Another Thing we do with Muscadines

First off, we were blessed to receive almost none of the effects of Hurricane Ida.  That was mostly felt on the southeastern part of the state.  

Two days ago we were talking about the muscadine harvest that gets bigger every year as our vine grows.  We eat most of them just snacking on them, but tonight I'll show you another thing we do - we make New Wine with them.  New wine is full of flavor, fizzy, refreshing with none of the alcohol that regular wine has.  Here's how we make it:

After picking we thoroughly wash the grapes.

We use a very old juicer.  I think it is called the Juice Man, or something like that.  I think it was invented shortly after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.  We feed the grapes into the hopper and it spins into a mechanism that juices it.  The juice comes out one end and the pulp and seeds fill a bucket on the other end.

The juice is pretty thick, with some pulp in it.  It is sweet and sticky.

Here is the bucket full of muscadine skins and seeds.  I like to get everything I can out of it.  I thought about running it through the juicer again...

But instead, I squeezed it through a muslin cloth.  This has an extra benefit as some of the red color from the skins comes out which gives the wine a red tint.

The recipe comes from The Maker's Diet, by Jordan Rubin.

New wine only has 3 ingredients: grapes, whey, and salt.

Add 1/2 cup of whey.  This separates from the yogurt when Tricia is making kefir.

Then you add 1 tablespoon sea salt:

We pour it all into a big jar, cover, and sit it on the counter at room temperature for two days.

After two days, put it in the back of the refrigerator and 'forget about it' for a good while.  We start drinking it when it is about 3 weeks old.  It looks horrible, but the taste is delicious and something that you look forward to every year during muscadine harvest.

Making New Wine

In this post from earlier this month we talked about picking 32 pounds of grapes from our neighbor's grape arbor.  That's a lotta grapes!  I realized in that post, I promised to let you know what we were gonna do with all the grapes and never did.  Well, I'll make good on my promise tonight.

We've been picking and eating muscadines from our own vines, but with all these, we have a plan.  We decided to make New Wine.  New Wine is a non-alcoholic wine made with fresh grapes.  New wine contains the nutrients of grapes with many enzymes, but none of the alcohol.  We've done this years ago and decided to do it again.  We'll show you how we do it.  We use Jordan Rubin's book, The Maker's Diet, for directions.

We washed the grapes and then ran them through our old juicer.  It is an old contraption, but it does the job.  Tricia fed grapes into the hopper and the juicer juiced the grapes, sending juice out of one spigot and the pulp and skins out another.  It can get quite messy and requires a concerted effort to clean up the sticky kitchen afterward!

I ran the food mill, further processing the pulp and skins to get more juice out of them.  I theorize that this is where a lot of the flavor comes from.  The mill works good, but I bet that if you washed your feet and stomped them in a big vat, that would do the job as well.  (Except that no one would drink the wine).

Here is a look at the grape juice once we were done:

Once we've finished processing, we have a lot of seeds, pulp, and skins left over.  We feed all this to the chickens.  Nothing goes to waste!

The 32 pounds of grapes yielded 2 and 1/2 gallons of juice.  It kind of looks like split pea soup.

To make new wine, you need whey.  Tricia had just made some kefir, so she had some.  She measured out 1 cup of whey for the juice of 32 pounds of grapes.

 and split it up accordingly and poured it into each jar.

Then a Tablespoon of kosher salt total is divided up between the 2 1/2 gallons of juice.

Once this is done, stir to mix in the grape juice, whey and salt.  Cover the jars and leave at room temperature for 3 days.

After two days, cover and move into the refrigerator.  Flavors will develop and get better over time.  It may not be pretty.  It is actually quite an ugly looking drink.  However, it is refreshing and tasty!

Checking In On the Muscadines

Back in May 2014 we planted a muscadine vine out in the side yard.  It has grown and we pick muscadines off of it each year.  The yield seems to increase every year. Last year Russ taught me how to effectively prune it to maximize production.  It seems to be pretty happy despite the fact that the soil in the side yard is poor and compacted.  If you dig with a shovel, it is like digging in a parking lot - hard and packed earth.  I've been amending the soil and will continue to do so until I get it where I want it to be.

Meanwhile we are still going to get a nice crop.  I like to make jelly with the muscadines.  Tricia likes to come out to the "vineyard" on late summer afternoons and eat muscadines right off the vine when the fruit is sun-warmed.  Delicious!  I guess if there is a downside to these, it would be that they have many seeds and you have to spit a lot.  Back in THIS POST FROM 2013 I chronicled how we made new wine with some grapes from our neighbors.  If we have a nice enough harvest, I'd like to try to make a batch of new wine with muscadines and see how it would turn out.

This year I've found a recipe to make muscadine syrup and I'm going to try that.  It seems like topping a homemade blueberry and pecan pancake with muscadine syrup.  Forget Wheaties.   That, my friends, is the breakfast of champions!

Clusters of Muscadines

Stay tuned and later this summer, I'll post how the muscadine syrup making experiment goes.

Making New Wine

Our next door neighbor (God Bless Good Neighbors!) called us up on Sunday afternoon and told us that they had picked all the grapes they wanted and we were welcome to go out and pick the rest if we wanted them.  In three shakes of a puppy dog's tail, we were under their grape arbor picking grapes!  We grabbed the biggest bowl we have which happens to be the cover of a Tupperware cake container and started picking grapes.


The Grape Harvest Begins Cue the song, "I heard it through the Grape Vine!"

I like the way this picture turned out with the sunlight shining through the grape leaves.  Speaking of grape leaves, usually during the Spring, we'll come over and pick grape leaves to make Grape leaf rolls, a delicious Lebanese dish that we enjoy.

Clusters of grapes

In no time at all the grape harvest was done and Tricia carried the all the bounty home in an over-flowing 'bucket'.  It really wasn't 'all' the grapes, though.  We ate them right off the vine.  They were juicy, warm and bursting with flavor.  Grapes at the store have nothing on these.


Grape Girl

We immediately started sorting out the grapes.


The Grapes of Wrath?

We separated out the good grapes...

Good Grapes

from those that weren't so good...

This is a sticky job as some of the grapes are over-ripe and have burst.  Some are past that stage and are in raisin form. 

When our job was done we had two colanders full of fresh grapes. 



The yield of the grape harvest

First, we wash them up.  They are full of spider webs, spiders and other little critters that we don't want to consume. 

Washing the grapes

What we're going to make is New Wine.  The recipe came from The Maker's Diet, a book by Jordan Rubin.  New wine is very refreshing and has all the nutrients of grapes found in wine as well as all the enzymes, but doesn't have alcohol.  The first thing we do is put all of the grapes (in batches) into our food processor to puree the grapes.  These grapes have seeds so they'll be in the 'slurry' as well.  No worries, we'll get them out later.
 

Processing the grapes

Once they are all processed, we run them through a sieve and push all of the juice through with a large spoon. 

Grape Juice, skins and seeds

The remainder after we filter is put into a bucket and composted into the garden.  In a little while we'll have a lot of little grape vines sprouting.

Seeds & Skin

There are not many additives to make new wine.  We add a tablespoon of kosher salt...

And a half of a cup of kefir whey that was a by-product of Daisy's milk when making kefir.  In a day or two I'll show you what we did with the curds from the kefir.

 We stirred it all up and then we put it in jars and set it out at room temperature for 3 days.


New wine before fermentation

Sitting out at room temperature for 3 days

Then we put it in the refrigerator.  It is really effervescent and tastes GREAT!  The longer you leave it in the fridge, the better it tastes.  We find it is best after 4 weeks in the fridge.  It doesn't look like it would be good as there is a lot of sediment, but don't judge a book by its cover.  We make sure we shake it up real good before drinking it.  This is delicious stuff and it is good for you.

New Wine aging in the fridge

"There might be a little dust on the bottle.  It's one of those things that get sweeter with time."