Mulburied

Boy that looks delicious, doesn't it? Here is a picture of the first batch of mulberry wine I started. I read and/or heard somewhere that wine is often made using only the wild yeast that naturally exists on the outside of the fruit. After the first few days of collecting these berries I pressed all the juice out of them and put it into a pitcher. I put a lid on the pitcher and covered it with a towel to keep light out. That was one week ago, as of last night. Last night I racked it (in laymans terms, put it in a new container away from all the old yeast and settled debris.) This is a view of the pitcher when I first opened it. As you can see the yeast builds a protective layer on top of the vessel, keeping other undesirable microbes from taking over their delicious fruit juice buffet. The yeast eats the sugars in the juice, and discharges alcohol.

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Here is the resulting containers of racked wine. Yes I tasted it and no it is not death poison. Wine made from straight mulberries has a taste much more like a lambic beer - mulberries are very mild flavored and the tartness found in other fruits just isn't there. The large bottle was salvaged from Dead Horse Bay in New York; the small bottle came from somewhere, it is a nice small size for sharing samples (in a few weeks.) The color is a deep, slightly purple red.

The third container, the sugar jar, is my first attempt at making vinegar. I added a dose of fluid from what I'll call 'forgotten produce' that had the distinct odor of vinegar to it. Only time will tell if I have a viable culture or not.

The mulberry tree continues to dump fruit on me at an alarming rate. Every day I go out and collect a large colander full of berries. I have taken to dumping them in the Crock Pot and cooking them for 4 hours, separating the cooked berries from the syrupy cooed juice. I HAVE 10 POUNDS OF FROZEN COOKED BERRIES. I expect the collecting to go on for another 2 weeks, until I have enough berries to mold into bricks and build a shed.

As for my next wine-experiment, the cooked juice has a higher specific gravity than the raw juice does (this means it has more sugar, and thus more alcohol potential.) In a few more days I plan to make a starter (yeast culture) from a day's worth of raw juice, and then mix it into all the cooked juice to make an even better wine!