Haskap, also called honeyberry, is a super fruit now emerging in the marketplace and is starting to get known for its ability to make truly amazing fruit wines! This is an exciting development and wonderful for us fruit wine lovers.
Many home winemakers are discovering this fruit and some forward thinking and innovative commercial producers already have been selling haskap wines to discerning wine clientele.
Let’s learn a bit about this amazing fruit and why we should be thinking about making wines from it (or at least buying a few bottles from some producers).
What are haskaps?
Haskap (also called Honeyberry) is a member of the Honeysuckle family. It has a recent history of being commercially grown and was first introduced in Canada in the mid 1960’s. Originally, the berry comes from the Japanese island of Hokkaido and used to be named “hasukappu” by the local natives from that island.
The fruit itself is a small oval berry, sometimes described as being in the shape to an elongated Blueberry and can be about 2.5cm long. The skin usually is a very dark blue, and its flesh is of a deep crimson colour and its seeds are tiny, very much like the seeds of blueberries. Haskap juice is very sweet, almost as sweet as the brix level of a ripe wine grape (20–22’ brix) and the colour…
