RAS Wines

Items

RAS Wines 2020 'Arkadia' Sparkling Blueberry Wine, Maine	Login	—	In Stock
RAS Wines (500 ml) 'A7' Americano Rosso, Maine (24 proof)	Login	—	In Stock

RAS Wines is Dan Roche, Joe Appel and Emily Smith.

Joe and Dan first met while cooking for a small neighborhood grocer. They bonded quickly over The Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, and Don DeLillo. Soon they were close friends and found a new passion to explore together: wine. A handful of years later Emily came to work for the same company and through similar interests and spirit joined the crew.

Over a decade later, after sharing thousands (and thousands) of bottles of wine, and swapping hundreds of book and movie and music recommendations, and just generally overlapping their lives, Dan (the R) Joe (the A) and Emily (the S) decided to turn their passions into their livelihood. RAS is the product of dreamers, travelers and seekers. It is for making the choice to do something you love now and not later. It is love and friendship and connection.

Dan, Joe, and Emily are tradition-minded winemakers creating delicious, uniquely Maine wines from locally grown wild blueberries. Wild blueberries are fundamental to Maine’s history, geography, and culture, and they are fundamental to the RAS winemaking approach. All of the wines are made from field blends of several lowbush blueberry varieties, yielding complex flavors that express the unique character of Maine. The bushes grow on scrubby, pine-forested slopes near the Atlantic Ocean, and somehow the berries taste like that. Wild Maine blueberries, with their inimitable flavor–ambrosial, herbal, saline, sweet–are ideal for making fine sparkling and aromatized wines because they’re high in acidity, small in size (better skin-to-juice ratio), and boast a deep flavor and naturally low sugar content that makes savory, light-bodied wines. The blueberries are sourced from a small number of organic farms in the Wild Blueberry regions of Maine like Mid-Coast and Downeast.

Social Media
Instagram: @ras_wines

Media Links
Wine Enthusiast: Climate Change, Fermented Blueberries and Wine’s Existential Quandary
The Maine Mag: Wild Blueberry Wine is Becoming Maine’s Hot New Commodity