Blue Wine is Now a Thing and We Want to Try it ASAP

Gone are the days of simply pairing your meals with red and white wines.

As it turns out, traditional wines are suddenly passé, and wines featuring more eccentric hues are all the rage.

Like blazing blue.

A Spanish startup is hoping to change the world of wine by crafting very electric variety.

Photo: Gik

Photo: Gik

At first glance, one might assume that the beverage in front of them is a sugary cocktail similar to what you might find in Mexico. But the vibrant colour actually comes from an undisclosed combination of red and white grapes that have been sourced from various vineyards across Spain.

The Smurf tinge comes from anthocyanin, a pigment that’s found in grape skin, and indigo, a dye extracted from the Isatis tinctoria plant.

“Try to forget all you know about wine,” the website for the brand, Gik, reads. “Ignore all the preconceptions and standards regarding [the] wine industry and turn a deaf ear to what the sommelier told you in the wine tasting last week.”

Co-founder Aritz López explained to Eater that neither he nor his partners had prior winemaking experience, but that they “wanted to create something really innovative.” Gik teamed up with the University of the Basque Country and a food research team to uncork this discovery, which fits into the chilled, sweet white wine category.

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So why blue? The team felt that Spain’s wine industry was “missing a little revolution.”

“We were raised in a country with a strong wine culture, but wine has always been a beverage put on a pedestal. So we thought about how it would be to have real people making wine for real people, not a wine made by experts to pseudo-connoisseurs,” says the team.

Bottles sell for about $11 and are currently available in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany, with a U.S. expansion in the works.

While we’re a little disappointed that we won’t see any blue wine on Canadian liquor store shelves anytime soon, we’ll be sure to track down a bottle of Gik next time abroad.

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