What is raspberry wine?

Wine is fermented fruit sugar. Grapes are the default because they carry the right sugar, acid and water balance in a single fruit, but nothing about fermentation requires them. Raspberry wine is made the same way: crush the fruit, ferment the sugar, age the result.

The complication is that raspberries are not grapes. They carry less sugar and considerably more acid, and they give up colour and aroma far more readily. A raspberry ferment that is handled like a grape ferment produces something thin and harsh. Handled for what it is, it produces a wine with a startling nose and an acid backbone most fruit wines never develop.

That acid is the whole argument. It is why a properly made raspberry wine finishes dry and clean instead of cloying, and it is why altitude matters — cooler mountain fruit holds its acidity where valley fruit loses it.

Walk into a supermarket in most of Europe and the bottle labelled raspberry wine is likely to be one of three quite different products, and the label rarely tells you which.

Aromatised grape wine. A cheap grape base with raspberry flavouring added. It is the most common version by volume, it is legal, and it is not fruit wine in any meaningful sense — the raspberry never fermented.

Fortified or watered fruit wine. Real raspberries, but the must is diluted with water to stretch it and the ferment is stopped with grape spirit to leave residual sugar. Sweet, simple, and a long way from dry.

Fully fermented fruit wine. The fruit is the entire base. Nothing is added to stretch it, nothing is added to stop it. This is the smallest category and the only one where the character of the fruit and its growing site actually reaches the glass.

G. Filipoff sits in the third. The 100% Raspberry Wine ferments entirely from fresh raspberries, with no added water and no grape spirit.

The raspberries are hand-picked from mountain plantings at roughly 800 metres in the Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria, near Asen's Fortress above Asenovgrad. Hand-picking is not romanticism here: raspberries bruise if you look at them hard, and bruised fruit oxidises before it reaches the cellar.

The fruit is crushed and fermented on its own sugars. Because raspberry must is lower in sugar than grape must, the finished alcohol lands around 10.5% rather than the 13–14% typical of red wine — a consequence of the fruit, not a choice to make something lighter.

After fermentation the wine is settled and matured before bottling. The colour it arrives with is light ruby, and it comes from the fruit alone; nothing is added to deepen it.

Alcohol. Raspberry wine sits lower — around 10.5% for the 100% bottling, 11.5% for the Mavrud blend — against 12–14% for most still grape wine.

Acidity. Higher, and more obviously so. It reads as freshness rather than sourness when the wine is balanced.

Tannin. Effectively absent in a pure raspberry wine. Raspberries have no seeds and skins of the kind that give red wine its grip. This is why the Mavrud blend exists: the grape contributes the structure the fruit cannot.

Ageing. Grape wine is built to age for years or decades. Raspberry wine is built around primary fruit aroma, which fades. Drink it young.

At the table. A pure raspberry wine works where a light red or a rosé would — aperitif, soft cheeses, dark chocolate, fruit desserts. The Mavrud blend, with real tannic structure, handles lamb, game, mature cheeses and mushroom dishes.

Mavrud is Bulgaria's signature indigenous red grape, grown in the Thracian Lowlands — deeply coloured, firmly tannic, and grown almost nowhere else. Blending it with Rhodope raspberry produces something that could not have come from anywhere but Bulgaria: the fruit's aromatics carried on the grape's frame.

It is also the most useful bottle in the range for anyone sceptical of fruit wine, because it answers the objection directly. The structure is there. It behaves like a red at the table.

Serve the 100% Raspberry Wine lightly chilled, 10–12 °C. Too cold and the aromatics shut down; at room temperature the alcohol pushes forward and the fruit flattens.

Serve Raspberry & Mavrud warmer, 14–16 °C, as you would a medium-bodied red.

Use an ordinary wine glass, not a liqueur glass. The aroma is the best thing raspberry wine has, and it needs room.