Ripe hand-picked blueberries and blackberries, Smoky Mountains © A. Payne
Blueberry bush with mainly unripe fruit, in June in the Smoky Mountains. © Amanda Payne
Strictly speaking, grapes are berries. But when we think of berries, we’re not usually thinking of grapes. And why is that? It’s partly because we think of berries as bright morsels plucked individually from bushes, and it’s partly because berries have a relative austerity compared with the modern eating grape. Berries can be tart or tangy even when fully ripe, while the red seedless grapes I tried recently were altogether too sweet for my liking. A couple of those, and I was already feeling that the sugar hit was going to be too much. Grapes weren’t always that way, of course, and there are plenty of less sweet grapes grown for wine — not to mention more traditional varieties, with thick skins you have to peel before you can eat their white, eyeball-like flesh.
But back to berries. If you’re going to have fruit, on a daily basis, berries are best because they pack the greatest nutritional punch per calories ingested, and most of them, like raspberries and blueberries, neither require sweetening nor deliver too much fructose in each bite. But then, I do like my berries on the tart side: not many people eat fresh blackcurrants and redcurrants without adding sugar, but I do, as I have a strong liking for sour. (Hot lemon drinks would be my favourite, if it weren’t for the damage to the enamel of one’s teeth!) And just as you can cultivate a sweet tooth, and want the sweetness of grapes more and more, so you can cultivate a taste for tang, and find that a little sweetness goes a long way.