Regarding Wild Grapes

Have you ever been on a walk or a hike and seen something like this?

The ground in all sorts of places— in the woods, on the sidewalk, near a path— are littered with squished berries right now. Did you know that these busted berries are wild grapes? And they are perfectly edible, as long as they are clean and whole! If you see these grapes on the ground, just look up and you’ll see the grape vine twisting and turning its way through whatever tree or bush is at hand. The leaves are sort of like spiky hearts:

I saw these grapes (first photo, above) and vine while I was on a walk around a nearby high school.

But not all native grapes are wild. On the farm, we’ve got some vines growing on purpose, mostly because, years ago, someone decided to grow them. So every August and September, we enjoy the bounty of cultivated native grapes.

They have lots of names: Georgia grapes, muscadines, scuppernongs, and probably some others that I don’t know. Growing up, we picked and ate them out of hand. There is a bit of a technique to eating them fresh— their skins are tough and they have seeds. But it doesn’t even matter… they are that delicious to me.

When I was young, my grandmother and aunts made enough jelly to last the whole year and never needed to buy any other kind of jelly from the store. For all of us grandkids, homemade biscuits with muscadine jelly were even better than dessert! And now my kids are learning to love muscadines, too.

The vines are so productive, there’s no way we can eat all of the grapes when they’re fresh. Since Mom is now the grandmother and I’m an aunt, we have worked together for the last couple of summers to make jelly from the grapes.

Making jelly is one of those things where you must follow the recipe EXACTLY, and you need to have everything ready to go when you start. If you don’t measure precisely, the jelly won’t set and will instead be sauce. If you don’t have ingredients ready when you start, you’re likely to end up with a sticky mess on the stove. So it was with some trepidation that I started the process last week.

I boiled a BUNCH of muscadines until they had given up enough juice to make a batch of jelly. The kitchen smelled so heavily of jam at this point that the kids came running, thinking dessert was in the making.

Doesn’t look very appetizing right now, does it?

Collecting the juice.

Now for the magic:

Gather supplies.

Boil the juice and sugar until it won’t stop boiling, even when you stir it.

Boil the foaming inferno for exactly 1 minute.

Take it off the heat and immediately ladle the hot jelly into clean jars.

Put canning lids on the jars, and put them in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes. Carefully remove the jars and let them cool on a rack overnight. If all has gone well, you’ll have gorgeous, amber-colored jelly in those beautiful jars to last until… well, maybe it depends on how often I make biscuits as to how far into winter the jelly will take us.

For me, this jelly is like a bite of warmest summer days, no matter how cold the winter.