When you first began making jams and jellies, the novelty and luscious results were enough to keep you inspired.
But after years of laboring over the stovetop, filling Ball jars and delivering endless apple jelly to the neighbors — neighbors whose smiles get less and less convincing — you realize jams and jellies aren’t doing it for you anymore.
Nature, of course, is still providing a wonderful bounty of fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs. So what’s your next step?
Nan K. Chase and DeNeice C. Guest have an answer with their book “Drink the Harvest” (Storey, $18.95), which lays out ways to make juices, wines, fermented drinks and syrups.
Chase has been a freelance writer for more than 35 years and has spent more than 30 years gardening in western North Carolina. Guest has been studying wild herbs and gardening for more than 30 years and has been making herb-based tonics and beverages for the past decade. Theirs is a natural partnership.
“DeNeice was making mead — she’s a genius with syrup — and I was doing juices and wines,” Chase said.
The book goes well beyond recipes (and there are nearly 50 of those). There are explanations of what to grow, how to harvest and the equipment needed, as well as the ins and outs of bottling, fermentation, using a fruit press and other skills. Yet one may be surprised at the relative simplicity of making fresh prickly pear cactus juice, blueberry syrup or garden mint wine. It’s not a daunting exercise.
“Heck no,” Chase said. “It’s like boiling water. Most of the stuff in winemaking, to me, it’s all about sanitation. I don’t even have a dishwasher. Most of this stuff, canning, it’s just being careful with your sanitation, following directions and putting it on the counter and actually doing it. I find when a harvest is ripe it’s not ripe very long. The big challenge is saying, I need to take this harvest, spend a half day, a day, and do it.”
Grapes, apples, pears, crabapples and peaches are some of the more common ingredients. Others are a little surprising. Rhubarb makes an outstanding fruit wine base, says Chase, who has batches of pumpkin mead and tomato wine working.
“You can make an incredible carnation wine, grape leaf wine,” she said. “All these crazy experiments.”
And if you’re feeling exceptionally daring, how about kudzu wine?
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Late last summer, the authors were driving near Guest’s house when she pulled over and told Chase to take a whiff. The kudzu was in bloom, and it smelled like grape Kool-Aid. The next week, Chase pulled into a grocery parking lot, opened her door and was hit by the same fragrant scent. She found the blooming vine.
“I stripped off the blossoms, infused them with water overnight, and I had a base for one-gallon bottles of wine.”
Chase will be among the speakers at the upcoming Chicago Flower and Garden Show at Navy Pier. Her seminar, “Welcome to the Drinkable Landscape,” is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. March 15.