About Fruit Wine & Mead
We Believe in Quality
FROM FRUIT to Glass
Fruit wines can be vinted in a number of ways and made from a variety of different fruits, berries honey (mead), ginger (ginger beer) and tea kombucha). Putting a general label on the category is difficult. The wines range from dry, still table wines, to light fruity sparkling wines, to intense, sweet dessert style products.
Quality, Expertise, Mouth- Watering Goodness
Table Wines
Fresh, fruity sparkling or still. Fruits commonly used are berries, feijoa and kiwifruit.
Seltzer & Spritzer-style Sparkling Fruit Wine
An effervescent, clean tasting, soda like beverage made from fermented fruit or sugar. Additional flavourings derived from added fruit or juice concentrates only.
Fortified Fruit Wine & Fruit Liqueur
Lucsious port-like wines and liquours made with cherries, berries, plums & feijoas
mead
The defining characteristic of mead is that the majority of the beverage’s fermentable sugar is derived from honey. Examples include:
– Honey Mead
– Mead with spices/herbs (Metheglin)
– Mead with fruits (Melomel)
– Mead with barley & hops (Braggot)
Other Fruit Wines
Alcoholic Ginger Beer, made by fermenting ginger and sugar is a balance of spicy heat and sweet.
Alcoholic Kombucha is fermented, lightly effervescent, sweetened black or green tea.
Since 1987
Our Story
We are the industry association for commercial non-grape winemakers. Our members include cider, fruit wine, mead and liqueur producers and range from high volume operations to small boutique producers.
The association was started in the 80’s when the NZ Fruit Wine Industry was booming. For the last 30 odd years the annual Fruit Wine and Cider Awards have been held. More recently with the phenomenal growth in popularity of Cider the Association decided in 2015 the Awards needed to be split into the NZ Cider Awards and the NZ Fruit Wine Awards and Cider New Zealand was born.