Mushrooms in Wine and Spirits: Trailblazers Exploring Fungal Flavours in Drinks
- Gauri Khanna
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
Winemakers and craft distillers in the United States are deliberately incorporating mushrooms into wine and spirits, primarily for their flavour and terroir-evoking qualities rather than any health benefit.
Extraction method matters enormously: maceration tends to preserve authentic fungal character, while distillation can reduce complex mushroom notes to something closer to cooked earthiness or plain dirt.
Regulatory scrutiny from the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) over functional mushroom ingredients has already forced at least one producer to reformulate, illustrating the tension between wellness culture and beverage alcohol regulation.
Mushrooms and alcohol occupy a curious shared space: both are products of fermentation, both carry a whiff of the transgressive, and both have found themselves at the centre of a cultural moment that shows little sign of passing. What is less often noted is how seriously some producers are now treating fungi as flavour ingredients in their own right, neither as a wellness shortcut nor a marketing gimmick, but as a genuine expression of place and craft.
Terroir by Accident: Va La Vineyards
At Va La Vineyards in Avondale, Pennsylvania, winemaker Anthony Vietri did not set out to make mushroomy wine. His family spent fifty years growing mushrooms commercially before he turned to viticulture, and the neighbouring farms continue to produce and compost fungi at scale. Tasters of his wines regularly remark on fungal qualities in the glass, something Vietri attributes to what he calls the "smelly ghost": a thick fog of heat and must rising from heaps of neighbouring mushroom compost, saturating the microclimate around his vines.
The practical consequence has been surprising. Vietri planted Italian Nebbiolo, a grape notoriously difficult to grow outside its native Piedmont, where morning valley fog is a defining climatic feature. He suspects the mushroom compost fog provided an analogue to that condition, helping the varietal establish in soil it had no obvious business thriving in. The chemical mechanisms remain unconfirmed, but the wines themselves, funky, rich, and distinctively earthy, suggest the surrounding agriculture has shaped the liquid as meaningfully as any conventional viticultural decision.
Deliberate Fungi: Craft Gin and the Art of Extraction
Where Va La's mushroom character arrives uninvited, other producers are making deliberate choices. Jake Sherry of Isolation Proof, based in the western Catskills of New York, built his Mushroom Gin around three specific species. Shiitake provides what Sherry describes as "pure mushroom flavour"; maitake contributes an earthy, buttery quality and reflects the fungus's natural occurrence in the Catskills region; and chaga, a parasitic fungus that grows on white birch trees, adds a golden hue to the finished spirit. On the nose the mushroom character is forward; on the palate it recedes into something more oxidative, with umami persisting at the mid-palate. The effect is less novelty act than base note: a grounding presence that ties the botanical composition together.
Extraction method proved critical. Early distillation experiments produced a cooked quality Sherry found unsatisfying, and maceration ultimately delivered something more faithful to the raw ingredient. Morgan McLachlan of Amass Botanics in Southern California arrived at similar conclusions through her own research and development work, noting that distilling mushrooms could result in a spirit that simply tasted of dirt. The challenge of working with fungi is not finding them flavourful; it is keeping them that way through processing. The two approaches across different production contexts reinforce the same principle, and anyone curious about how preparation method affects fungal compounds will find a parallel logic at work.
Regulation, Reformulation, and the Wellness Boundary
Amass had, for years, used reishi and lion's mane in its 29-botanical gin. Both are among the most commercially prominent functional mushroom ingredients, associated in wellness markets with cognitive and immune support. When the TTB began scrutinising functional mushroom ingredients in alcoholic products, a development McLachlan links to the broader surge in mushroom wellness culture, Amass reformulated, substituting porcini to preserve the original flavour profile without triggering regulatory concern.
The episode reveals something structurally important about where beverage alcohol sits: adjacent to wellness, but legally required to keep its distance. McLachlan is candid that the quantities of mushroom used to achieve flavour in a spirit are unlikely to deliver the concentrations associated with medicinal effect. Her non-alcoholic, adaptogenic brand, De Soi, uses lion's mane and reishi at levels intended for functional effect, and they are undetectable by taste. In gin, the mushrooms are audible, so to speak, precisely because flavour, not bioactivity, is the objective.
Wellness trends cycle. Regulatory environments shift. What Vietri, Sherry, and McLachlan share, despite arriving at mushrooms through very different routes, is a conviction that fungi earn their place in a glass on flavour alone. Umami, earthiness, oxidative depth: these are qualities that serious drinkers seek out and return to. In a category that cannot credibly market health outcomes, that may be the most honest and durable case for mushrooms in alcohol anyone has yet made.