Like Grandma Used to Make
Jay Erckenbrack is the owner of Minnesota Wild in McGregor, Minnesota where his company’s line of fruit jams and syrups evoke the sensory memory of a visit to grandma’s. “Both my grandmothers made tremendous breads and rolls and I remember the fresh hot bread coming out of the oven and then putting homemade jelly on it,” Jay says. “Not a bad way to start to start the day.”
Seven years ago, Jay’s grandfather came into the picture when he started a winery. “I have this picture of grandma in the kitchen making jelly and grandpa in the basement making wine,” he says. When Jay, and Lori Gordon, Minnesota Wild’s general manager, sat down at the kitchen table a dozen years ago to imagine what products could result from a trip to grandma and grandpa’s house, the list was long. They are still developing new products that the old folks, feeling inventive and perhaps a bit whimsical, might turn out. For example, the company recently introduced blueberry salsa. “The underlying flavor is salsa but the blueberry really comes through,” according to Jay.
A Berry Good Business
Before launching Minnesota Wild, Jay and Lori worked in the Minnesota paddy rice industry, but left to market lake and stream wild rice. They soon realized they could not make a living selling 1-lb. bags of rice, so they made the small leap from hand-gathered wild rice to hand-gathered wild fruits. Although Minnesota Wild has branched out into non-food products as well, fruits remain central to the business. They process tons of:
- wild chokecherries
- blackberries
- black currants
- high bush cranberries
- Juneberries
- blueberries
- pincherries
- plums
- grapes
- raspberries
About half of the wild fruit is gathered by Ojibwe people from the Leech Lake and White Earth Reservations. “We have a buying program up at Leech Lake reservation. They buy for us up at Cass Lake at their fisheries building,” Jay says. “We’ll tell them we want 5,000 lbs. of chokecherries and… 2,000 lbs. of plums and they put a list out around the reservation and people bring it into the fisheries building and are paid when they drop it off.”
What Makes Minnesota Wild
Since growing grapes in northern Minnesota would have been a dicey proposition, Minnesota Wild’s wines- there are 14 with two new ones in the making- are crafted from wild fruits. The wines are made by blending them with honey wine or mead. Jay likes using mead because Minnesota apiaries produce an abundance of high quality honey. Blending honey and wild fruit wines is challenging for the winemaker, however.
“Honey is very hard to do by itself at home. You need special filtration equipment,” Jay says. “With the wild fruits the sugar content and pH is all over the board. By making the wines separately and then blending them we can have better control. The more tightly we control each batch the more consistent we can be.”
Branching Out to Farmers
Customers who shop at Minnesota Wild’s retail outlet in McGregor can watch the wine-making and bottling process through a large glass window. Jay points out that not all fruit products sold by the firm are gathered from the wild. So Minnesota Wild has had to turn first to Minnesota farmers and then, on occasion, to farmers in Wisconsin and Michigan. “If it’s not from wild fruit it won’t say wild on the label,” Jays says. “Minnesota Wild is a brand name but the wild products say wild plum or wild blueberry on the label.”
“Any landowner can put a wind break of wild plums or chokecherries in,” he says. “The worst case is the birds and bears will have a pile of food but the best case is the farmer will get a valuable harvest. The native plants just make so much more sense.” Farmers on the Red Lake Reservation have begun raising low bush cranberries. Jay is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to purchase part of that harvest.
Nurturing Relationships
As his company has expanded, Jay has found that his relationships with Native people, nurtured early in the business’ life, have been fruitful in a non-food way. The Minnesota Wild label now includes jewelry from the Red Lake Reservation, willow baskets from Leech Lake Reservation, and birchbark canoe baskets, birdhouses and other crafts from the White Earth Reservation.
All of the products sold by Minnesota Wild are available at its retail and mail order store in McGregor, its Duluth store on the waterfront and at a variety of specialty shops around the state. The wines, Jay says, are sold to over 100 liquor stores.