Melshimber Wines

Waterdhavian Vintages

• Manycherries Bold: Like all Waterdhavian winemakers, the Melshimbers produce several varying labels of manycherries each year. The most famous and prestigious of these is Manycherries Bold, a tart, fruity red wine given an earthy balance through the addition of cherry stems to the grapes that make the wine, which despite its name does not usually contain cherries. It is an excellent mulling wine in the depths of winter.
• First Frost: Made from the same grapes that produce winter wine farther north, first frost is created by harvesting the grapes when just touched by freezing temperatures. This leads to a wine less cloyingly sweet and potent than its cousin. It still displays the distinctive purple-blue color and spicy tone of winter wine, but its mellower edge brings out hints of violets and licorice hidden by winter wine's sweetness.
• Waterdhavian Harbor White: So named because its grapes thrive in coastal vineyards, harbor white is a dusky golden wine carrying echoes of salt-laden ocean breezes over dry floral and stone fruit flavors. The Melshimbers' harbor whites are famed for notes of honeysuckle, peach, and salted caramel in their best vintages.
• Pulass: The Melshimbers are the only winemakers who reserve a portion of their harbor white grapes to produce a unique fortified wine called pulass. The wine is aged in barrels sealed with a sea salt crust and fortified with brandy, a technique adapted from ancient Tethyrian practices. The wood for the barrels is repurposed from decommissioned ocean ships.
  • Pulass is made in a variety of styles and is generally dark brown in color and ranges from bone dry, salty, and nutty to syrupy sweet and rich in caramel and raisin. The sweeter varieties are known as low pulass and are the more common and cheaper. Dry and salty high pulass is something of an acquired taste, and appreciation of it is considered the mark of a refined palate.
• Clarry: A blend of table wines sweetened with honey and spices, this rose wine varies in subtleties of flavor with each vintage. Clarry is not among the Melshimbers' most prestigious labels, but it is useful in salvaging wines from vineyards hindered by poor growing conditions in a given year. There are often several different varieties, some of them highly experimental, produced each year utilizing blends of wines encompassing all of the Melshimber estates. The blending of clarry to create a drinkable, intriguing wine from dregs is considered something of an art, and the best clarries can be playful, surprising, and delicious. Clarry is a common drinking wine served at inns and taverns of all stripes in Waterdeep.
• Silver Spring: This almost colorless white artwine shows a delicate silver luminescence in shadowed environs. Silver spring is slightly sweet with almond, lobster mushroom, and butterscotch notes on the finish. Its light flavor masks a deceptively high amount of alcohol.
  • The grapes used in silver spring are rumored to originate underground, and the vineyards that grow them are a carefully guarded Melshimber secret. Some say the silver spring grapes were derived for surface use from even harder to obtain grapes far beneath Waterdeep. The wine is stored in ceramic bottles because its luminescence fades within a matter of hours when exposed to open air and vanishes instantly in sunlight.
  • Only small amounts of silver spring are produced each year, and the Melshimbers reserve much of the wine for themselves and special guests whose tongues might wag more loosely under its influence. It is considered an honor—and a danger to those in the know—to be offered a glass of silver spring.

The Helm-and-Eye Estate Vintages

• Scornubian Rose: Named for both its color and flavor profile, Scornubian rose is richly pink and highly floral. The Melshimbers have cultivated their vintages to bring out rose notes, but the wine can display lilac, violet, and geranium as well. It is a favorite of the Healing House in Scornubel and is also frequently drunk at the Spires of the Morning in Waterdeep, enough that rare vintages displaying aster notes are blessed by the priesthood and kept in storage for holy rites. The lesser vintages are often derided as “perfume wine.”
• White-of-the-Run: Legend says that these grapes were brought south from the Unicorn Run in the High Forest, and every once in a while, a vintage of the white is reputed to have curative powers. The Melshimbers smile mysteriously when asked about the history of this wine and do not refute such stories. Neither do they make any such claims themselves. A festival is held each year during the wine pressing that brings priests of Mielikki, Lurue, and sometimes even Silvanus to enjoy the current vintage and bless the next. Regardless of its fabled origins, white-of-the-run is a fine wine, delicately sweet with flavors of vanilla, grass, green apple, and herbs. The wine also shows the mineral frothiness of fresh springs.
• Moorland Firefly Red: One of the rare Melshimber wines, moorland firefly red is made from grapes originally found growing wild on the High Moor. Still only partially cultivated, and therefore difficult to work with and poorly producing, the wine is deep red with glints of phosphorescent green and flavors of cedar, flint, and peat. A single vineyard, Smoke Hill, produces vintages showing a higher level of refinement that are effervescent with luminous green bubbles, revealing the great potential of the grape. Dubbed the “Extra Special Reserve,” this wine has only been drunk by the Melshimbers and their closest friends.

Greenfields Vineyards Vintages

• Amnian Honey Wine: Halfway between a proper wine and a mead, Amnian honey wine includes honey in the fermentation. It comes in both red and white varieties and is quite sweet. Despite this, it has a curious underlying heat, making it popular not only for drinking but also cooking. The wine isn't very fashionable in Waterdeep, where it is mostly mulled to good effect, so the bulk of it is sold locally rather than brought north. It is growing in popularity in the Heartlands, however, so some of it is shipped for sale to the Melshimber estates there.
• Coin Wine: Coin wine has been cultivated more for its color than taste, and it comes in several varieties that are blends of different grapes. The main white variety is the color of liquid gold and tastes of persimmon, orange blossom, and white pepper. Another white variety is copper colored and tastes of honeyed walnuts and smoke. The red is a blood ruby color and tastes of leather, pomegranate, cloves and black pepper. A rarer variety is the emerald wine tasting of lime, mint, and musk. The results of efforts to create silver, electrum, and diamond varieties have so far been buried in each year's clarries. The coin wines are very popular in Amn, but in Waterdeep they are regarded more as a curiosity or gimmick and enjoyed as such. Still, they are sold more successfully than the Amnian honey wines.

Heartlands Estates Vintages

• Heartlands Vat Wines: Generally the least important of the Melshimber varieties, the wines produced here are cultivated for maximum mass appeal in the many rural inns that dot the Heartlands. These wines are rarely seen in Waterdeep because they do not offer the level of sophistication that the Melshimbers represent in Waterdhavian society, though they occasionally appear in lower class taverns and dives under names that don't draw a direct connection to the family. The wines are not even bottled properly, usually shipped in mass amounts via vat, hence their collective name. When the Melshimbers do bother to serve these, it is often to have a laugh over quaint Heartland tastes. The vat wines do serve one other important function as the backbone of many a clarry, however.