Rubus phoenicolasius
The wineberry is a spiny, arching cane fruit native to eastern Asia, sometimes called wine raspberry, and it is close enough to the red raspberry that it was originally imported as breeding stock.1 The United States brought it in during the 1890s for raspberry improvement programs, and by the 1970s it was found invading natural areas across most states east of the Mississippi.2
The plant is easy to recognize: canes can reach nine feet, covered in dense reddish glandular hairs, with silvery leaf undersides.2 The fruit is a small aggregate drupe, about 0.4 inches across, that stays wrapped in a sticky, glandular calyx until it is nearly ripe; the berries ripen from June into July in moist, sun-to-partial-shade sites.21 Several New England states list wineberry as banned or regulated invasive species.1
It tastes like a raspberry with a little more tartness and many seeds, and picking it is a low-regret harvest because every handful removes fruit that would otherwise spread the thickets that outcompete native vegetation.2 The notebook’s lacto-wineberries puts that harvest to work in a salt-fermented batch.
Wineberry is a good example of a food that is regionally available without being regionally native. In the Northeast it turns up in roadsides, forest edges, disturbed ground, and sometimes wet sites, tolerating anything from full sun to partial shade once established.3 Its abundance is tied to the same traits that make it troublesome: fruits are produced in quantity, animals disperse the seeds, and arching canes can root where their tips touch the ground.3 Harvesting fruit does not make a patch harmless, so the food value belongs alongside a clear warning not to plant or spread it.