ESSAYS FROM THE
HEARTLAND
NUMBER THREE
CHERRY WINE
July 1, 2013
Most people don’t know when cherries are ripen. That’s
because most people today live in cities and don’t have any idea how any food
arrives at their plate - it just comes pre-wrapped in plastic at the local
supermarket. When cherries are ripe depends a little on the variety of cherry,
but it’s basically late June or early July.
For my tart pie cherries it’s around July 1.
Most people also don’t know that you can make a great wine
from tart cherries, because they think that the only good wines come from
grapes, and that wine made with anything else is inferior, all like that
second-grade apple stuff that you drink in high school or college because it’s
cheap and girls like it better than beer. If they are really sophisticated and
have vacationed in Door County or Northern Michigan, they know that you can
make cherry wine, but they think it’s all that sweet desserty stuff. When it
comes down to it, most city folks don’t know a lot about food except what’s on
a menu.
You can make a dry cherry wine made from tart cherries that is
a fantastic complement to a warm afternoon picnic laid out over lush green
grass beneath blue skies and billowy white clouds. And most girls do like it a
lot better than beer, so it works pretty well for those candy is dandy moves,
too.
You can just go out and buy several flats of cherries, but
that’s cheating. If that’s what you do, all you are is a mixologist. To be a
true wine maker, you have to grow your own fruit. That starts with planting the
tree. The planting-the-tree part is the easiest – sticking the tree in the
hole, watering and getting your fingers in the dirt to pat it down around the
trunk - it’s earthy, fun, doesn’t take a long time, and the small effort has no
relationship to that required by what follows - sort of like screwing. After planting the tree in that hole comes
the long wait for fruit to bear, just like waiting for the baby to drop only
longer. It can take a very long time depending on the tree variety. Then, just
like with babies, the real work begins.
Before you can make the wine, naturally you have to pick the
cherries. But that doesn’t just happen. First, every spring you pray that you
don’t get an early frost. There is not a lot more frustrating than getting all
excited about a tree covered with blossoms, anticipating a great crop, and then
having a deep freeze that kills off all the blooms. That tree won’t be worth
anything except shade until the next spring rolls around. Kind of like a
miscarriage, but of course not nearly so devastating. The freeze watch does
give you a lot more respect for Mother Nature, completely unpredictable yet
wholly determinative of what you get. Farmers have to go through this weather
roulette every year. It’s enough to make your religious. Of course, city folks
don’t really understand this either, because all they’ve ever seen is tv
coverage of water misters in the Florida orange groves. Besides, everybody
knows all fruit comes from California (or Mexico) where they don’t have winter,
anyway.
Assuming you get by the frost, you next have to decide
whether to spray the trees, or not. After a couple of years of reduced or
blighted yields, I decided to spray my cherry trees. Natural food types shudder
at the idea of spraying fruit trees. Most of them have never tried to grow
fruit, or watched an entire year’s crop sicken and die because of something that could have been easily prevented with a biodegradable
spray. Those same types won’t want to eat a cherry that has blemishes on it
because it looks gross. I look at spraying like inoculating your children
against disease, and I put the no-spray ideologues in the same category as
parents who won’t have their kids inoculated against polio or whooping cough
because it involves injecting some nasty unnatural chemical or live pox into
their bodies. Just talk to them after their kid gets polio.
There is nothing fun about spraying fruit trees. You pick a
nice sunny day, because if it rains after you spray all the stuff washes off
and you have to do it over again. This means it will be hot outside while you
are spraying. The warnings on the label would have you covered in a chemical
warfare suit while you spray, but a) I don’t have one, b) it gets too damn hot
inside all that impermeable rubber , and c) the suit would likely make me trip,
fall off the ladder and break my neck. So the warnings are about as useful as
“Caution – Hot” on your coffee cup lid. Fruit free spray has a “perfume” to it,
kind of like the odor added to natural gas in your house so that you know it’s
around. Fruit tree spray smell has the same degree of wonderfulness as the
flavoring they put in laxatives to make it go down better. When the wind blows
the fruit spray back into your face and all over your hair, not only do you
feel it, but you smell it. That’s when
you think, “This stuff isn’t healthy for bugs and fungi, so it’s can’t be real
healthy for me. Maybe I should have worn that chemical warfare suit.” Too late.
Spraying with your eyes closed while you hold your breath to avoid inhaling the
spray blowback isn’t an OSHA-approved process for working on a ladder, and I
haven’t yet figured out how to control those gusts of wind on spraying day, so
I just accept it as part of the process and take a good shower afterward.
So you’ve planted the tree, waited for the blossoms, made it
through the frost, and sprayed, or not. Finally, several weeks later comes the
picking. You see, you do have to pick the cherries. If you wait for them to just
fall off the tree they won’t be good, and the birds will get most of them
first. Picking is pretty good exercise, hauling ladders around the tree and
yourself up and down the ladder, practicing your balance trying not to fall off
while stretching to reach that choice cluster just out of reach, and then
carrying the baskets full of the cherries. Picking is pretty time consuming but
not exactly mind bending, which gives you lots of time to think. And because
your task is picking cherries, naturally you tend to consider cherries, and
apply those thoughts to the task at hand. Which turns out to be quite
instructive about growing things, and therefore, people, because people (at
least most of them) are living things, and most lessons about growing living things apply to people as all living
things have an awful lot of things in common. All connected as part of the
mystic cosmos and all that. Learning something about life from cherry picking
is another one of the things that city folks just don’t get because they rarely
deal with living things, except for other people (and people are remarkably
myopic about people), or occasionally a shih itzu (which is an unnatural dog
living in an unnatural environment), so you really can’t blame city folk for
their ignorance and the fact that they have to learn most of what they know
about living things from books - if only
they would quit trying to impose their lack of wisdom about the living world on
the rest of us! Even though they may not understand their true nuances, city
folks still use many of the pearls of wisdom that have come from eons of picking
cherries, such as “cherry picking” – looking at all those cherries hanging
there and picking only the best, ignoring the rest; or “popping a cherry” - well,
you understand the derivation when you gently squeeze a bright juicy cherry and
the pit pops out. Hey, I’m just sayin…
When you’re picking,
you want the best, most healthy cherries in your basket. Just like kids. You
notice that younger trees produce far less fruit than those that are a few
years more mature. A cherry tree that has been producing for few years produces
buckets more fruit than one that is just beginning. Demonstrably, this is clearly
one of the things that city folk don’t understand, as they are constantly
listening to their children rather than the other way around. Is this a mixed
metaphor? Whatever. On the other hand, you also notice that the small amount of
fruit that the younger tree does produce is generally more consistently
healthy. This is because the fruit is more scattered, less abundant and not so
crowded in clusters, so that if one cherry catches a fungus, it does not spread
quickly to its neighbors. Crowded conditions spread disease, more space slows
it. The younger trees with less fruit act like an isolation ward in a hospital.
When there is more space between the cherries, and fewer clusters, molds and
fungi can’t spread so fast. That’s the
same reason there is more time for kids to grow up in the country. Childhood
can last longer because there’s more space and the fungi of adulthood just doesn’t
spread so fast. In a city a kid that catches a trend spreads it to others much
more quickly and pretty soon everybody is getting nose rings or blowing dope or
having rainbow parties. It’s also why you need that fruit spray to innoculate your
older more mature trees that have so many more cherries on them.
Another thing you learn is counter intuitive. You notice
that some of the best, fastest ripening and healthiest berries are on the
lowest branches on the outside of the tree, where it’s easiest to pick. “Why is that?” you wonder. Well, at least I
wondered. Two reasons. On the outside of the tree, there is more sunshine and
less shade. The sun is like diet for the fruit, more sun makes the fruit ripen
faster and better. And molds and fungi like shade and moisture. Its damper and
shadier on the inside of the tree canopy, so those on the outside are less
susceptible. The other thing is that birds don’t go after that low hanging
fruit so much, because they might become dinner while getting their dinner: barn
cats and such. The higher you go in the tree, the more you find cherries that
are ruined by pesky birds that take a piece and leave the rest with a wound
that invites bacteria and molds and fungi to come on in. It follows that if you
want your fruit to be healthier, you don’t just let the tree grow any which way
of its own accord. You have to “cultivate it,” which in this case means pruning
some of the branches to reduce the canopy and let more sun reach the cherries
in the interior. Have you ever noticed how kids that never get pruned because
their parents don’t want to stunt their creative instincts, tend to be a pain
in the ass? Like cherry trees that aren’t pruned properly, the fruit does not
turn out as consistently good.
Another thing: the cherries which are the deepest red aren’t
the best. From pictures in the books, you would think they should be, but when
you closely inspect real ones, the deep redness usually comes from a wound or
worm festering deep inside the cherry. The deep red is more like internal
bleeding. The brighter red cherries are better.
Cherries pass from white to creamy white to bright red to
deep red pretty quickly, so you have to be Johnny on the spot to pick them
around July 1, whether or not it’s convenient. You want good cherry wine, you
need good cherries, which means you have to be around when the cherries ripen.
A week before and they are not ready. A
week later and it’s too late. Growing things is not about your convenience. You
have to adapt your schedule to the thing that’s growing. No way around it.
So now you have the basket of cherries. Everybody has their
own recipe, but this is how I make my dry cherry wine. Take 6 pounds of
cherries, cull them to keep only the best, and rinse them. No need to pit them.
For every 6 pounds of cherries, boil 6 pounds of mild honey in 7.5 quarts of
water. Put the washed cherries into a large nylon straining bag into a cleaned
and sanitized fermenter, and crush all the berries with your hands. Lick your
fingers. J
Pour the hot water over the crushed cherries. Add two teaspoons of yeast
nutrient and ¼ teaspoon of wine tannin. Wait till the water cools and add 2
crushed Camden tablets. Put the lid on the fermenter. Let it sit overnight, and
then add one teaspoon of pectic enzyme. Wait 24 hours and add one packet of
Montrachet or other wine yeast. Put the cover back on and if possible, fit it
with an airlock. As it ferments, it’s gonna foam, so be prepared for a lot of
foam. Stir once or twice daily. After two weeks, take out the bags of now
sickly white looking cherries. Don’t squeeze the bag, that just introduces
detritus into your wine. Rack the wine into a glass corboy, right to the
shoulder to minimize exposure to oxygen. Bung it and fit it with an airlock.
Keep the corboy in a dark place or under something to keep light away from the
wine. Rack it twice more over the next few months. A year later, bottle it.
Drink it slightly chilled. Hmmm hmmm good. You can’t buy this at the local
liquor store. If you can find a place to buy it, don’t bitch at $20+ per
bottle. A lot of work goes into making a decent bottle of wine from scratch.
Just like kids…
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