Ainoa Winery

The story

The First Grand Gold

In March 2025, Ainoa entered Kuningatar, their raspberry-blueberry blend, into Vinalies Internationales in Paris. The competition that year drew 2,684 wines from 550 producers across 37 countries, almost all of them grape-based, entered by estates from France, Italy, Spain, and the other classical wine regions. Kuningatar scored 94 out of 100 and received the Grand Gold medal, the highest award the competition gives. It was the first Grand Gold ever awarded to a fruit wine in the competition's history, and the first awarded to any Nordic wine. David Cohen had spent the previous eleven years developing production methods that other berry wine producers had not tried. The judges in Paris, tasting blind, gave the Finnish raspberry-blueberry blend a higher mark than most of what surrounded it.

From the atlas

Ainoa Winery

At A Glance

The Producer

Ainoa Winery makes fruit wines in Hollola, a small municipality in the Lahti region of Southern Finland, from Finnish forest berries rather than grapes. David Cohen, a mechanical engineer from Boston who spent fifteen years winning homebrewing awards before moving to Finland in 2008, developed every process and recipe in the cellar. Paola Guerrero de Cohen, originally from Ecuador and a former banker, earned her wine production certification in 2013. They founded the winery together in 2014.

The decision to work with berries was not a compromise. Finland's climate excludes commercial viticulture entirely, so the founders built their production model around what the country does produce: wild and farmed raspberries, blueberries, and golden berries from Lapland. The technical ambition was direct: make wines that carry the same hallmarks as classic fine wines, starting from Finnish fruit.

Two years in, their blueberry wine became the first Finnish wine to win a gold medal at an international competition. The following year, Vaapukka, their raspberry wine, won the Vinalies Trophy at Vinalies Internationales in Paris, the highest award given by Les Oenologues de France, ranked eleventh best overall of more than 3,500 wines entered from 45 countries.

Place

Hollola sits in Päijät-Häme, a province of Southern Finland known for lakes, forests, and a climate that shortens growing seasons and prevents grape ripening at any commercial scale. The berries that thrive here, and across Finland's boreal forests, accumulate natural acidity during long, cool summers. That acidity is the balancing force in every Ainoa wine, doing the same work in a Finnish raspberry as tannin and tartaric acid do in a grape-based red.

Valokki is made from golden berries sourced from Lapland, Finland's northernmost region, where the fruit grows slowly under extended summer daylight and carries a pale gold colour and a distinct aromatic character different from the darker southern fruits.

There are no appellations, no classified vineyard sites, and no viticulture laws to navigate. The regulatory category is fruit wine, but the production logic is closer to the concentrated, aromatically precise style of a serious European dessert wine than to commercial berry cordial.

Soil And Site

The berries that supply Ainoa come from Finnish forests and farmed plots rather than from a single estate. Wild raspberries and blueberries are among the most common forest fruits in Finland, growing across the boreal zone in acidic, well-drained sandy or peat soils typical of the region. These conditions produce fruit with high natural acidity and concentrated flavour, particularly in cooler years when the berry ripens slowly. Golden berries from Lapland grow in the far north under extreme seasonal light, and the resulting fruit is lighter in colour and distinctly aromatic compared to the southern varieties.

Story

When David Cohen arrived in Finland from Boston in 2008, he already had more than a decade of award-winning homebrewing behind him. He found a country with outstanding raw fruit and no winemaking tradition built around it. Most Finnish berry wines at the time followed a simple formula: dilute pressed juice with water to reach volume, add sugar to reach alcohol, bottle. Cohen's approach went the other way. He spent several years developing processes from scratch, averaging three years of refinement per product before he was satisfied.

The founding problem was category perception. Many people in Finland looked down on berry wines as a lower tier of drink, something made for practicality rather than pleasure. The Vinalies Trophy in 2017 changed that framing in a single announcement: a Finnish raspberry wine, two years old, had ranked eleventh against more than 3,500 wines from classical wine-producing countries across four continents.

Samuil Angelov joined as sommelier after the early competition wins, accelerating product development. Growth funding followed in 2024, along with board-level expansion and a target of tenfold production and sales growth by 2033. The winery that began as a two-person technical project in a Lahti suburb is now distributing through Scandinavian state retail systems and has been served in Finnair business class.

Vineyards And Cellar

Ainoa owns no vineyards. Berry sourcing is the equivalent of grape procurement: wild and farmed Finnish forest fruit selected for natural acidity and flavour concentration. Golden berries for Valokki come from Lapland specifically, where the northern growing conditions produce a fruit with a different aromatic register from the southern raspberry and blueberry.

In the cellar, the defining choice is pressing. Where most berry wine producers dilute pressed juice with water to stretch volume, Ainoa uses pressed berry liquid as the majority component. Vaapukka is fermented cool to hold the fresh raspberry aroma through fermentation rather than cooking it off. After fermentation, the wine spends at least four months in tank before bottling, during which the aroma settles and the wine coheres.

Kuningatar is made differently from either of its components. Vaapukka and Silkki are fermented and aged separately, then blended and aged together for several more months before filtration and bottling. The extra post-blend ageing is what allows the raspberry and blueberry notes to stop reading as a mixture and start reading as a single wine.

Wines

The range has four wines, each made from a single Finnish fruit or a two-fruit blend.

Vaapukka is the raspberry wine and the winery's longest-standing award winner. Pressed raspberry juice, cool fermentation, four months of tank ageing. The wine is sweet at 120 g/l of residual sugar but carries enough natural berry acidity to hold the sweetness in check. At 12.5% alcohol, it sits in the lighter dessert-wine register. Bottled in 35cl clear glass with glass closures, served at 10 to 13 degrees Celsius.

Silkki is the blueberry wine, made on the same pressed-juice and cool-fermentation model as Vaapukka. It is available on its own and is also one of the two source wines for Kuningatar. Darker and rounder in character than the raspberry, with the blueberry's softer acidity giving a quieter aromatic profile.

Kuningatar is the raspberry-blueberry blend: Vaapukka and Silkki aged separately, combined, then aged together for several months to allow the two fruits to merge. At 12.5% alcohol and 120 g/l residual sugar, the blend sits at the same technical weight as Vaapukka but the blueberry component smooths the sharper raspberry edges. This is the wine that won Grand Gold at Vinalies Internationales 2025, scoring 94 out of 100.

Valokki is the golden berry wine from Lapland fruit, lower in alcohol at 10.0% and the same 120 g/l residual sugar, bottled in 37.5cl clear glass. It has been Finland's best-selling dessert wine since 2023, the first non-fortified Finnish wine to lead one of Alko's retail sales categories.

In The Glass

Vaapukka opens with fresh raspberry, close to the aroma of the berry itself rather than jam or reduction. The cool fermentation keeps the aromatic register immediate. On the palate, the 120 g/l of residual sugar is met by sharp, clean berry acidity, so the first impression is tart before it is sweet. The middle is dense and fruited, with a concentrated berry weight that follows from juice-majority pressing rather than water dilution. The finish is clean and relatively short, with the acidity carrying through.

Kuningatar adds the blueberry's darker, rounder note to the raspberry base. Where Vaapukka has a bright, angular tartness, Kuningatar is softer in the middle, with the berry characters overlapping into something less immediately identifiable as a single fruit. The post-blend ageing rounds the transition between raspberry and blueberry so the wine reads as unified rather than mixed.

Valokki, at 10.0% alcohol, is lighter in body. The golden berry from Lapland gives a pale colour and a softer, more aromatic character, less sharp than raspberry, with a honeyed quality that reads closer to late-harvest white wine than to the berry-fruit wines in the rest of the range.

All four wines share the 120 g/l residual sugar level except Valokki, which carries that same sugar at lower alcohol, making it the sweetest-drinking of the range in spite of identical numbers on the label.

A Bottle To Understand It

Start with Vaapukka. It is the wine that made the clearest argument for what Ainoa does differently: pressed raspberry juice as the majority liquid, not water-diluted; cool fermentation to hold the fresh aroma; four months in tank before bottling. Those choices show up directly in the glass as concentrated fruit weight and clean berry acidity rather than the thin sweetness typical of commercial berry wine. The residual sugar is high at 120 g/l, but the natural tartness of Finnish raspberry means the wine does not feel as sweet as the number suggests. Serve cold, in a small glass, alongside cheese or fruit desserts. The 35cl bottle is the right size for two people.

Anecdote

In March 2025, Ainoa entered Kuningatar, their raspberry-blueberry blend, into Vinalies Internationales in Paris. The competition that year drew 2,684 wines from 550 producers across 37 countries, almost all of them grape-based, entered by estates from France, Italy, Spain, and the other classical wine regions. Kuningatar scored 94 out of 100 and received the Grand Gold medal, the highest award the competition gives. It was the first Grand Gold ever awarded to a fruit wine in the competition's history, and the first awarded to any Nordic wine. David Cohen had spent the previous eleven years developing production methods that other berry wine producers had not tried. The judges in Paris, tasting blind, gave the Finnish raspberry-blueberry blend a higher mark than most of what surrounded it.

Final Word

Ainoa is a Finnish winery without vineyards, working from forest fruit in a country that cannot grow grapes. The competition record from Paris, earned against thousands of grape-based wines from classical regions, is not incidental to understanding what the bottles are. It is the clearest evidence that the technical decisions behind Vaapukka and Kuningatar produce something with real weight and acidity, not sweetened fruit drink.

Sources

• https://ainoawinery.com/about-us
• https://www.prowein.com/en/MediaNews/News/CompanyNews/AinoaWineryreceivedgrowthfundingandtoptalentontheboard
• https://ainoawinery.com/journal/2025/3/25/the-queen-of-the-north
• https://ainoawinery.com/kuningatar
• https://ainoawinery.com/wines
• https://winemakermag.com/articles/sweet-finnish
• https://ainoawinery.com/vaapukka/
• https://ainoawinery.com/valokki