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Champagne, Currant
Put four pounds of loaf sugar into a saucepan with six quarts of water; skim it well, and boil it till it is a clear syrup; pour it over a quart of white and a quart of red currants, which have been stripped from the stalks. Let it stand for one hour and a half, then stir in two table-spoonfuls of yeast. Let it remain for two days, stirring it frequently, pass it through a coarse bag into a small cask, and fine it with a quarter of an ounce of isinglass. Probable cost, currants, 4d. or 6d. per quart.
A country wine dressed up with a grand name: currants, sugar syrup and yeast, fermented briefly and fined bright. The proportions are sound, but the instructions assume a cellar, a cask and a brewer's judgement rather than a clock.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in hard cones and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, four pounds to the six quarts of water.
- Quantities in modern termsSix imperial quarts is about 6.8 litres of water; a quart of stripped currants weighs roughly 1 lb 4 oz to 1 lb 8 oz (about 570-680 g), so you need something over 2.5 lb of fruit in total. Finished volume is around six quarts, or eight to nine wine bottles.
- Temperature before pitching yeastThe syrup goes over the fruit hot and is left an hour and a half. That is unlikely to be long enough to bring several quarts down to blood heat in a cool room, let alone a warm one. Yeast is stressed well above blood heat and killed at higher temperatures still; wait for the must to reach 65-75F however long that takes.
- The yeastTwo tablespoonfuls of yeast means fresh barm skimmed from a brewing tub or a baker's wet yeast. A single sachet of wine yeast does the same work more predictably and leaves less bready flavour.
- Two days is only the first stageThe two-day open ferment is the vigorous stage; the cask then continues working for weeks. Modern practice is a fermentation vessel with an airlock rather than an open cask, and no sealing until fermentation has genuinely finished.
- PressureThe name promises sparkle, and sparkle comes from residual sugar still fermenting in a sealed container. Bottling a wine that has not finished, in anything but proper sparkling-wine bottles with wired closures, is how bottles burst. Check with a hydrometer that the gravity is stable before closing anything.
- IsinglassA quarter ounce (about 7 g) of isinglass, a collagen fining made from fish swim bladders, is still sold to brewers and is used at far lower rates today. It is not vegetarian; bentonite or a proprietary wine fining does the same job.
- The coarse bagA jelly bag or straining cloth. Squeeze it hard and you drag pulp and haze into the cask, which is exactly what the isinglass then has to deal with; let it drip.
- The cost noteFourpence or sixpence a quart is pre-decimal currency and reflects the price of currants in a Victorian market, where the fruit was cheap and seasonal. It has no bearing on what you will pay now.
Nineteenth-century household books are full of "champagnes" — gooseberry, rhubarb, elderflower, currant — none of them from Champagne and none of them made by the méthode champenoise. The word was used loosely for any pale, brisk, lightly sparkling home-made wine, and the borrowed glamour was half the point at a table that could not run to the imported article. Red and white currants together give the pale pink-to-straw colour and the sharp acidity that make the comparison plausible; currant bushes were a fixture of the kitchen garden, cropping heavily in July, and a glut of soft fruit had to go somewhere before it spoiled. Cassell's carries the recipe as a matter of course, at a period when brewing and wine-making were still ordinary domestic tasks rather than hobbies, and when the yeast for them was often simply lifted from whatever else was working in the house.