- Creating
Wine From Wild Plants
BY JACK
B. KELLER JR
- © Copyright
2001
In Stalking
the Good Life, the late naturalist Euell Gibbons wrote about
wild berries. "Actually," he wrote, "I begin picking
berries about the time the last spring snow melts away."
He then describes in one chapter a succession of harvests of
wild wintergreen berries (teaberries), strawberries, red raspberries,
black raspberries, wineberries, dewberries, blackberries, blueberries,
huckleberries, squaw huckleberries (deerberries), and elderberries.
Elsewhere in the book he describes harvests of wild barberries,
black haws, cherries, chokecherries, cranberries, grapes, juneberries,
wild raisins, squashberries, shadbush berries, serviceberries,
sarvisberries, sugar pears, and sugar plums. These are just some
of the berries -- but a sampling of what is out there -- growing
in the wild and available to be harvested and turned into wine.
No matter where
you live in the world, you live but a short walk or drive away
from more edible wild plants than you probably ever imagined.
Ancient man was successful as a species because he was capable
of eating a very large variety of plants and animals. Many plants
bear fruit or other components that can be made into wine suitable
for just about any palate. On the pages that follow, I will be
describing but a few of the thousands of wild edible plants in
the United States and Canada which are suitable in one way or
another for winemaking. Readers living outside this geographic
area should not turn away. Many of the plants featured herein
have relatives scattered all over the globe, and I have consistently
tried to identify the genus (and species) of each plant featured
so that distant relatives can be identified and recipes adapted
to suit them.
- Adapting Recipes
Okay, you're out walking in the woods and come across a thick
stand of salmonberries. You pull a couple of plastic bags from
your day pack and an hour later you're heading for home with
8-10 pounds of sweet (but slightly tart), fresh fruit. You check
your well-thumbed copy of First Steps in Winemaking and strike
out. Then you fire up the computer and start burning up the search
engines. Nothing! What to do? Well, hopefully you've got a bookmark
set to The Winemaking Home Page and are therefore in luck. No,
I don't have a salmonberry wine recipe (yet), but I can tell
you how to make salmonberry wine. More acurately, I can tell
you how to adapt a recipe to serve your purposes, and that's
better than nothing.
The first thing
you do is ask yourself, "What is a salmonberry similar to?"
By similar, I mean most like in type of fruit, taste, pulp, firmness,
color, skin or rind if that applied, and type plant. It is unwise
to compare fruit from vining plants with fruit from bushes or
trees unless there simply is no alternative. So, let's compare
the salmonberry with similar berries.
Well, it looks
like a salmon-colored blackberry, but tastes more like a red
raspberry, wineberry or thimbleberry.
- Except, in
reality, it tastes like none of these. Still, it comes closer
in taste to a red raspberry than a blackberry, wineberry or thimbleberry.
We might be able to narrow it down further, but this will do--quite
nicely, actually. Start with a red raspberry wine recipe and
go from there. But first, there are a few things you need to
think about.
-
- Fruit Content
With few exceptions, the more fruit you use in making a wine,
the fruitier tasting it will be. This can be good or it can be
too much. If good, so much the better. If too much, you have
a problem. You can blend it with a complementary but weaker tasting
wine or with a "second" wine made from the same fruit
pulp as the first batch--if you happened to have made one. There
really isn't much more you can do. Why is this important?
It's important
for two reasons. When making a wine by recipe that specifies
a varied quantity--such as 4-6 lbs--you can be assured that using
the lesser quantity will make an acceptable wine, but using the
larger quantity will make a fruitier wine. If you opt to use
the larger quantity, you would be wise to also make a "second"
batch using the pressed pulp from the first batch. This will
always make a weaker wine, but one that is almost always acceptable
on its own merit. More importantly, you'll have that "second"
wine to use in blending with the first batch should its taste
be too strong for you.
But it's also
important when adapting a recipe for another ingredient. If the
substituted ingredient lacks the fullness of flavor of the original
ingredient called for in the recipe, you'll need to adjust the
quantity upwards to make up for what is naturally lacking. In
the case of substituting salmonberries for red raspberries, I
can tell you right off that salmonberries lack the flavor and
aroma raspberries are so famous for. Thus, you'll want to adjust
the quantity upwards, but not too much. Berry wines should be
subtle, not overpowering. My red raspberry recipe calls for 3-4
lbs of fruit. If using salmonberries instead of raspberries,
use 4-5 lbs.
Another thing
to consider about fruit content is that when using less fruit
rather than more, the lesser amount, if within the recipe limitations,
will usually produce a wine that more closely approximates the
taste of grape wine, albeit the approximation may take a leap
of imagination. What I mean is this: in truth, grape wines do
not taste like grape juice, and fruit wines should not taste
like fruit juice. My favorite peach wine recipe calls for 3 lbs
of peaches per gallon, but I will reduce the amount of fruit
to 2-1/2 lbs for an exceptionally flavorable crop. Conversely,
for a weakly flavored crop I might increase the amount to 3-1/2
lbs. next
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