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Currant Wine, Black
Take six quarts of black currant juice; mix with it six quarts of cold water and twelve pounds of moist sugar. When the sugar is dissolved put the liquor into a cask, which must be kept in a warm, dry room. It will ferment without anything else being added to it. A little of the liquid should be kept with which to fill up the cask when the fermentation is over, and the wine has been well skimmed. Before closing the cask add one quart of brandy. Currant wine should not be bottled for twelve months, and will be improved if kept even longer. This wine will be good for several years. Probable cost of currants, 4d. to 6d. per quart.
A straightforward country fruit wine, scaled for a small cask and a household that expected to wait a year for it. The quantities are large, the method is casual, and both need translating.
- Scale it down firstSix quarts of juice plus six quarts of water is three imperial gallons, about 13.5 litres, before the sugar goes in; with twelve pounds of sugar dissolved and a quart of brandy added the finished volume is nearer 17-18 litres. Divide by four or five for a single demijohn unless you have the fruit and the vessel for the full batch.
- "Moist sugar"Victorian moist sugar was unrefined or partly refined cane sugar, damp and pale brown, closer to today's light muscovado than to white granulated. Plain white sugar ferments cleaner; a light brown sugar gives something nearer the original flavour.
- The sugar load is very highTwelve pounds of sugar in this volume works out at somewhere around 320-390 g per litre depending on how the sugar's own volume is reckoned, a potential alcohol of roughly 19-23 per cent. Wine yeasts generally quit between 14 and 18 per cent, and wild ones often lower, so the wine will almost certainly stop sweet. That was the intent, and it helps explain why it keeps for years.
- Wild fermentation is a gamble"It will ferment without anything else being added to it" relies on yeast on the fruit skins and in the room. It often works and it often turns to vinegar. A packet of wine yeast, and a Campden tablet in the must 24 hours beforehand, is what modern practice substitutes.
- Warm, dry room means about 65-70FWarm, dry room -- The recipe gives no temperature. A steady 65-70F is what modern practice suggests for fruit wine; much above 80F and the flavours go coarse.
- Topping up and the reserved liquidThis is the hinge of the recipe. Once fermentation slows, headspace in the cask lets air in and the wine oxidises or sours, which is why a little liquor is held back to fill it to the bung. In glass, use an airlock during fermentation and top up to the neck before ageing.
- The brandyA quart of spirit into roughly four gallons adds a little over two per cent alcohol and helps preserve a wine that will sit in wood for a year. Any 40 per cent brandy does the job; the point is stability, not flavour.
- TimingTwelve months in cask before bottling is not padding. Black currant wine is harshly tannic and acidic when young and needs the time; a further year in bottle is a real improvement.
- The price noteFourpence to sixpence a quart of currants was a Victorian market price and has no modern equivalent; note that it is quoted per quart of fruit, not of juice.
Fruit wines like this one were the domestic answer to grape wine in a country that could not grow grapes reliably and taxed imported wine heavily: currants, gooseberries, elderberries, cowslips and parsnips all went into casks in English still-rooms from the seventeenth century onward, and recipes for them are common in household manuals up to the First World War. Black currants had a particular reputation as medicinal fruit, valued for sore throats long before anyone could name vitamin C, which is also why they appear in the same books as currant syrups, jellies and lozenges. Cassell's, compiling in the 1870s and reissuing for decades after, prints a cost per quart of fruit with the recipe, as it does throughout. In the United States, black currant cultivation was restricted or banned in many states in the early twentieth century because Ribes host white pine blister rust, and the fruit is only now returning.