Mulberry Wine

Our first adventure into the world of wine making starts with the discovery of a large Mulberry tree in the front yard of the house we purchased just last year.  Of course, last year we were so busy moving in and painting and cleaning that we did not even notice the tree...until this year when it literally began raining mulberries on my husband while he was mowing the lawn.

Here is the first chapter in our adventure.

April 2012:

Finding the tree, harvesting the berries (it is a fruit not a berry, in fact) and trying to figure out how to begin wine making from scratch.

After some research, (God bless eHow) we found that to make about 1 gallon of wine using the siphon-hose and bucket method, we would need about 5-6 pounds of ripe fruit per gallon of wine.  Well, there goes our vineyard idea, we would need many, many more mature trees than we have!  So we will begin by doing a bit of experimenting.

We placed a plastic sheet underneath the (very tall) tree to begin catching the berries as they dropped to the ground.  After a day or so we had about half of a 5 gallon bucket full.  Ok so we won't have to pick these by hand and we can use not-so-perfect berries...sweet.  We though that was good enough to work with, so we got online and began looking for a reasonably priced complete wine-making kit to get us started.

We decided on the One Gallon Wine Making Kit from http://www.letsdowine.com/1gaeqkit1.html

The kit will be in after a few days and we can begin the second leg of our journey!