Domestic Wine and Foreign Apple Juice

The other day as I was mixing up my frozen, concentrated apple juice from Cub Foods, I noticed that the can said, “China” on it. Upon further investigation, the (Cub Brand) can said that the contents came from apples that were from Germany and/or Argentina and/or China. I stared at it, wondering why when a butt-load of apples are grown in the USA, that these apples came from “one or more” of these other countries?

Yesterday, I decided to make a raspberry wine, using wild, Minnesota-grown raspberries. I will tell you, up front, that this is not a cost-effective way to get wine. The benefit is in the artistic creation, the satisfaction of making a fine wine, and using local fruit!

My first step was to drive to Rapids Lake (about a 48 mile round-trip), where I know there are a lot of plants and a lot of berries. I was fortunate to find mulberries too! I was dressed in denim pants and a denim jacket to protect against the many thorns. I also wore a hat and a mosquito net over my head. I was going to be in the “mucky-muck for awhile, and I wasn’t going to suffer too much, except for getting too warm.

The berries were plentiful, but I needed a quite a few for my wine. Note* if you want my wine recipe, I don’t have one. I use berry juice, water, sugar and yeast. The amounts are not measured. Wine-making is a “Zen” thing for me. I may not do it “correctly” for the “experts,” but I make a good wine and it is all natural.

After climbing back up the ravine, I was picking raspberries “topside,” when I noticed some high-quality berries growing up high around a fallen tree. I climbed onto the log, and was picking berries from up there, when the thorns and vines and branches caught hold of my legs, and I was suddenly “hogtied!” I was already balancing on top of this log, and I felt that feeling… that I was going down.

I fell about three feet or so, down through the tangle onto my back. When I realized that nothing was broken, nothing was twisted, and I hadn’t been impaled by any branches, I noticed that half of my berries had spilled onto the forest floor! I tried to gingerly scoop them up. The ground was full of rotting leaves and dirt, so some were not salvageable. Then I got back up, and had to pick more!

Later, at home, I began the process of rinsing the berries and removing bugs, spiders and leaves. Then I heated them up in a pot and mashed them and strained and restrained to remove the many seeds. Most of the concoction was the seeds that I removed, but I also got a quantity of high-quality raspberry juice! I boiled the juice and added sugar. Then I added filtered water and of course, the yeast. I sealed it in a half-gallon carboy with a bubble-lock, and soon it was bubbling away.

After all that, I decided that a bottle of my wine (after six months in the carboy and another year in the bottle), should be worth at least $59.99… no… make that $69.99. I think that fall was worth at least $10!

I guess that’s why Cub Foods just buys the fruit from China…