There are close to 20,000 acres of wine grapes planted in the ruins of the Okanagan Valley, immensely attractive to tourists and restauranteurs alike. The wine? Well, some is fine and most is a kind of sweet fermented grape juice, comfortable and safe and cozy. What, though, if we got really dangerous and made this stuff instead?

You can see that I’m still alive after cooking with over half of this quart already, or at least alive enough to make this image, so that’s good, right? Here, let me help you with some words to answer that question:

Yes it is!

Harold and Huginn Hard at Work Crafting an Uncombed Okanagan Experience for You

Ah, but what is it? It’s magic stuff, with all the flavours of wildflower honey, if not more, and all the flavours of grapes, and an ability to absorb cinnamon within its taste profile (the taste profile already contains cinnamon, which deepens with the addition of some ground Saigon).

This jar contains about 10 pounds of grapes, reduced slowly over heat to a thin syrup. It is far more useful for cooking than honey, for anywhere where the flavour of honey is required without its thickness. For thickness, simply reduce further. Consider this as well: cold-hardy grapes can be used, cropped far, far more heavily than wine grapes, so heavily in fact that there is enough left over for birds, and an increase in spring bee habitat of several hundred percent. And that’s just a bonus to what it can do for our cooking. If we added to this magic elixir…

…which is green grapes turned into a sour juice, we would have two of the three ingredients for salad dressing right there. Just whisking in some oil and we’d be in green heaven. We could easily turn the world of Okanagan cooking on its head. Just imagine what we could do.

This year we’re going to have fun in the kitchen, right here at Okanagan Okanogan.

Yay!