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Apricot Wine
Boil twelve pounds of sliced ripe apricots and a pound of sugar in three gallons of water for half an hour, and strain the liquor into a pan. Put with them a few of the kernels of the fruit, mix all together, and having covered the vessel, leave the liquid to cool. Mix one table-spoonful of fresh brewer's yeast with it, and leave it for three or four days to ferment. Then pour off the clear liquid into a cask, which must be scrupulously clean, and let it remain until the fermentation is ended. A pint of Rhenish or other white wine should then be added, and the cask closed for six months. At the end of that time it should be decanted into bottles, and kept for a year longer before being used. Time to boil, half an hour; ferment, three or four days. Probable cost, 3s. a gallon. Sufficient to make three gallons.
This is a Victorian country wine of the kind made in quantity from garden fruit, and two features of it put it outside what can be recommended today: the deliberate addition of apricot kernels, and a sugar level far too low to protect eighteen months of unsupervised storage.
- The kernels are the main problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which can be hydrolysed to hydrogen cyanide. The quantity here is given only as "a few", with no weight and no indication of size, so the dose in the finished three gallons is unknowable. It is the same compound that makes bitter almonds a restricted flavouring rather than a free ingredient.
- Not enough sugar to make wineOne pound of sugar to three gallons of water, plus whatever the apricots contribute, will ferment out to only a few percent alcohol at best. That is well short of what would inhibit spoilage organisms, and the liquid is then asked to sit in a closed cask for six months and in bottle for a year after that.
- An open ferment with no acid or sulphite controlA ferment with no acid or sulphite control -- the liquid is covered while it cools, pitched with a spoonful of fresh brewer's yeast, and left three or four days in a vessel that is covered but not sealed. Modern winemaking controls pH and uses sulphite precisely because low-alcohol fruit musts held at room temperature are readily colonised by acetobacter, wild yeasts and moulds.
- "Scrupulously clean" is not sanitisedA wooden cask that has held previous batches cannot be sterilised by scrubbing. The instruction reflects the best practice available at the time, not a modern safe standard.
- Sealing an active fermentThe cask is to be "closed" once fermentation appears finished. Appearance is unreliable, and a sealed rigid vessel containing residual sugar and live yeast builds pressure. Airlocks exist for this reason.
- Ingredients you would have to hunt forFresh brewer's yeast meant a moist barm bought from a brewery, which is no longer a general retail item. "Rhenish" is Rhine wine, a German white; the pint added here functions as a flavouring and finishing addition.
- If you want apricot wineUse a current fruit-wine recipe with measured sugar, acid and yeast nutrient, a hydrometer, and no kernels.
- On the costing"3s. a gallon" is three shillings a gallon.
Cassell's belongs to a long British tradition of "made wines" or country wines, in which households fermented whatever the garden produced in excess — gooseberry, elderflower, cowslip, damson, rhubarb, apricot — against the cost of imported grape wine, which carried duty. Adding a measure of grape wine or spirit at the end is common in the genre. Using the kernels for flavour is also traditional; the almond-like note of stone fruit pits was prized in ratafias, noyau and macaroons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the chemistry behind that flavour was understood. The recipe's patience is worth noting for its own sake — six months in cask, a year in bottle.