We’re always on the hunt for that unique bottle to take along to a dinner party as a real conversation-starter for enthusiast friends. But show up with any of these under your arm, and you might not be getting many more invitations in future...or making many more friends, for that matter.
Birch sap wine
By tapping a mature silver birch tree during a very narrow window in early Spring – just a couple of weeks in the middle of March, so blink and you’ll miss it – it’s possible to extract a good amount of birch sap, which foragers around the world will tell you has many different culinary uses. Among the most common is as a base for making syrups, although it needs a good deal of sweetening; the largely water-based sap contains very little by way of natural sugar, and tastes faintly bittersweet in its unadulterated form. Despite this, it’s also popular with some home brewers: by adding a lot of sugar, some sweetened fruit juice and yeast, it’s relatively straightforward to create a unique-tasting, light dry wine with a distinct overtone of damp wood. Not to everyone’s tastes by any means, but a nice voyage into the traditional for those with the right tools to hand.
Birthday cake wine
This wine, as the makers themselves would have it, is ‘like no other blend you have ever tried, with beautifully blended birthday cake flavours and fine wine, while still maintaining the true wine experience’. With varieties on offer including coffee cake, black forest and cheesecake, we’re sure the first half of that claim is accurate at least. Made in New York (where else?) using imported French wine as a base, these products might sound insane – and probably are – but to be fair, there’s a kernel of logic behind them: inspired by the tasting notes that wine experts often use to describe great wines (‘hints of cinnamon, chocolate, and cherry’ etc), daring mixologists Raphael Yokoby and David Kanbar decided to blend these flavours more prominently into good quality wines, and Birthday Cake Vineyards, for better or worse, was the result.
Snake wine
We’ve all known the odd (that being the operative word) friend or relative who returned from a trip to Asia brandishing a bottle of moody-coloured rice or grain wine with some horrifying creature submerged in it. Often it’s a small lizard, scorpion, or most commonly a snake – typically a venomous one, which poses no threat to the drinker as the combination of ethanol and our own stomach acids unbind the proteins and render the toxins inactive. The ancient traditional claim is that these creatures possess magical powers that can somehow boost human health, increase stamina, or cure a plethora of standard ageing effects from hair loss to waning libido. Of course, there’s pretty much zero medical evidence to support such wild claims – conversely, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the sale of these products to tourists as mere novelties has a damaging effect on remaining populations of (often endangered) snake species in many Southern Asian countries, which is why so many nations now ban their import.
Bear bile wine
While we’re on the distasteful topic of wines that involve needless cruelty to animals, few bottlings can rival the spectacularly heartless practice involved in creating bear bile wine. Again, this is a product chiefly linked to traditional medicinal beliefs in China, South Korea, Vietnam and Laos, where odd superstitions regarding the ability to transfer a bear’s great power and strength to humans first proliferated around the time of the Tang Dynasty (circa 700AD). In a typically brutal ‘bile farm’, captive bears are held in tiny cages while their livers or gall bladders are harvested surgically using catheters, open fistula, or wholesale removal. Happily, the vast majority of Chinese physicians today roundly condemn the practice, and agree there is no evidence to back up any supposed medical benefits. A synthetic alternative is now in production, but despite this, some estimates still put the annual global trade in bear products at upwards of $2bn.
Korean poo wine
Hard to believe, we know, but faeces wine (known in Korea as Ttongsul) is genuinely a thing. Even more amazingly, while Korea does have a long history of deriving medical products and health supplements from droppings, this particular beverage only really came to prominence – if you can call it that, since barely anybody drinks it for some reason – as recently as four years ago. And, to finally drop your jaw to near-dislocation levels, here’s the real kicker: it’s most commonly made from human stool, ideally that of children. (We’ve seen some casual uses of ‘ideally’ in our time, but that one probably takes the biscuit.) Methods of crafting this, er, acquired taste? In all honesty, whatever horrors you’re imagining, it’s probably reasonably close to the truth. Just in case you need first-hand verification, though, Vice magazine obligingly made a mini documentary about it. Bottoms up indeed.
Meteorite wine
In a doomed attempt to wash away the taste of that last nugget, so to speak, here’s an altogether more heavenly entry – you can buy a wine that’s been aged with a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite. And, perhaps surprisingly for such a vintage, it launched in 2010 at the seemingly quite reasonable price of £15 a bottle. The brainchild of Norwich-born astronomer and vintner (now there’s a CV) Ian Hutcheon, manager of the Tremonte Vineyard in Chile, it’s actually a Cabernet Sauvignon called, fittingly enough, Meteorito. The rock in question had been traced to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and is believed to have landed on Earth some 6,000 years ago, before being scooped up and dunked in a barrel of cab sav for a year or two. Apparently the resulting tipple tastes surprisingly ‘fresh and lively’. Who’d have thought?
