We’ve been converting the lawn in our backyard to a large pollinator garden full of drought resistant perennial flowers and native grasses. It’s a response to climate change and a desire to encourage biodiversity. It’s also building on the legacy left by the original owner of the house who was an avid gardener and winemaker who planted Marechal Foch grapes in the 1970s.
The grape was prominent in the Upper Midwest because it could survive the harsh winters and is disease resistant. I’ve had to learn about pruning and have made some lovely jam from the fruit before, but usually the birds eat most of the grapes before we ever do much with them.
Last year the birds ate every one a good three weeks before they were even close to being ripe. This year we were determined to enjoy some so I started picking them before they were completely ripe and freezing them whole until I could decide what to make from them. After I had five gallon-sized freezer bags full I started to get concerned about how much space they were taking up.
I decided to can the juice and that has wound up being the thing I want to experience most this winter as a way to remind me of summer by mixing it with sparkling mineral water.
It’s also a way of reminding me of a mission trip I went on with my mother to Tisovec, Slovakia in 1994 after my father had died. A free-flowing spring is located a few hundred yards outside of town and locals hike out with carts and backpacks to fill bottles with the naturally carbonated mineral water.
People there would mix a homemade fruit syrup with the mineral water to make a refreshing naturally-flavored carbonated soda.
We’ll wind up with about a dozen quarts of a lovely unsweetened grape juice made from our own grapes. It’s quite nice without any additional sugar.
There’s not much to making it, really. Just bring the grapes to a simmer and boil for 10 minutes – just enough to break down the skins while crushing them with a potato masher. Marechal Foch grapes are seedless. Strain through a fine mesh Chinoise or cheesecloth and process according to the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning instructions. Basically, if you’re doing water bath canning it’s processing at a full boil for ten minutes and if using a pressure canner it’s six lbs. of pressure for ten minutes.
We’ll enjoy it in the wintertime as a way of reminding us of summer. There’s a satisfaction that comes from something you made yourself that can’t be matched by simply being a capitalist consumer.
There’s a timelessness to following the ebbs and flows of the seasons. Growing … producing … stocking up. Then, in the dead of winter, getting a flood of memory from opening up a jar.
“No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
The Evanjelické Gymnázium Tisovec, or Lutheran High School of Tisovec, was a very popular mission trip in the early 1990s for members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The Missouri Synod Lutheran Church was the church I grew up in and one I ultimately rejected as an adult. However, my mother wanted to make this trip after my father passed away and she asked me to go along.
It was an extremely good thing I went for her sake and it did spur me to renew an interest in religion. I investigated religion as an adult and rejected the fundamentalist sect nature of most of what I see in American religious life. I joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America because of their inclusiveness. However, serving on church council in a small town in Iowa pretty much did in my desire to belong to a church ever again. I’ve since stopped believing in a personal God as a man with a snowy white beard who knows the number of hairs on my head.
Still, the trip was an important experience and I’m sad that I’ve had so many defeats in life that it remains my only overseas trip. I am grateful that it’s easy to recall the sensory impressions I had at that time and at that place.
“But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Schmecken! 