MPR reports on a new way to gather the fruit for your wine:
St. Paul couple Jeff and Gita Zeitler are starting their own winery and cider house, but they’re taking a particularly creative approach to sourcing ingredients — they want to forage as many of them as possible.
That means their ingredients will change with the seasons.
“We’ll start making rhubarb wine, and if we can source enough dandelion flowers and lilacs, we’re gonna make dandelion-lilac wine,” Jeff said. “And in the fall, we’ll be harvesting apples and pears and whatever fruit … carrots make a great wine believe it or not.”
For now, the Zeitlers are getting most of their fruit from peoples’ yards all over the cities.
They’ve been leaving fliers at houses with fruit trees, and have been surprised by how many invitations they’ve gotten to come back and harvest.
“Over time, we hope to establish sort of an urban orchard,” Jeff said. “It’s dispersed throughout the city … fruit trees hiding in plain sight. If you think about it, in Minnesota, we are sitting on some of the best farmland on Earth. We have good soil. Even in the city, we have our little 1/8th-acre lots that you can grow some pretty nice fruit trees on.”
We have a bumper crop of apples. We donate them to the food shelf and the University of Minnesota Equine Center – and make apple pies, of course.
(h/t my lovely sister)
