Des Taylor liked to make wine.
Usually, people who make wine start with grapes. But Des was very creative and like to make wine from many other ingredients. Looking through his winemaking recipes, I find Apple wine, Banana wine, Beetroot wine, Lettuce wine, Mead (honey wine), Orange wine, Parsley wine, and the family favorite, Choke Cherry wine.
Choke cherries are very small cherries with a rather large pit in the center, so there is very little flesh. They grow wild beside country roads and most people don't pay them much attention because they taste AWFUL! If you try eating one of these choke cherries it feels like it has sucked all the moisture out of your mouth. Your mouth purses up and you just have to spit it out right away. But for people who know the recipes, it makes a very good wine and you can even make a pretty nice jam, too.
Choke cherries start to ripen around Des's birthday, July 25. So after his birthday, Des took the family for a drive in the country, looking closely at the bushes beside the road. When anyone saw a bush with little clusters of bright red berries, they'd call out and Des stopped the car to have a look. If there were enough and if they were ripe (the best ones were so dark red they were almost black), the whole family climbed out of the car and started picking. They're very easy to pick because each bunch has a central stem with about a dozen berries sticking out from the sides. You just grab them in your hand and pull downwards with a pail held underneath and all the choke cherries pop off the stem and fall into the pail. After tasting just one or too, no-one was tempted to eat them, so all the fruit went into the pails.
Back home, after a long day of cherry picking, we gathered around the kitchen table and picked over the berries. There's always some stems and leaves (and bugs) that fall into the pails along with the choke cherries. We washed the berries, too, to get rid of the road dust and any other dirt. Then the lovely glistening red cherries went into a large plastic garbage pail with some clean water. For the next week or so, they sat in the water. The cherries absorbed the water, swelled and burst, sort of like slow-motion popcorn. We helped this process along by digging into the pail every day and squishing and squeezing the cherries with our hands to get the goodness out. By the end of the week, the natural yeast made the mixture start to ferment - it got very bubbly and some of the cherries filled with gas and floated to the top.
When Des first started making choke cherry wine, he used to squeeze the juice out of the cherries by putting them into an old, clean cloth diaper, then wringing it out. Later, he bought a wine press - a special machine that squashed the cherries an let the juice come out through holes in the sides. Either way, he had to separate the good juice from the seeds, skins and pulp. The juice turned into wine; everything else went onto the compost heap. Then came the special step to get rid of the horrible bitter taste: add lots of sugar! The sugar started out by making the juice as sweet as grape juice, but then Des added special wine-making yeast that fermented the sugar into alcohol and lots of carbon dioxide bubbles. For the next week, the fermenting juice stayed in the pails, but once the bubbling began to slow down, Des siphoned the clearest part of the juice into large glass jugs. The jugs had special fermentation traps on the tops which let the bubbles of carbon dioxide escape through some water, but wouldn't let any air back into the jug.
Then came the waiting. Wine making is very slow, so you have to be patient. Of course, while you're waiting you can make some other kinds of wine! That's what Des did. He liked to have several batches of wine on the go at all times, so he could do the next step on whatever batch was ready. There would also be some earlier batches ready to drink. Choke cherry wine takes about 6 or 7 months to finish fermenting, so in the coldest part of the winter, Des opened up the jugs and carefully siphoned the dark red wine into wine bottles. You could have a taste at this point, but it wasn't very good yet. So the bottles went onto the wine racks in the basement and we had to wait some more.
The next summer, the choke cherry wine was ready to drink. The best way to enjoy it was to have a picnic! Des opened a bottle of the wine in the morning and poured some of it into a plastic bag with some spices. Then he put in some pieces of steak. The steak sat in the wine all day and absorbed the flavours. At supper time, Des cooked the steak on a barbeque or on a grill over a fire. Baked potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked in the fire were a nice side dish. Then we feasted on the steak and admired the choke cherry wine's deep red colour shining in the firelight. It tasted delicious!
