sour grapes

 

A grape vine has been climbing up the side of my deck for the past 20 years.  The leaves provide a green haven, a secret spot that I can peek through but can't be seen.  

The grapes (Valient) are just the size of a small blueberry, and each has at least two seeds, but the flavour is really grapey and delicious.  The racoons agree, and help themselves just before I plan to harvest them.  This year I pinned netting over the entire thing, and didn't lose any.

For the past few years, a fungus disease has destroyed the crop before it even formed.  But perhaps because last year was so dry (inhospitable to fungus) there was a bumper crop this year.  

I needed to do something with all this bounty.  I couldn't wait until the grapes were properly ripe because they started dropping, so I went into action.

I picked many buckets of grapes, washed and pulled off all the ripe ones, and set them on the stove with two cups of water.  I let the pot simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

To make jelly, at this point you can put the cooled fruit into a jelly bag and let it drip overnight.

But I find there is quite a bit of waste that way.  I would rather put the whole thing through a food mill.  There will be almost no pulp left behind, and the seeds will be filtered out.

The resulting juice can be made into jelly (it will be more cloudy than if using a jelly bag).  

I also added a bit of white sugar and lemon and froze a lot of the juice.  I make a very satisfying drink with half juice, half lemon-flavoured mineral water.  It's powerful!