Sure enough, the flavor is sweet apples and cherries. It has less of a wine taste to it that I would expect from a Mead, and it instead tastes like a flavored hard cider. Mind you, that's fine, as I tend to like a few hard ciders. The thing is, I was really expecting something a bit more like a mead. On the plus side, it does manage to be both sweet and tart at the same time. That's a trick that few hard ciders are able to pull off correctly.
I'm not going to gulp this, but am going to try and dissect at least the tip-in and the trail off. The tip-in definitely has a kind of Zinfandel about it, but it also has the jazz and gala apples mixed with a little bit of bing cherry juice. The trail off has just the slightest hint of wood to it, and that's about all I'm getting from the fact that this was barrel aged for nine months. Maybe if I tried this side-by-side with a version that wasn't aged in barrels I'd see more of a difference. As it is, is a relatively simple beverage that's not half bad.
Bottom Line: I definitely prefer it to regular wine.
3.0/5