We were blessed enough to be invited to pick grapes at a friend of a friend's backyard vineyard mid-August. He had a wonderful slew of vines, and we came home with a couple bushels of Concord and what I think were Reliance grapes. I can't wait for the day we have a lovely backyard vineyard. We picked wild grapes earlier a couple weeks before, but their yield is just not much compared to these juicy beauties.
These are the grapes draining. After I was all finished making juice, and had already tossed the spent skins, pulp, and seeds, my preservation group had a posting that said I could have used all of that to make fruit leather by putting it through my handy-dandy food mill. Something to try next year!
We ended up with 8 gallons of grape juice. Grape juice and apple juice are the only things that are safe to can in half gallon jars, and boy does that fact make processing go so much faster. I canned grape juice a couple years ago, but did it all in quarts that time and it makes for a lot of time spent canning. The Concords made a beautiful purple juice, while the Reliance, which were green to pink, made a lovely mauve-y pink juice. All those quarts up there are chicken stock and crushed tomatoes. It was a busy week :)
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