With heavy heart I have to report that my experiment with the windfall grapes turned sour (pun intended). As per a discussion on the cooking forum I decided to try my hand at making verjuice (French: verjus).
According to literature found on it on the internet, verjuice is squeezed from unripe grapes that are picked when people are thinning the crop in the middle of summer. The obtained juice was widely used for cooking in the more distant past, when lemons were not readily available, and it is becoming favoured again for its milder, grapey taste.
Mine started to ferment almost immediately, and then it went way too sour. The truth is that the grapes were not really totally green any more, it was September already. Which probably caused the sugar in the juice to ferment and turn into alcohol and/or acetic acid. In any case I ended up with bottles of yucky, smelly stuff that I finally decided to dump. But now that I gained some experience, maybe next year...
2 comments:
Thanks Christian! It is heartening to get an appreciative word every once in a while. :)
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