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Currant Champagne
Take four quarts of very ripe white currants and four quarts of very ripe red currants; pour over them six quarts of cold water, and bruise and stir them about every day for six days. Strain the juice through a jelly-bag, and put four pounds of loaf sugar to every gallon of liquid; add one ounce of isinglass, dissolved in a little water, and two table-spoonfuls of fresh yeast. Leave the wine for two or three days, then put it into a cask, which, when the fermentation is quite over, must be closed. It will be ready to use in six or eight months. Probable cost of currants, variable; when plentiful, 4d. per quart.
A Victorian country wine, made by open fermentation on crushed fruit and then racked into a cask. The method is sound in outline but written for people who kept a cellar and knew what a working cask looked like; a few things need translating and one or two need watching.
- Imperial measuresCassell's quarts are imperial: 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, and four to the gallon (4.55 L). Six quarts of water is 1.5 gallons; how much strained juice the eight quarts of fruit yields is guesswork, so the liquid to be sugared may come to something in the region of two to two and a half gallons, and the sugar at 4 lb per gallon perhaps 8 to 10 lb.
- Loaf sugarCone or loaf sugar was simply refined white sugar broken from a hardened block. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- IsinglassA collagen fining made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, used to drop haze out of suspension. Modern winemakers add finings after fermentation has finished rather than at the start; gelatine, bentonite or simply long settling will do the same job, and bentonite keeps the wine vegetarian.
- "Fresh yeast"This means baker's barm or compressed yeast, the same organism as bread yeast. It ferments a fruit must but tends to give a coarse flavour and low alcohol tolerance; a dried wine yeast is what the recipe would call for if it were written now.
- The six-day steepThe hinge of the whole thing. Crushed fruit standing in open water for six days before any yeast is added leaves the must open to acetobacter and wild moulds, and souring is a genuine risk. Keep the vessel covered with a cloth, stir daily as directed, and expect the wild flora on the currants to start fermenting well before day six.
- Closing the caskThe instruction to close it only "when the fermentation is quite over" is not optional. Sealing a wine that is still working builds pressure enough to burst a bottle or blow a bung. Use an airlock until the specific gravity has been stable for several days, then seal.
- Why "champagne"Nothing here creates sparkle deliberately; any liveliness came from residual fermentation in a tightly closed cask. Deliberately bottling this to referment would need pressure-rated bottles and a measured priming dose, neither of which the original gives.
- Yield and timingYield is uncertain, very roughly two to two and a half imperial gallons, say 9 to 11 litres, or twelve to fifteen 750 ml bottles. Six to eight months is realistic before the harshness settles, and currant wines are generally reckoned to improve past a year.
Redcurrant and whitecurrant wines were among the commonest of English home-made "British wines", made in quantity in July when the bushes came in all at once and the fruit was too abundant and too acidic to eat straight. Calling a pale, briskly acid fruit wine a "champagne" was common in Victorian recipe books, where the name signalled a light-coloured, sharp, faintly effervescent drink to be served cold, as against the heavier raisin and elderberry wines; how far it implied a method is less clear, since a number of period "champagne" recipes for gooseberry and rhubarb do aim at sparkle through bottling. The price note at the end ound plplentiful — fourpence a quart when currants were plentiful — is aimed squarely at the reader deciding whether it was worth the trouble.