Wine-caps

On PEI, wild food is everywhere. While walking to a meeting in downtown Charlottetown recently, I spotted some delicious, edible mushrooms in a public park. These are Wine-caps (Stropharia rugosoannulata).

Photo: WIne-cap mushrooms on PEI.

I class Wine-caps as easily recognized, beginner-level fungi. As you might guess from the name, their caps start out wine-red or reddish-brown in colour, although this fades to brown or tan as they age. While cap colour is a clue, the definitive features are underneath.

Under those caps are gills, which are initially covered by a veil when the mushrooms first appear. Veils protect the all-important, spore-bearing gills until spores are ready to be released, and they are a common feature of many mushrooms (including store-bought button mushrooms and wild Meadow Mushrooms).

Wine-cap’s veil has a series of thickened wedges, which makes a distinctive pattern on young specimens; you can see this on the small mushroom on the left side of the main photo. As the mushroom grows and the cap expands, the veil starts to pull apart, creating a ring of triangular teeth (inset). Eventually, the veil will break altogether, and that toothed ring is left on the stem like a cogwheel.

These mushrooms can grow to 15 centimetres (six inches) or more across, and the gills darken to a purplish colour as the mushroom ages. Spores are purplish-brown to black, but the combination of cap colour and the distinctive veil on young specimens (or toothed ring on the stem of older ones), makes Wine-caps pretty safe to ID without the need for spore prints.

Wine-caps are likely native to Europe and North America, though their original range is hard to confirm. They are not only cultivated as edible mushrooms worldwide, but their mycelia can also be unknowingly spread in woodchips (if they suddenly pop up in your mulched garden, that’s likely how they got there). As a result, Wine-caps are now present on every continent except Antarctica and are often more common around human habitats than natural sites.

These are saprotrophic fungi that make their living by decomposing organic matter (such as those wood chips). But nature is rarely as peaceful as we like to imagine, and even decomposers are involved in daily life-and-death battles. Tiny worms called nematodes try to prey on Wine-caps’ nutrient rich mycelia, and – in response – the fungi have developed spiny cells (‘anthocytes’) that pierce the nematodes and kill them. Wine-caps are not vegetarians: they digest the nematodes they kill. This carnivorous habit is shared by hundreds of other species of fungi, including Oyster Mushrooms and Shaggy Manes.

The Wine-caps I found made their way to my dinner plate that evening and were delicious. Whether you appreciate these fungi for their edibility, ecology, or adaptations, they are interesting parts of PEI Untamed!