Hollola Finland, 09 March 2020
Ainoa Winery is pleased to announce that its most recently released wine, Ainoa Kuningatar 2017 dessert wine has been awarded a gold medal at the 2020 Vinalies Internationales in Paris.
As every Finn knows, the flavor Kuningatar is a delicious sweet/tart mix of blueberry and raspberry that is widely used in foods. It should have been an obvious choice for a wine, but as far as we could determine, few had done so. Not that we can take credit for great insight, the first time we made Kuningatar it was a fortuitous accident.
In the US, there is a saying that “it is better to be lucky than good”. In the case of Kuningatar, it was both. We spent years perfecting our raspberry and blueberry wines, but it only took a few minutes of inattention in the winery to put those two wines in the same tank. Rather than beat ourselves up for the mistake, we decided to see if there was still something worth saving. To our amazement, the blend passed our “wow” test for determining if a wine was good enough to put into production – the only wine we have ever made that did so on the very first try.
Kuningatar is not the first of our wines that was sent to Vinalies for its first competition and won a gold medal there – that honor goes to Ainoa Vaapukka 2015 which did so in 2017. These two wines, along with Ainoa Sametti which won silver medals at Vinalies in 2018 and 2019 remain the only wines in the world made from berries ever awarded medals at Vinalies.
Kuningatar is still in limited production and is currently only available at fine restaurants around Finland. Restaurants which wish to order it can do so from our distributors Vindirekt or Kespro.
