Who makes it
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.
Where it grows
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.
How it is made
The 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.
What they make
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.
Wines to try
First bottle
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.