choke cherry wine

They said the vineyard was cursed long before the soil drank its first blood.

Nestled deep in the Appalachian woods, the Rowan Estate had once produced the darkest, sweetest wine in the state—Choke Cherry Wine, named after the fruit that grew unnaturally fat and red on the estate’s eastern grove. But after the massacre in 1893, when the entire Rowan family was found bled dry in their cellar—bodies hung on meat hooks like livestock—the vineyard rotted.

No one bought the land. No one dared.

Until Adeline.

She wasn’t superstitious. Just desperate. Her ex had left her in debt, and her dreams of opening a small vineyard had long turned to ash—until she saw the listing. Twenty acres of untouched land, a full manor, a winery. All for less than the price of her city apartment.

She moved in by fall.

At first, the vineyard felt like it was holding its breath. The air was too still, the sky too low. At night, the walls whispered.

But she didn’t listen.

Adeline focused on reviving the wine. She crushed choke cherries, sweetened them with honey, fermented them in the old stone cellar. There, the smell was always strongest—not of fruit, but of iron. Of something old and rusted. She chalked it up to decay.

The first bottle was ready by winter.

Dark as dried blood. Smooth. Seductive.

She took a sip. It burned.

That night, she dreamed of a man.

Tall. Pale. Handsome. Dressed in clothes from another century. His voice was velvet and smoke. “You’ve brought me back,” he said, touching her lips with stained fingers. “You uncorked me.”

She woke choking on the taste of wine and something saltier. Coppery.

The dreams came every night after. So did the bottles.

She never remembered making them. But every morning, a new bottle of choke cherry wine waited on the counter. Always uncorked. Always half-drunk.

And he was always there. In her dreams. Whispering her name. “Adeline, pour me another.”

She knew she should be afraid. But fear became fascination. The dreams grew more intense. He kissed her throat. Bit it, once. She bled into his mouth, and he moaned like a man dying in reverse. “You taste like the first harvest,” he murmured.

She woke up with a bruise on her neck and lips stained red.

Adeline tried to stop drinking the wine.

That night, she woke up in the cellar—naked, bloody handprints across her hips, and a gash down her thigh.

The walls pulsed. The barrels groaned.

She ran upstairs, trembling, only to find her reflection smiling in the hallway mirror.

But her face wasn’t smiling.

It was his.

She smashed the glass.

You’re losing time, she wrote on the walls in charcoal. You’re not alone here.

But every morning, the words were scrubbed clean.

Then came the others.

A couple of wine bloggers, curious about her “secret blend.” A retired sommelier. A girl who said the vineyard “called to her.”

They tasted the wine.

And they never left.

Sometimes she heard them, crying in the walls. Other times they danced in the orchard under moonlight, skin stretched tight, eyes black as obsidian. One night, she watched the sommelier split open like an overripe grape, wine pouring from his mouth as he laughed.

She tried to burn the vineyard.

The fire stopped at the grove.

The man from her dreams—she now called him Rowan—appeared in the flames, untouched. “This land drinks what it loves,” he said. “And I love you, Adeline.”

She collapsed.

When she woke, she was lying in the cherry grove, tangled in red roots. The trees bent toward her, their fruit splitting open like bleeding eyes. She could hear the vines humming.

Rowan knelt beside her. “Let me in,” he whispered.

And this time, she said yes.

The new Choke Cherry Wine hit the market in spring. Reviewers called it divine. Aphrodisiacal. Sinful.

They didn’t know what was in it.

But Adeline did.

Each bottle held a taste of the cellar, a splash of the grove, a drop of devotion. And sometimes—just sometimes—if you listened close after the last sip, you could hear a voice in the glass:

“Pour me another.”