CNN is reporting a winery in Connecticut that uses no grapes.  Instead they are making fruit wines using raspberries, blackberries, cherries, and rhubarb.  Yesterday, I watched as a crew from RFD-TV interviewed a Kansas man who made wine from elderberries as well as elderflowers.  He had acres of the plants for his "vineyard" and was apparently making a financial go of the project.

Blasphemy, you say! 

My mother used to make a beautiful strawberry-rhubarb wine and I have made elderflower wine from a recipe my grandmother brought from Germany in 1891.  It's hard work but it makes a wonderful pale gold product.  I collected my blossoms from the wild and, believe me, passersby look at you as though you're some kind of nut as you stuff these "weeds" into a grocery sack.

But there is beauty in knowing that you will have the last laugh when you pop that cork.  Every June when I pass the clustered blossoms along a country road, I think, "I need to make another run of that stuff."