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Black Currant Wine
Put equal quantities of currant juice and water into a cask with three pounds and a half of sugar to two gallons of the mixture, and place it in a warm spot. When it has fermented, take off the refuse; keep the cask filled up with juice, and add a quart of brandy to every six gallons directly the fermentation ceases. The cask must then be closed up for eight or nine months, when it may be bottled off; but it will not be fit for use until it has been at least twelve months in bottle. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. per gallon.
A country wine of the old English pattern: fruit juice, water, sugar, wild yeast and time. It works, but the method assumes a cool cellar, a wooden cask and a cook who knows what healthy fermentation smells like.
- The hinge: do not bottle earlyThe cask is closed only "directly the fermentation ceases," and bottling waits eight or nine months more. If any sugar is still fermenting when you seal glass bottles, the pressure will burst them. Confirm with a hydrometer reading that is stable over several days rather than trusting the absence of visible bubbles.
- Scale it downTwo gallons of juice-and-water mixture with 3½ lb sugar works out at about 3½ oz sugar per pint of liquid. For a one-gallon demijohn that is about 2 quarts juice, 2 quarts water and 1¾ lb sugar, which lands in the usual 11-12% potential alcohol range.
- Fruit yieldBlackcurrants give roughly half their weight in juice when crushed and pressed, so a gallon of juice needs something like 18-20 lb of fruit. Many modern recipes crush the fruit into the must and strain later rather than pressing juice first.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the cask, which is why it wants "a warm spot" to get going. A packet of wine yeast and a nutrient addition gives a far more reliable ferment; blackcurrant is high in acid and low in nitrogen, and stuck ferments are common.
- "Take off the refuse"This means skimming the brown scum and fruit debris that rises during the vigorous first days. Modern equipment replaces the open cask with a bucket under a cloth for that stage, then a demijohn under an airlock.
- Keeping the cask filledTopping up with juice is oxygen exclusion, not flavour adjustment. In glass, top up to the neck with water or the same must so only a few inches of surface are exposed, or the wine will oxidise and may grow a film yeast.
- The brandyA quart to six gallons adds roughly 1.5% alcohol by volume overall — a modest fortification meant to stabilise the wine for long cask ageing, not to make a liqueur. It is optional if the wine is properly sealed and sulphited.
- Cost and timing3s 6d per gallon is the book's own estimate of probable cost, from the 1870s-80s, when sugar rather than the fruit was the main outlay. The full schedule is close to two years from picking to drinking: ferment, eight or nine months in cask, twelve months in bottle.
Blackcurrants were a kitchen-garden staple in Britain long before they were a commercial crop, valued as much for medicine as for pleasure — currant syrup and currant lozenges for sore throats appear all through nineteenth-century household books, alongside the wine. Because the fruit is too sharp and too seedy to eat raw in quantity, almost every traditional use turns it into juice: jelly, cordial, cassis in Burgundy, and here a cask wine. Cassell's places it in a long run of home-made wines from garden produce (gooseberry, rhubarb, elderberry, parsnip), a class of drink that survived in rural England well into the twentieth century and then faded as bought wine grew cheap. The long maturation the recipe insists on is characteristic: high-acid fruit wines are harsh young, and time in wood and glass was the only softening tool available.