?
E: There are a couple of different processes. We work with each farm individually. I spend a lot of time with our growers. We’re prepping for the next harvest right now, in August. The fields are wild—they call them rock farms. You can’t grow anything else in these fields. It’s potatoes or blueberries. Depending on how developed the farm is, a lot of our growers are raking by hand. It’s very hands on, low to the ground, and not a lot of intrusion. One of our farms does irrigate, the other three we’re purchasing from don’t at all. It’s not like there are set rows and flat fields—irrigation here is difficult to do. There’s not a lot of spraying going on. One of our farmers is doing that, or rather, one of his larger purchasers does. “Big Ag” business is descending up here.
One of our farms is organic, the other two are not organic certified, but they don’t spray or do anything like that. When it starts to be close to harvest, we spend time in the fields and we’re looking at ripeness, weather—depending on rain, the fruit soaks up a lot of water—and we’re looking to maximize our sugar content, our Brix. We look at cleanliness as the fruit is coming out, depending on how it’s been harvested, one of our guys uses a machine to harvest, for example. The people who are hand-raking, they’re incorporating a lot of leaves and branches. Sometimes we like leaves in there—they’re tannic. We’re picking and choosing when we want those flavors. We get to have that opportunity because we work closely with each grower, so we know what we’re going to get.
C: As far as working with the farmers, it’s relationship building. Understanding what thy hope to get out of it, what we’re looking for, and also acknowledging that by making wine out of this fruit, we’re adding value to the product and creating a more sustainable market for these families. We’re working with Mainers. Some of these folks have had these “rock farms” in the family since the Civil War.
It’s creating an infrastructure for people to build a different economy for themselves that isn’t directly related to being at the whim of larger corporations. [Those corporations] don’t pay the market value for the fruit, and growers don’t get paid until the end of the harvest. They have to take these offers, and sometimes there’s a loss at the end of harvest. We pay above that market price so the growers can have a better quality of life and prop up this piece of Maine industry.
M: Do you taste each parcel as it comes in, and blind blend?
E: We keep it all separate through fermentation. Everything’s been racked a few times now, so this [gestures at the tanks in the winery] has been sitting around for five, six months. At this point it’s starting to clarify, and we’re starting to get ready to make wine out of it. For blueberries, it takes a long time for the sediment to fall out of it. Right now, we’re blending farms.
M: You’re really investing back into the community from which you are making your money.
C: Yeah. Michael and Eric started this because they wanted to make something that was from Maine that really spoke to the terroir of the state. Michael being a winemaker from Napa, he has all the knowledge that can be applied to this process. [Michael Terrien is the co-founder of Obsidian Wine Company and owner of Terrien Wines in California.] More so, it was their love of growing up in Maine and seeing this economy sort of collapse underneath these farmers, saying “we can actually affect a change here and improve some lives in this place we love so much”.
M: How do you find the growers you work with?
E: There’s a blueberry grower association—it’s a very small community. A lot of the growers will share resources with one another. Some will manage other families’ lands—some manage over 30 different farms. It’s very interconnected, it’s not hard to find them. It’s more about who is interested in working with us. For us, we have a very hands on relationship. If we were just buying from large producers, we wouldn’t have any say into what we get. We do try to pay all of our farmers a sustainable cost, because we really want them to be there in the future.
M: How do you process your fruit when you come in?
E: Typically it’s harvested and minimally processed. Families who do fresh-pack take care not to introduce E. coli when they sort and pack. But bad bacteria can't live in wine so all we have to think about is flavor rather than making people ill. We did a wild ferment this year of organic fruit, and it just went off.
M: Oh, bummer. What happened there?
E: We’re working with the University of Maine, who is a great resource. The bacterial load on the fruit has been skyrocketing the last few years. Some yeast strains are really becoming dominant. There’s potential for Brettanomyces to take over. That may change our approach a bit. We’re not using any sulfur in the process. Wild yeast ferments happen really spontaneously. Some of our process in the future may involve washing.
M: How do you choose the yeast that you work with now?
E: Michael uses a champagne yeast. We use it pretty cross-platform. With the wild yeast ferment, we’ll definitely try again. The champagne method, we macerate and pitch yeast on fruit in the field. Often it goes right away because it’s coming out of the field at 85 degrees. We’ll typically pitch yeast on it so we can hope to win the fight. For the charmat and cans, we try to get that to press before it starts to spontaneously ferment. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we’ll press it and then pitch it here. We do about 250 cases a year of the champagne, that being the direct macerate. We’re gong to try this year doing a different maceration—try doing a bulk ferment on skins. We might try to do 10 tons and see how that presses out. It’s one thing to have small batches go off, and another to have a big amount go off.
C: Natural yeast is important, but we’re trying to get to the purest expression of the blueberry. You want to use spontaneous fermentation, but it can take such a different turn.
M: At the end of the day, you have to make wine.
E: Yeah, the sugars are so low with blueberries. Your risk level is so much less with grapes. With us, the yeast is slow to get going. We’re committed to doing our wild ferments—this was going to be our year! Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait another year. We like that process and we know that fermenting on skins provides such a richer body. That said, we’re also trying to scale up and create some processes we can replicate. For now, that means using yeast.
M: That’s fair. What do you use the oak for?
E: Typically just for aging. You don’t get any of the texture or anything from the wood. We’re finding that time is a big benefit to this wine. Sometimes we age for six months, nine months. We’ll oak some stuff and blend it back in with unoaked stock. We’re liking a two year cycle for the champagne. We want to start holding stuff longer. It’s so high antioxidant, so tannic, that it hangs in there—it becomes more volumeful, more interesting. The older vintages that we have are just so cool.
M: It seems like there’s a big culture of experimentation here.
E: Oh, yeah! That’s Maine all over. The brewery scene here has just been fantastic. There’s a lot of experimentation. The industry is growing on all levels. It’s amazing to see all the different malt houses, farms growing hops, company harvesting peat and smoking. I didn’t even know we had peat bogs! All that stuff is exploding. It’s a good time to be here. It feels like maybe California felt when people started growing grapes up there! We’re riding that wave.
M: There’s a lot of history of fruit based wines in New England. Do you feel connected to that history at all?
C: We do feel connected to the history. The blueberry wines that have existed in Maine were made in a traditionally Maine way—it was sweet, it was delicious, it was catering to a specific palate and it created a pathway for what we’re doing now. We’re walking through the door and making it our own. We’ve learned a lot from the people who have been making fruited wines, and we’ve learned what we want out of our wine. It’s provided an important foundation.
E: Everyone used to make their own. My grandma used to make her own. She made dandelion wine and wine from Concord grapes. She made everything under the sun. My friend Ken makes his own switchel, you know? There’s a great tradition of that. Now because of the change in the market, there’s a change in appeal. There’s a little boom in Portland now, and it has allowed all of these different industries to become real businesses. People’s palates have shifted away from sweet, which has been a perfect circumstance for us to produce something that speaks to the simplicity and nature of the blueberries in the region—it’s viable, where as maybe 50 years ago, it wasn’t going to happen. People have been subsistence farming in Maine until very recently.
M: What has it been like getting these wines to market?
C: It’s been difficult. Maine being a community that it is, we’re lucky that people are willing to try it because they want to support you since you’re local. The wine is different though—it defies traditional expectations that people have for fruit wine. They think it’s going to be very sweet and jammy. You have to educate and taste taste taste with people. What does the Maine blueberry taste like? There’s salinity, minerality.
I’ll say Portland has been really welcoming. With the cans, we’ve seen some crossover with sour beer drinkers. Folks are more apt to try something. When you get up to Bar Harbor, for example, people are expecting something a little sweeter.
E: We had a lot of growing pains initially. You’ve got red wine, white wine, and maybe there’s a little shelf in the corner labeled fruit wines. That market has changed dramatically. Now, ciders and kombuchas and sours occupy a huge section of the store. We’re trying to navigate that. At least now there’s a buying population that’s excited to try new things. We’ve had good luck with seafood—that minerally salty aspect works really well with our wine. It seems unusual because of the color, but it’s really good! We did an oyster event this last summer, and it was shockingly good.
M: Hey, what grows together goes together!
C: Absolutely. I always have a four pack of the cans in the fridge. I drink it with everything. It’s great boat wine. Retail, people can get it for $4 pack for $20 or $5 each. It has started making it into people’s coolers. We’re in 200-250 stores in Maine right now—Hannafords, Rosemonts, some Whole Foods. Places a lot of smaller craft beer and wine stores carries our wine.
[We tasted the charmat, an absolutely delicious sparkling wild blueberry wine with a twist-off cap. I took a bottle home and immediately drank it the next day. I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the drive back, unsurprising, since I absolutely love the vibe a little RS (or in this case, dosage) can bring to wine. The dosage on this wine is extra brut—that’s 4.5g sugar per bottle, or 6g/L—you would barely notice any sweet flavor. It has lovely blue fruit, a supple weight, soft tannins. It’s winter friendly, it has that oomph. It feels like wine, familiar, approachable, delicious.]
C: People’s perception of sugar on the palate is as much as about the sweet flavor as the fullness, the mouthfeel. This probably isn’t sweet enough for some people, but it’s enough to make it fuller, richer, and it compliments the acidity nicely.
E: This wine allowed us to reach audiences we weren’t reaching otherwise. It was $18 at the time—easier for people to just walk in and try it. It’s more approachable than the champagne style.
C: We poured this at Central Provisions during the summer, and we crushed it. It pairs well with so much, and it’s delightful. People dug it—especially people from away, coming to Maine and looking for a Maine experience, it’s nice.
[We tasted the champagne-style wine, bone dry (no sugar) with an awesome mousse, this wine is incredibly complex, and to me, the star. It’s got Italian-style blue fruit, depth, and a yumminess that makes me want to drink the whole glass. The wine is familiar, in a way. It feels both complex and uncomplicated. I took home a bottle and drank it with my best friend on her deck, wrapped in electric blankets, out of small jars. It was perfect.]
M: Do you work with other fruit winemakers around here at all?
C: Yeah, there’s a new winery here called RAS making blueberry wine. They use our press.
E: We’re trying to encourage small farms to make wine with our method. There’s plenty of room. I think we bought less than 1% of the entire harvest in Maine last year, and we bought 40 tons. 90% of Maine’s harvest gets sold to the international market as frozen fruit. It ends up in the freezer section blended in with all the other blueberries in the world and it loses its distinction. That’s why the price is so repressed—it’s competing with fruit from Brazil, for example. [The field price for Maine wild blueberries has declined 75% in the last decade.] As much as we can, we want to keep that harvest in Maine and help folks make product out of it, that’s the way to elevate our farmers.
C: The more we can educate and encourage others, the better the farmers are and the better the economy.
M: A rising tide lifts all boats.
E: Exactly!
On February 14, I’m hosting a virtual wine class (on Zoom!) with Coco—we’ll be tasting the dry sparkling canned, charmat, and champagne-style wines and learning more about Maine fruit wines as well as how Bluet makes wine and works with local farmers. You can register here. When you do, you can invite a friend for free.
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Non-profit pairing: Coco supports the Maine Locker Project, which “provides access to healthy food at 34 public schools and preschools in Portland, South Portland, Gorham, and Westbrook that serve nearly 11,000 children, more than half of whom come from low-income families”. Donate to this important organization here.
Bluet is distributed by MS Walker in Boston. They’re available in California, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland—your state coming soon. You can support them by asking for their wines at your local wine shop and staying up to what they’re doing on Instagram, as well as buying their wines on their site. Learn more about Bluet through the New York Times article here.
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