Home › Food for the Sick › BLACKBERRY WINE
BLACKBERRY WINE
To every gallon of bruised berries, add half a gal lon of soft cold water; let stand twenty-four hours, then strain. To every gallon juice, add three pounds sugar; fill a cask and let it remain without moving or shaking until it has fermented, which it will have done in six weeks. Put over the mouth of the cask a thin piece of muslin. When fermentation has ceased, draw off the wine and bottle without shaking the cask. Cork and seal.
A wild-ferment country wine of the simplest kind: fruit, water, sugar, and whatever yeast arrives on its own. The proportions are sound; the equipment and the judgment of when fermentation has finished are where a modern maker should depart from the text.
- The proportions in modern termsPer gallon of crushed berries, 2 quarts of water; after 24 hours and straining, 3 lb of sugar per gallon of liquid. That is a heavy sugar load, and a wild ferment will likely stop short of dry, leaving a sweet wine of perhaps 12 per cent alcohol or so; the alcohol and the residual sugar together are what keep it from spoiling.
- "Soft cold water"Soft means low in dissolved minerals - rainwater or cistern water in 1877. Chlorinated tap water may inhibit wild yeast; use filtered or bottled water, or draw tap water and let it stand uncovered overnight.
- The caskSubstitute a food-grade plastic fermenter or a glass carboy fitted with an airlock. The point of the muslin over the bunghole is to let carbon dioxide escape while keeping out fruit flies and dust; an airlock does the same job better.
- Wild yeast is the gambleThe recipe relies on yeast on the berry skins and in the air, which can as easily give vinegar or a barnyard smell as wine. A packet of wine yeast pitched after the sugar dissolves removes the guesswork, and the fruit character survives it.
- Six weeks is a guess, not a ruleFermentation depends on temperature and yeast. Judge by a hydrometer reading that stays unchanged over several days, or by the airlock going quiet for a week or more. Warm rooms finish faster; a cool cellar can run two months.
- Do not bottle earlyThis is the one instruction that matters. Corking and sealing a wine still throwing gas will burst the bottles. Verify fermentation has genuinely stopped, and rack once more off the sediment before bottling.
- Racking off the lees"Draw off without shaking" means siphon carefully from above the sediment. Disturbed lees carry yeast and pulp into the bottle and give a muddy, bitter wine.
- SanitationEvery surface the must touches should be sanitized - fermenter, siphon, bottles, corks.
- YieldRoughly 7 to 8 lb of blackberries yields about a gallon of crushed fruit, and the finished wine comes to a little over a gallon per gallon of strained juice - five standard bottles.
Blackberry wine appears here under Food For The Sick rather than among the beverages, and that placement is the interesting part. Through the nineteenth century blackberry preparations - the wine, the cordial, the syrup, the brandy - were standard domestic remedies for summer complaint and diarrhea, the root and unripe fruit being valued as astringents, and a small glass of the wine was thought both binding and strengthening for an invalid who could keep down little else. Sweetened fruit wines of this type were also a practical way to preserve a hedgerow crop that spoils within days of picking and that cost nothing but the scratches got in gathering it. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by Ohio churchwomen and first published in 1877, was written for households where the nearest doctor might be hours away and the medicine chest was largely the pantry.