#wineberries

Wineberries -> Wineberry Sorbet

Mulberries -> Vegan Mulberry Cheesecake

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania nibbling wild raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and tiny blueberries on summer trips to Ontario, chewing sassafras and sipping on honeysuckle, but wineberries were queen. I probably haven't tasted wineberries in 30 years, as I moved away from the east coast in 1996. They're on my shortlist of things I miss after loved ones, lightning bugs, thunderstorms, and beech trees.

Lookit these beauties.

Unlike raspberries, they're meltingly soft. No crunchies. If you pick them unripe, they're tart, but still fairly tasty,

Unripe ones are amber-orange, ripening to lush crimson, which is the perfect blend of honey-sweet and tart/citrus, deepening to pomegranate seed red.

The NYT's Urban Forager blog describes wineberries as a "citrusy wild fruit which tastes like a cross between a raspberry and a California orange" (by which I can only assume they mean something like the 1930s Valencia orange tree in the back yard of my friends in Westminster, CA; store-bought oranges are a different animal). The Guardian's gardening columnist Alys Fowler says...

"…sherbert"

She also irresponsibly suggests planting some right after mentioning finding a forest overrun with them between Lakes Como and Maggiore, and noting her mom's own patch tended to get around. If you look them up in the US, you find a slew of articles lamenting wineberries as invasives, often while admitting ruefully that they're delicious.

Backyard Foraging: It’s Wineberry Season in the Northeast!

Rubus phoenicolasius, Rosaceae Family

There’s an unmaintained area of my property where I rarely trek into. Today, I decided to explore. BOOM! Massive wineberry patch exploding with ripe wineberries. This, for me, is one of the most enjoyable invasives to manage. In the Fall, I will cut the brambles back to reduce the size of the patch, but in the meantime, I gorged on these berries to reduce the spread. These tart little gems are a little waxy when the calyx first opens, so I like to wait to harvest right after a rainstorm if possible. I collected so many wineberries that for the first time I actually have enough to freeze.