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Creating Wine From Wild Plants
by Kack 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.

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