Berries

Our berries

The berries we cultivate at our farm are quite special and there is a clear logic beyond the great taste why we selected these species

Red Gooseberry: A typical berry in " grandma's garden", but very rarely grown in larger scale. Gooseberries are big and juicy and have been called as " Nordic grapes". We were convinced in the suitability of the premium Lepaa Red Gooseberry species to wine production once we tasted our pilot wines years ago. These gooseberry bushes do have nasty thrones and that is why we figured that the deer would not eat them. This assumption has turned out to be correct. The local, strong deer population have left the bushes and also the berries alone. Many people ask about how to hand pick gooseberries with the thorns. With rose gardener's gloves and with the "picking pool" we have developed the harvesting is fast and easy.

Green currant: This special version of the well known black currant was developed in Finland ca 50 years ago. The berries remain green when ripe. The taste is a bit sweeter and milder than in black currant and the vitamin C content is even higher. Very healthy. No wonder that the developers of this species thought that the green currant would become a best seller. However the green currant did not really break thru as people have the image of green berries being raw when out and presented on the market place and they buy the more traditional black, red and white currants. One alleged benefit of the ripe berries been green is that birds don't see them. We can confirm this claim, we don't have any problems of birds harvesting our green currants ( nor gooseberries) at the end of summer. We know that there are berry eating birds around as they visit regularly our black currant bushes. The fertility of the black currant allows the taxation of the birds, so we do not see that as a problem to tackle. The green currant yields an excellent wine and of our three types of berry wines this has the most resemblance to white grape wines.