We have made several trips to an elderly gentleman's farm to help him harvest his grapes. He grows a few varieties of muscadines and two varieties of scuppernogs ( the green colored grapes).
This venture is best undertaken in the cooler part of the day as it gets quite warm even under the canopy of the grape vines.
Our first trip yielded one gallon of huge muscadines that were squeezed and turned into grape juice which was then used to start a batch of wine- new experience for us.
Our second trip- we came home with 2 gallons of grapes. One gallon of small, dark muscadines great for jelly and a gallon of scuppernog - also for jelly. Our farmers informed us that we would get more juice from the grapes if we froze them first and then let them thaw before using them. So..... now the grapes are resting in our freezer until I have the time to deal with them.
You can see in the photo the different colors of the grapes. These are muscadines and we were searching for the darkest ones- they looked a lot like olives. The grapes will ripen over a period of 30 days. This style of grapes are picked individually-unlike the bunch style grapes we commonly see the in the supermarket.
A prerequisite of making juice is watching the I love Lucy clip where she is stomping the grapes. Click here to view the video clip.
