Wild Blue Wonder | Bluet Wild Blueberry Wine

Wild Maine blueberries

Credit: Greta Rybus

Wild Maine blueberries
Credit: Greta Rybus

Michael Terrien squats in the field and picks a handful of fruit. He crushes it, squeezing the shockingly purple juice into a plastic beaker. He pours a few drops into one end of a refractometer, a pipe-size device that measures sugar levels. As he waits for the result, he picks another berry and pops it into his mouth, chewing pensively as he stares at the distant hills.

Terrien is a winemaker who lives in Napa Valley. He makes an acclaimed Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and consults for some of Napa’s most prestigious labels. And he is doing what he’s done every August for most of his adult life: visiting the fields, tasting the fruit, deciding when to pick and how to turn this fragrant abundance into the best possible wine.

Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide!

Email(Required)

“How do we tell the story of this fruit?” he asks his winemaking partner, Eric Martin, who is sampling his own berries a few feet away. “How do we learn from it and make a wine we respect?”

Martin laughs. “I remember being 26 and working the harvest with you in Napa back in the ’90s, and you were saying, ‘How am I going to honor this fruit? How am I going to honor this farmer?’ And it’s the same now.” He pops some fruit into his mouth and exclaims, “This is delicious. I really like the balance of sweet and tart.”

“I agree,” Terrien replies. “Just shockingly beautiful. It smells woodsy and mineral-y, like granite.” He runs his hand over a seam of bedrock breaching the surface, as if to make the connection.

“It’s amazing how different it can be,” says Jeremy Howard, the grower of this fruit. “The flavor profile from patch to patch and year to year can change tremendously.”

It’s the kind of conversation that growers and winemakers have always had, and in so many ways this scene could be anywhere in Napa: slopes stippled with fruit, pickers in the distance filling bins. But this isn’t California. And these aren’t grapes.

We’re at Appleton Ridge, Maine, standing in a field of wild blueberries, Maine’s second-most-famous food. Unlike the “highbush” blueberries cultivated worldwide, wild blueberry bushes rise less than a foot off the ground and produce tiny berries with intense flavor. They thrive in cold climates on thin, acidic soils, especially the glacier-scoured reaches of Down East Maine, where 36,000 acres of fields are maintained, a heathlike region known as the blueberry barrens.

Martin and Terrien, who grew up in Maine and still return each summer with their families, began making wine out of their favorite fruit nine years ago. At first it was on a lark, but they liked the results so much they kept experimenting, and in 2014 they launched Bluet, an all-natural wine made entirely from wild blueberries, or “bluets,” as Thoreau called them, borrowing the old word used by the French settlers who first encountered the fruit. To Thoreau, they were “little blue sacks of swampy nectar and ambrosia commingled,” which certainly sounds like the kind of thing one should turn into wine.

Winemaker Michael Terrien with a bottle of Bluet, a sparkling wine made from wild Maine blueberries using the same time-honored techniques as Champagne and Prosecco.
Credit: Greta Rybus

Bluet was not the first blueberry wine, but most earlier efforts were the kind of syrupy funk that has given generations of country fruit wines a bad name. Terrien was the first person with serious winemaking chops to tackle the fruit, and he was not fooled by its sugar. Wine grapes like Pinot Noir have twice the sugar content of blueberries, for instance, “but you don’t make pie out of Pinot Noir.” He went straight to méthode champenoise, the technique employed in Champagne to produce a dry, sparkling, extraordinarily aromatic wine. The result turned heads, in Maine and beyond.

I’d tasted my first bottle of Bluet the day before meeting Martin and Terrien in the barrens, and it was a revelation. The mind has no idea what to make of a champagne glass of midnight-purple juice topped with a frothy pink head. The darkness and density suggest extreme red wine. The word blueberry inclines one to expect sweetness. And so that first delicate, bracingly tart sip comes as a shock.

But at least then you know what to expect. On the second sip you start to appreciate the clean snap of it, and by the third the nuances are coming through, the ethereal notes of citrus and rose petal that Terrien talks about. And by the fourth you’re hooked. (I immediately wanted to try it with Maine’s other iconic food, and Terrien approved: “What grows together goes together. Roasting a lobster over a charcoal fire and drinking a bottle of Bluet is a very lovely combination.”)

“It’s like the blueberry had this flavor that hadn’t been unlocked,” Martin says as we pick our way through the field, sampling from different plants. “Once you strip away the sugar by converting it into alcohol, you reveal its essence, and it’s this really beautiful expression that no one’s tasted before, even though it’s been hiding in plain sight.”

Bluet’s production has doubled each year, but at 3,000 cases per year it’s still tiny. Now the state and its blueberry growers would very much like Martin and Terrien to go big. Crushed by a global tsunami of highbush blueberries, more and more of Maine’s 485 remaining blueberry growers are giving up, despite having the most flavorful blueberries on the planet.

“We started doing this just for fun,” says Martin. “We thought it would taste good and would speak to the place. But once we started working with growers and discovered how desperate they are, that changed. Blueberries grow on land that’s otherwise agriculturally worthless. You can’t grow corn or potatoes on it. The only other thing you can do with it is condos and cul-de-sacs.”

The industry has tried to expand its options with dozens of value-added products, but only wine has a market that puts tremendous value on flavor and place, says Martin. “When we started explaining that we wanted to take the unique character of their fruit and put it into a bottle so people could experience it, their eyes lit up, and they said, ‘That’s the story that we’ve been trying to tell!’ This is what wine is set up to do.”

That story can’t come a moment too soon for family operations like Brodis Blueberries, where we are standing, which has been growing blueberries in this spot since the Civil War. “We were talking with Grandmother Brodis,” Martin says, “and she just looked at us and said, ‘I don’t want to be the one.’ And we knew exactly what she meant. This tradition could be lost very quickly.”

As they wrestle with the implications, Martin and Terrien gaze across the Wyeth-like vista of yellowing greens rolling like waves up and over the glacier-smoothed hills, breaking against old stone walls. Both men are in their 50s, with graying temples and teenage kids. Terrien is tall and thin, with a sumptuous head of hair that gives him a John Kerry–esque mien. Martin has curly hair and would look thin next to anyone other than Terrien. Both have built successful careers away. And both are now feeling the magnetic tug of Maine. It’s that week of August when everything starts to turn. The sun is still strong, but something about the way it angles across the burnished fields reminds you that it’s not high summer anymore. There’s an urgency to the crickets. There are berries to be picked. Time is shorter than you think.

When you ask Martin and Terrien how Bluet began, they will tell you about the bachelor party a decade ago on a Maine island where the group of friends drank everything they’d brought until they were left with one bottle of homemade blueberry wine, and they drank that and Terrien said, “There’s gotta be a better way to make blueberry wine.” But then they will stop and back up and talk about how the Civil War turned Maine’s delectable yet inaccessible specialty into a national obsession. And then they will stop again and back way up and talk about the glaciers.

About 35,000 years ago, the last in a series of ice ages gripped New England. Glaciers a mile high pushed down from Canada, bulldozing Maine’s topsoil deep into the Atlantic Ocean. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, about 12,000 years ago, they left a raw landscape of granite till, molded into rolling hills. One of the first colonizers of this harsh terrain was a little plant called Vaccinium angustifolium, the wild blueberry. By partnering with a fungus that was adept at mining nutrients from rock, the blueberry was able to get a toehold in those infertile, acidic environments where little else could grow. And for more than 10,000 years, it has persisted, forming low mats that stay blanketed by protective snow in winter. In May it sends up tubular white flowers, followed by juicy blue fruits in August, and in fall the barrens blush crimson. It is one of the most distinctively Down East of landscapes, a palette of colors washing across the naked hills.

Native Americans managed their own fields for thousands of years, and colonists followed suit, but blueberries were little more than a local celebration each August. With thin skins and abundant juice, they fall apart within days. It wasn’t until the Civil War, when the sardine canneries of coastal Maine lost their southern markets and began canning blueberries for Union soldiers, that the means to share the bounty with out-of-staters was at hand. Soon canneries were being built throughout the barrens.

With no competition—the fruit grew almost nowhere except Maine and the Maritimes—blueberries boomed in the late 1800s, with 150,000 acres in production. Cans featuring Maine’s iconic fruit became ubiquitous throughout the country, allowing people to make pies year-round.

But the seed of the wild blueberry’s downfall was planted in the early 1900s, when the USDA began crossbreeding plants with the tallest stems and largest berries. It was successful, though the berry lost its woodsy intensity in the process. By the 1930s, highbush blueberries with huge fruit were being widely grown. The larger berries looked more impressive and had thicker skins that allowed them to withstand shipping.

In the 1950s, freezer technology arrived and bought the wild blueberry some time. While highbush berries dominated the produce aisle, the flavorful wild berry was the go-to for frozen. (It got a boost in the early 2000s, when it was found to have the highest antioxidant content of any fruit. Cranberries and cultivated blueberries are a distant second and third.) Today, 99 percent of the crop is frozen, usually the day it comes out of the fields.

But the past decade has brought Maine’s industry to its knees. Highbush blueberry production has exploded worldwide, much of it in countries with alarmingly low costs of labor. Maine’s annual 50-million-plus pounds of berries amounts to just 3 percent of the global blueberry crop. As this blue glut has exceeded the demand for fresh berries, the excess is dumped on the frozen market at fire-sale prices. From an all-time-high price of $1.07 per pound in 2007, the price for frozen berries cratered to about 25 cents per pound in 2016 and 2017 before settling in the past few years at 46 to 60 cents per pound—right around the break-even point, according to Lily Calderwood, the wild blueberry specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

With economics like that, says Calderwood, it’s no wonder many of Maine’s blueberry farmers are looking to get out. “We’re in a big transition,” she told me. “A significant percentage of the growers are more than 75 years old and want to retire. There’s a critical need for new farmers. But they aren’t coming.”

Eric Martin and Michael Terrien didn’t know about the travails of the industry when they drank that first syrupy bottle of blueberry wine at that bachelor party a decade ago. They just knew there had to be a better way to honor the berry they’d both grown up adoring.

The two had been tight as kids, running around the Portland area playing capture the flag, building snow forts, and picking berries every August. “The best picking was always under the power lines,” Martin remembers. “But you had to be fast, because everyone knew where they were.” He became hooked on the unique joy of popping a handful at once. “It wasn’t just one flavor, but six or seven at once. Some sweet, some tart, some waxy.”

They both ran off to California. Terrien became known for his minimal-intervention winemaking, letting the fruit and the land speak for itself at a time when most winemakers were embracing technology to control flavor as predictably as possible. Martin worked the crush with him for fun.

Martin wound up in North Carolina with a career as a novelist, but the two friends stayed tight, reuniting in Maine every summer. After the bachelor party, they had blueberries on the brain. A year later, they were both at a wedding where all the food was sourced locally, Martin remembers. “The corn, the lobsters, the honey. Everything except the wine. We were drinking Michael’s wine from California. And Michael said, ‘Why aren’t we drinking Maine wine? Where’s the Maine wine?’”