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Champagne, English
The yellow hairy gooseberries are the best for this purpose. They should be taken when they are fully grown, but before they are in the least ripe. Reject all unsound or bruised fruit, and pick off the stalks and heads. Bruise a gallon of fruit so as to burst the berries without breaking the seeds. Be careful that the tub in which they are placed is scrupulously clean. Pour over them a gallon of water, and let them stand in a warm place for forty-eight hours, stirring them frequently, until all the juice and pulp are separated from the rest of the fruit. Strain the liquid, pressing the pulp with a wooden spoon till it is quite dry. Pour it upon four pounds of coarse sugar, and let it stand three days more, still stirring it frequently, then strain it through a coarse bag into a cask, and mix with it a cupful of the best gin. Let it stand twelve months, then bottle it. It must be bottled in the spring. If it is not quite clear, it may be fined with a little isinglass; half an ounce is enough for four gallons. After the bungs are driven in tightly, a vent-hole should be made in the cask. Probable cost of gooseberries, 1s. per gallon.
A wild-fermented gooseberry wine, bottled in spring so that a second fermentation gives it some sparkle. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are imperial and the method assumes cooperage the average kitchen no longer has.
- The hinge: pick underripeThe whole style depends on green, fully grown but hard fruit, which carries high acid and low sugar. Ripe gooseberries make a flabby, jammy wine that will not pass for anything champagne-like.
- Bruise, do not crushThe instruction to burst the berries without breaking the seeds is deliberate. Gooseberry pips release bitter, tannic notes into a wine meant to taste clean and sharp.
- GallonsThese are imperial gallons of 160 fl oz, about 4.5 litres, not the US gallon of 3.8. A gallon of gooseberries is roughly 6-7 lb of fruit; the strained must comes to roughly two gallons.
- Coarse sugarUnrefined or partly refined cane sugar of the period. Ordinary granulated sugar works and gives a cleaner flavour; four pounds to two gallons of liquid is a moderate charge, aiming at perhaps 10-11% alcohol.
- No yeast is namedThe book relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the air of the fermenting room. Modern practice is to add a cultured wine yeast, because a spontaneous ferment on cultivated fruit is as likely to go to vinegar or to stall as to finish.
- "A warm place"Read this as roughly 18-22C. Much warmer and the open-tub stage risks souring; much cooler and it may be slow to start.
- The cask and the vent-holeA small oak cask is not required; a glass demijohn with an airlock does the same job and is easier to keep clean. The vent-hole driven after bunging is the period equivalent of an airlock, letting carbon dioxide escape rather than blowing the head out.
- IsinglassA collagen fining from fish swim bladders, still sold for beer and wine. Half an ounce to four gallons is about 14 g, which is a generous dose by modern standards; commercial preparations give their own rates. Bentonite is a vegetarian-friendly alternative; isinglass and gelatine are both animal-derived.
- The ginA cupful in two gallons is a small fortification, added for keeping quality rather than strength.
- Spring bottling and bottle pressureBottling in spring catches the wine as warming weather restarts a slight fermentation in the bottle, which is where the sparkle comes from. Use proper sparkling-wine bottles and wired or crown closures; still-wine bottles and corks pushed in by hand can and do burst.
- YieldExpect roughly two imperial gallons, about nine litres, or a dozen 750 ml bottles.
English households made "champagne" out of whatever the garden gave them, and the gooseberry was a common candidate because a green one delivers the same combination of high acid and low sugar that makes cool-climate grapes suitable for sparkling wine. Gooseberry wine was widely enough made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it was also, by repute, a source of fraud: unscrupulous merchants were said to pass it off as genuine champagne, and the accusation appears often enough in period writing to have become a stock joke. The costing at the end, one shilling per gallon of fruit, is the giveaway that this was economy as much as pleasure.