Kelley Fox Blueberry wine 2022 (1)

This luscious wine is a collaboration between Oregon winemakers Kelley Fox and Jim Anderson of Patricia Green Cellars. In preserving the fruit of a recent harvest, the two merge memories from their pasts of this abundant summer fruit into one luscious, dry, and one-of-a-kind wine.

Kelley shared a memory of tasting a locally-made blueberry wine in the early 80s, soon around the time that she moved to Oregon. The blueberry wine’s aroma expanded throughout the room, challenging the pinot noirs on the table. Such a presence! Jim, on the other hand she says, lived in Maine as a child and his family grew blueberry bushes. His memory goes back to when he was very small, dwarfed by the bushes with the tiny flavorful berries.

Now, Kelley & Jim are seriously talented winemakers — this isn’t your state fair fruit wine, and before you ask, it’s completely dry. It also is far from some of the more cerebral pinot noir wines of this state. It evokes a ravenous black bear scarfing down paw-fuls of blueberries fresh off the bush. Always finding parallels to the world of plant medicine, Kelley describes this as a dose of bear energy through the blueberry plant!

100% blueberries, made like a red wine. The blueberries were handpicked from a farm in the Willamette Valley. They were brought to the cellar, then given a daily foot-treading to crush the berries and extract color. When the wine was dry (this wine has no residual sugar!), the wine was pressed and transferred to neutral, tight-grained oak barrels to age. It was racked to tank and then bottled.