By Kami Nguyen

Town Crier Editorial Intern

Peninsula couple are the first to get FDA approval for herbal wine

Business Profile

Wine lovers may have heard that a glass of wine a day is good for their health.

That statement may be even more true for Botavina, a new wine on the market, which has added something new to the winemaking process - herbs.

Creator Patrick Butler said the red wine, which he mixed with ginseng, is the first of its kind and is the only herb-blended wine that is available stores.

Botavina is sold in stores in the Marin to Santa Cruz area only.

It is available elsewhere in the United States through an online ordering process, Butler said.

The herb-wine was approved in August 2001 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a U.S. Government agency responsible for overseeing regulations pertaining to the wine industry, he said.

Butler said the process had multiple steps that included such things as content, formula and label approvals.

Although Butler knows there may be competition not far down the line, he said he’s not worried about it.

“We do know that they cannot knock-off a product that has better quality than Botavina so their market position would have to be based on a lower price and lesser quality,” he said.

Butler said he became involved in the winemaking business in the late ’70s when he took an interest in home-brewed beer, which was a becoming a popular thing to do in the Bay Area.

Along with home breweries for beer, in 1979, he also met home-made winery owners.

“Visiting their garage wineries and tasting their wine started me on a path that 23 years later saw me enrolled in the U.C. Davis enology master’s program and my subsequent introduction to the wine business,” he said.

Butler said he became interested in working with herbs when he worked as a naturopathic doctor and did medical work in Southeast Asia.

While doing so, he said, he learned how to treat “patients whose medical culture contained a vast array of herbal remedies.”

Butler put that knowledge in use when he started working in the cold wine cellars over the years.

Butler said he used herbs called echinacea and golden seal, which he placed in the wine he drank to prevent him from getting colds or the flu.

The new additions to the wine may take a little bit of time before it is fully accepted by some wine drinkers.

Julie White, manager of the wine department at Draeger’s Market in Los Altos said she is hesitant to make a decision on whether to carry the product.

“No one has requested it yet,” she said. “Maybe if we begin to get pressure from the customers we will buy and choose a selection.”

White said she has never heard of a wine with an added blend of herbs before and says she’s not sure what kind of enhancement it would add to the drink.

For his first wine, Butler decided to use the herb ginseng because he has also used the herb himself to “fight fatigue and increase mental clarity.”

He said the herb is his favorite and he has been using it since his grape harvesting days.

The mix, he said, included a blend of zinfandel, merlot and ginseng.

“The flavor profile (is) upfront fruit with a smooth mouthfeel and not a lot of tannins,” Butler said in a press release. “The ginseng adds a pleasant herbaceous quality not normally associated with zinfandel.”

For the future of the Botavina wine, Butler said he plans to make a zinfandel/merlot wine blended with the herb damiana and a merlot blended with and echinacea.