Photo by: BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER
Enjoy!
France taught me some important customs: Substitute perfume for a shower in a pinch, buy bread and produce fresh daily, and cap the day with an aperitif.
Fruit- or herb-infused aperitifs are the right refreshment to make the transition from work to home and gathering with our favorite people. While you can buy aperitifs such as Pernod and Lillet, they are easy to make at home, experimenting with everything from fresh peaches to fennel seed, orange rind and peppercorns.
As a student in France half my life ago, I noticed cafes overflowing with locals sharing animated conversation and aromatic drinks in the evening. Friends come together to “prendre un pot,” or have a glass, with or without alcohol. There’s something magical about the in-between moment when day slips into night. As we transition from work hours to personal time, a drink gives us a moment to pause and reflect, to reconnect with special people in our lives.
“L’aperitif is both a beverage and a social activity,” writes Georgeanne Brennan in her book “Aperitif: Stylish Drinks and Recipes for the Cocktail Hour” (Chronicle Books). More than just a drink before a meal, she says, it is a national custom.
Unlike the quintessential American after-work martini, classic French aperitifs are made from herbs, spices and fruits to pique the palate and stimulate the appetite. In someone’s home, you might be offered a vin maison, or house wine, made from local bounty such as walnuts or oranges from Algeria or Spain. Traditional vin de pêche is made by steeping leaves and blossoms of peach trees in white wine.
In fast-paced, recession-rattled America, the homemade aperitif is one custom worth adopting. Many people these days entertain at home rather than dine out. Inviting friends over for a casual drink lets us connect without the added time or stress of preparing a full dinner. I enjoy the ritual when I can, on nights free of children’s games, school events and music recitals.
Making fruit- or herb-infused wine takes only 10 minutes and costs about what you would spend on a cocktail at a bar. In my Seattle kitchen, I usually have an unmarked bottle in the refrigerator with flavors of the season. A few times a year, I gather flavorful local fruits and herbs, and douse them with a Northwest wine. The bottle sits in the fridge, ready to sip with my husband or to offer guests.
To make your own vin maison, you can use either red or white wine, although I prefer white in summer. I generally buy a dry Northwest white in the $10 to $12 range, such as pinot gris or sauvignon blanc, but it’s fun to experiment with slightly sweeter wines like gewürztraminer or riesling. The basic recipe is one bottle of wine, one cup of chopped fruit, a scoop of sugar, and a generous splash of a neutral vodka or eau de vie to preserve the fruit. That’s it. The hard part is waiting three to four weeks for the flavors to mingle.
Sometimes called ratafia, infused wine can also be made from leaves, herbs or vegetables. Pete Wells in The New York Times (“Bottling the Bounty of the Season,” Aug. 29, 2007) called ratafia “a gesture of hospitality as well as an expression of . . . faith in food made or grown nearby.” We may not live near orange trees, but the Northwest gives us heaps of peaches and raspberries in summer, pears and apples in fall and strawberries in spring. Each season finds a different flavored wine in my refrigerator. Some are more successful than others — one pear-cinnamon vin maison tasted too strongly of vanilla bean. My latest concoction contains cucumber, orange rind, fennel seeds, peppercorns, cloves and bay leaf.
As I serve aperitifs, I remember the French family who taught me the art in their old country home in Poitiers, a city in northwest France. The father would rush home from a day at work, in suit and tie, and we all sat over a collection of small glasses, mysterious dark bottles, nuts and olives. In France, children are included in the ritual with lemonade or other fruit drinks. The aperitif is distinctly different from dinner — in a separate room, intimate, peaceful. It’s a simple way of giving thanks for the day and for each other.
While I have adopted this particular custom from my days in France, I still prefer a shower over perfume.
Vin Maison
1 cup chopped in-season fruits, vegetables or torn herbs
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup vodka
¼ vanilla bean, sliced lengthwise (optional)
1 bottle wine, red or white
1. Place the fruit, sugar, vodka, vanilla bean and wine in a large glass jar and stir to dissolve the sugar. Cover tightly and refrigerate 3 to 4 weeks.
2. Strain through a sieve lined with cheesecloth, pressing down gently on solids. Using a funnel, pour the wine into a clean bottle and cork tightly. Store in refrigerator.
To serve, pour into small wine or juice glasses. Serve straight, over ice cubes or with a splash of sparkling water.
Dandelion wine, the ultimate in “home” winemaking. The flowers are often a nusance and we try very hard to get them off our lawns. An entire industry has been created to come up with various chemicals and tools to get rid of these pesky plants.
Personally, I quite like the flowers, I like their tenaciousness and I find that they look pretty as well. My main reason in liking them is the fact they they make good wine. Dandelion wine was actually the very first wine I made. This was over 20 years ago. I was a teenager then and the wine was not that good but it sure made me popular around the block… Since then, I have made a few improved batches and my enjoyment of dandelion wine has increased since then.
The wine itself can be made in various styles but my personal favorite is just off dry. A perfect summer wine and quite refreshing.
This little video series prepared by acclaimed commercial dandelion winemaking Phil Tonks of Grandview Winery goes through the whole process and and very well done.
It kinda makes me want to put my lawn mower away and watch the weeds grow so that I can get another batch of dandelion going soon.
I raise a glass to the joys of summers, holidays, sunshine and the wines that go along with it.
Happy winemaking!
by Eddie Thomas - Star Tribune
The taste of northern Minnesota comes through in the fruit flavors of Forestedge Winery, just as you can divine the story of the land, or the “terroir,” in a good French Burgundy, a glass of Minnesota fruit wine tells the story of this area: its caches of wild fruit, its early inhabitants, its new arrivals, its windfalls and deprivations all coming together in a sweet, powerful liquid.
As is the case with many food traditions in the Midwest, someone is currently bringing a new level of sophistication to this one. People have always made wines from the fruit that grows naturally here, although in my experience some of them have been more “Whoa, that’s strong!” than “Holy cow! Delicious!”
Although it’s often difficult for home winemakers to bring flavor and alcohol production into balance, recently some commercial producers of fruit wines have achieved a high level of consistent technical skill.
If the glut of nongrape wines entering the Minnesota State Fair is any indication, we finally have some fruit wines good enough to challenge the supremacy of the grape. No doubt, grape wines can express quirks of flavor as dramatically as the best of them, but nothing says home like wine brewed from the fruit at your feet.
Fruit wineries have cropped up statewide, some also making wine from cold-hardy grapes developed at the University of Minnesota. Others, such as Forestedge Winery near Laporte, Minn., one of the state’s northernmost wineries, shun the grape altogether.
“So much of what we do still has an anchor in the basement,” said Paul Shuster, who is co-owner of Forestedge with his wife, Sharon, and their friend John Wildmo.
That is, even though they’ve won enough wine contest awards to choke a fireplace mantel and now make 35,000 bottles a year, they continue to ferment each of the many fruit wines they make in 35-gallon barrels — which means that each batch numbers at least 50 barrels. They like to keep the process manageable, on a human scale.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” said Shuster. “We’re more comfortable working this way, but we have 50 barrels to clean after each batch.”
The operation may have begun in a root cellar, but their current facility gleams with stainless steel. It’s a Russian stacking doll of old and new: foraged wild berries inside a laboratory, inside a charming barn-red structure sitting next to one of the largest rhubarb fields I’ve ever seen.
To the west, you see plum trees and the raspberry plantation. They hire local pickers — mostly retired folks and professional foragers — to bring in the wild berries and fruits. All of the rhubarb for their signature rhubarb wine is grown on-site.
They moved to their land in the 1970s. There, on 40 acres between Walker and Park Rapids, Paul and Sharon began making wine from their rhubarb. Their early attempts used natural fermentation, which relies on microbes in the air to provide the yeast.
“Using just natural yeast, the wine only fermented to 6 percent alcohol. It was all sugar. When we poured it, within minutes, hundreds of wasps circled our glasses,” said Shuster.
A lesson in winemaking
Not long after that, they began to take their winemaking more seriously. Paul began splitting and transplanting the rhubarb plants from the family garden, and in the 1980s they planted a small field of chokecherry trees. Their Volkswagen mechanic, Wildmo, who initially partook of their fruit wines during a house call on the Shusters’ 1961 VW bus, caught the winemaking bug himself and eventually joined the venture.
As they neared opening, Sharon nailed down their formulas for making fruit wines in (relatively) large batches. Today, their winemaking process reads more like a science textbook than a back-to-the-land manual.
A bit of sweetener
Blueberry and strawberry don’t need much additional sugar, but a chokecherry wine might need just a bump. Delicate and flinty, not unlike a dry rosé, the chokecherry wine is used in Paul’s tasting room to introduce people to fruit wines.
Not only is chokecherry the most iconic of all fruit wines, but it’s also distinctive and singular, with a rose-hip hue and fleeting scents of basil and black pepper that come and go with progressive sips.
More than the others, its restraint seems to capture the lean beauty of our northern, boreal forest, and I like to drink it with cheeses, or before dinner — though I’ve also found it to match chicken and fish well.
Making our way down the row in the tasting room, I love the woodsy character of the black currant, which has the dark, leathery tone of an old Rioja and the acidity of a wild blackberry. The winemakers suggest drinking it with grilled meats, and immediately I think of a grilled Iowa chop.
The plum tastes exactly like an excellent Japanese plum wine of recent memory: potent, it lingers flirtatiously with ripe, musky fruit, and for me, suggests a dessert pairing. The apple, now made exclusively from Honeycrisp, tastes deeper than many of the small-batch apple wines I tasted during a trip to Germany a few years ago, and fairly begs for a bacon and onion tart for companionship.
Later that night, around the campfire, I poured everyone a tipple of the chokecherry. Our visitors from out-of-state were pleasantly surprised at its complexity, and I was secretly grateful for it, a tap into the culinary heart of our atypically beautiful, hardscrabble northern territory.
Amy Thielen is a chef and writer who divides her time between Two Inlets, Minn., and New York City.
Article by Will Buss of bnd.com
Jody and Allen Justus have long enjoyed a bottle of homemade wine. Their good friend Arnold Schorr had always made it. But after he died seven years ago, the couple wondered how they would quench their thirst for sweet fruit wine. Jody decided to learn.
“I had to learn a lot about chemistry and do my homework,” she said. “I came up with what I think are some good recipes.”
Like a good wine, wine making takes time to perfect. Jody has spent the past seven years learning how to make sweet fruit wine from peaches, apples and blackberries.
In March 2009, she retired from the Belleville Post Office after 31 years. That July, she started making what would amount to 5,000 gallons of wine.
Now a year later, the Justuses have just opened their Jo-Al Winery and gift shop. Although located in a former mechanic’s garage on Illinois 177 at the east edge of Mascoutah, where the city meets cornfields, Jody and Allen Justus are seeing fellow wine lovers blazing a trail to their quaint confines.
“Those who walk in are pleasantly surprised,” Jody said. “We’ve had a steady stream of customers coming through. Just from one sign on the street, one of those stick-in-the-ground types, and one on the interstate. Some folks come in from the interstate.”
This new business, which held its grand opening last week, is another sign that wine making is thriving throughout metro-east and the rest of the state at a time when Illinois is struggling to pay bills, much less support its viticulture. Funding for the Illinois Grape Growers and Vintners Association has steadily fallen from the $550,000 that once was allotted to the nonprofit organization about five years ago.
The 2011 fiscal year budget finds the wine-making group on tap for only $150,000. Association external relations director Megan Pressnall said the latest squeeze came a year ago when full-time enologist Bradley Beam was cut.
“It’s tough,” Pressnall said. “We’re becoming more diversified with our funding sources. We’re turning more to festivals to do some fundraising.”
But these cuts have not shriveled Illinois’ wine country. “It grows incredibly each year,” Pressnall said. “We now have 90 wineries in the state. Ten years ago, there were just 14.”
Even facing increasing state liquor taxes, wineries and vineyards are flourishing.
Judy Wiemann bought the Piasa Winery in Godfrey four years ago and moved it to Maryville last October. She reopened it under the same roof as her Villa Marie Vineyards and Winery, which she opened in November 2008.
“Our business is good,” Wiemann said. “We sell a lot of wine. Our wine is very good. We get a lot of traffic from Missouri.”
But as a winery, Villa Marie-Piasa Winery must file a form by the 15th of each month. This lets the Illinois Department of Revenue know the inventory on hand at the beginning of the month, what is manufactured, what is sold and the tax rate paid per gallon on what was sold. Last September, this tax rate increased from 73 cents to $1.39 a gallon.
“Things are tight, and the additional laws they have put in place, in my opinion, makes it harder for the small business person,” Wiemann said.
Jody Justus, whose husband’s cousin in St. Clair County Sheriff Mearl Justus, has a larger vision for her winery. Aside from the craftsmen and artists who sell their creations in her gift shop, Jody envisions becoming a link in a chain of businesses in her hometown that would promote commerce and tourism in the area.
“It’s all here all in our own backyard,” she said. “Our ultimate goal is everyone succeeds. We would really like Mascoutah to have more business, hire more workers in real estate and promote everyone here that we can.”
Jo-Al Winery has seven different wines made from fruit purchased from local orchards, like Braeutigam Orchards in Belleville, and the blackberries come from Hawkins-Schwartz Orchard in Dix, Ill., located near Mount Vernon.
Jody and her workers make it in the back of her 2,200-square-foot building in a space that is kept between 68 degrees to 71 degrees and at 50 percent humidity. Many state wineries like Jo-Al do not grow their own fruit but make in on site. The new Mascoutah winery cuts and crushes the fruit, and the juice is fermented in large polyurethane tanks. Jody and two employees have turned out as many as 600 screw-cap bottles in 10 hours.
“It’s a labor of love,” she said.
