Wild berry with wild grape mix?

[sfraise]

Here's what I'm thinking, and would like some feedback on....

We live in Wisconsin on 23 mostly wooded acres, with a ton of wild black and red raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, blueberries, and wild grapes. So far we've gotten 5 quarts of mostly black raspberries with red raspberries to a lesser amount, and will probably finish out with at least double that. Once the blackberries ripen we'll probably end up with several quarts of them as well. I'm not sure how many elderberries we'll end up with as I haven't had a chance to actually figure out how many trees we actually have yet and didn't harvest any last year. As for the wild grapes, assuming the birds don't go crazy with them we should end up with several gallons of them after the first frost, some of the vines I've looked at are just loaded with grapes this year. The blueberries most likely won't make it to the wine as those will probably get used up in pies lol.

I know that it's pretty tough to make a wild grape wine that tastes good, you either end up bitter or too sweet from trying to back sweeten it. So I've been thinking about just mixing everything together to try and blend the taste. I'm hoping that the other berries, especially the blackberries, will balance out the wild grapes and give it a more fruity flavor and lessen the need to back sweeten to death.

Has anyone here had much success with using wild grapes for wine, or has anyone on here ever mixed all of these wild berries together with a good end result?

My other thought is that I might decide to just run out a 50 gallon batch which means I may have to end up buying some additional fruit if I can't pick enough wild stuff, that might open an up the opportunity to try and further balance the blend out a little. If I end up doing that I'm thinking that the thing that would better balance out the wild grape would be more wildberries, thoughts on that?

 

[jensmith]

I mix whatever is on hand all the time. Including wildish grape. Do not add any acid blend without either tasting it or testing it. If too sour or tart welches grape concentrates are great for mellowing. Either before or after fermenting.

 

[sfraise]

Thanks for the reply Jen!

How does it usually come out when you mix everything together like that?

 

[jensmith]

Exelant!! Very tasty. Especially if you can find blueberries to add. The more fruit to galleon the longer it takes to mature. 4 pounds to the galleon is good. It does depend on your fruit mix however.

 

[sfraise]

Lol, the blueberry thing may or may not happen, we have about a dozen blueberry bushes but I'm not sure my girlfriend will let them go to wine. They're just now starting to get ripe and so far only have about a quart of them picked, but the bushes are exploding with berries just on the verge of ripening so we'll have to see. Assuming of course the neighbor kids and our own kids don't strip them bare before we get them picked lol.

It's been a good year all around it seems for us here so far, we have the most blueberries I've seen in the last couple of years, the raspberries are just everywhere with perfect big purple berries (and a few red variety), and so far the apple trees are completely loaded with apples. Assuming the blackberries, elderberries, and wild grapes do well we should have plenty of fruit by late fall to run out several gallons of wild wine.

I'm hoping I can get enough blackberries to help mellow out the sour since they're a sweeter berry, we got a ton of them last year but I thinned some of them out from the raspberries so that we would get more raspberries this year so not sure how many we'll end up with. Last year the blackberries had just exploded over top of a lot of the raspberry bushes and choked them off, they were even starting to overtake our blueberry bushes which I cleaned up this spring.

 

[Arne]

I do not know how strong the blackberries are, but the elderberries have a really strong flavor. I am thinking they could take over the flavor of the wine. My biggest problem with the elders is there is something about the taste of them that I really don't like. So don't take what I have said to heart. Many others like them in a wine that is heavy with their flavor. Arne.

 

[sfraise]

Bonus, just found some gooseberries hidden in with some raspberry bushes today, not sure if they'll make it into the wine but I love gooseberries lol.

 

[sfraise]

After finding the little gooseberry bush yesterday I decided to go on a gooseberry bush hunt and ended up finding several of them. It seems we have 2 different varieties growing out here, one that grows smaller purple berries that are already ripe, and the other growing much larger green berries that are border line ripe.

I went ahead and picked the small purple berries today, but decided tomorrow I'll go ahead and pick all of the other ones and just let them ripen for a for a while after I pick them before I put them in the freezer.

Doing some thinking I've decided that just scouring the timber for berries is kind of a pain lol, so I've decided this fall that I'm going to put up some trellis' and transplant several of the raspberry plants so they'll be in a nice neat long organized row. I may end up doing the same thing for a good row of blackberries as well. Since most of the gooseberry bushes I've found are competing heavily with several other weeds and brush and not getting nearly enough sun, I'm going to transplant 4 or 5 bushes of them as well to their own little designated area.

I cleared an area this spring to put a few rows of grapes but never got around to planting any this year, however I noticed that a small tree that I didn't get around to removing yet has a health fast growing wild grape vine climbing it, so I think I may just let that one wild grape vine grow on the trellis I put there and maybe try and transplant a few more mature ones and just make that one trellis all wild grape. I'll probably run 2 rows of marquette's next to it, but since it will take a few years before I start to see any grapes off of those at least I'll have the mature wild grapes there giving me something until then.

We've got about a dozen blueberry bushes but we'd really like to have a lot more of them so we're going to try propagating some more by layering some of the lower branches and see if we can't get some new growths from them. We've got 2 different varieties of blueberries, one is a smaller bush about 3 or 4' tall with smaller sized berries, and the others are about 5' tall with much bigger berries on them. I've never tried layering before but hopefully we can get some new growth from both varieties by doing it. We may try taking a few cuttings as well and see if we can't get some clones to root that way also.

We should also have a good crop of strawberries next year as well, we got 15 regular plants in the ground this year as well as put in several alpine's so assuming all goes well next year we should be buried in all kinds of berries lol. Once our cherry tree starts producing (assuming it survives) then we'll have even more lol.