Happy Labor Day Weekend!

Makin' hombrew...

[Note to readers, post too long for email, mostly for pics]

Happy Labor Day Weekend! I hope you have plans that involve family and friends, somewhere you love to be.

I thought a lot about my last post after I published it, and the comment from Mrs S. I didn’t come to substack to scare people about what is wrong with the world. I came here to write about the beauty, joy and wonder of this world, too.

I planted these grape vines at my sisters when I lived here in 2004. She trims them each year, but we train them in no way except to keep them off the sidewalk and from climbing the apples. They grow and root as they will. This one is the largest, spanning all the way around the corner, but also rooting in about six places. I planted 8 vines here and they cover about 60% of the chain link fence enclosing the yard. I know about proper training but I figured they are all Frontanac clones so let them grow and they will figure it out. This corner gets the most sun, so it is the most productive by far.

I took the afternoon off to pick these. I needed to get to them before the neighbors, raccoons or city contractors. We lose them some times. My sister caught a woman one morning with buckets full. We think she has cleared it out in the early morning more than one year. City contractors came by one year after we trimmed them per the the inspector’s order, and shaved everything to the fence, taking probably 25 gallons of ripe berries to some compost somewhere. A horde of city raccoons have cleared it out in a night or two, at least one year I’m sure.

I filled a five gallon bucket almost 8 times. Five times fills the bin. The bin is not food grade but I am only mashing the berries and transferring the mash to carboys. If it looks ghetto or white trash, it is both (I’m here helping my sister remodel and fix up the place, it is a work in progress.). But yeah, quality control here is basic.

25 gallons/1 bin of berries leaves four gallons of vines, and 8 gallons of mash, which will become about 5 gallons of juice, 20-22 bottles of wine. I have fermented Frontenac three or four times and I’m about the only one who will drink it. I don’t think I’m going to ferment it fully this time. I’ve always used store-bought yeast for Frontenac grapes, though I typically wild ferment with other fruits. Store-bought yeast eats through the sugars in a few months, most of the sugar the first month. Wild ferment sometimes takes years. But that means I should be able to bottle it at about 8%, let it ferment in the bottle until it is 9% and bubbly, which is about half what Frontenac can ferment to, which 18% is one of the reasons the wine isn’t that great for taste (but good enough for drunky.) But a straight grape juice, Frontenac Imperial Sweet, that sounds like elixir. But then you saw my feet in it.

I left a few still on the vine for the kids, and maybe for the woman who steals them but who asked this time, and then looked very disappointed when I told her I would be using them. I hear kids invariably calling them blueberries. I have told my nephew’s friends, who have probably eaten a gallon each, they are grapes, but then they do look like blueberries, not like the only kind of grapes these kids have ever seen, from the store, so they still call them blueberries. The wine isn’t for connoisseurs but the grapes are sweeter and juicier for fresh eating than store-bought, and the fresh juice is spectacular, I think better than any other grape juice I have had. I will not be trimming these and planting the trimmings at the 80 next spring. That would be illegal, without paying the University of Minnesota $25 per cutting established; or you can buy them established from a licensed dealer.

Frontenac is a French grape crossed with wild native grapes for the cold hardiness, as no good traditional wine grape can withstand the Minnesota winter. The UofM has been trying since the 50’s to cross-pollinate grapes to build a wine industry in Minnesota. There are now a few dozen wineries, there have been some decent white wines made form UofM grapes, but I’ve never heard of anyone who made a decent wine from Frontenac, or from the grape that was supposed to be better, the Marquette. Most of the red wines made in Minnesota are made from imported grapes. No amount of climate change is going to change that.

Thanks for reading. I hope to post a lot of these actually doing stuff things, in the future. Let me know what you think. I hope you have a great weekend.