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Currant Wine, Red
Take three gallons of ripe red currants, pick from the stalks, bruise them and press out the juice, and infuse the residue in four and a half gallons of cold water. Mix well and repeatedly to ensure equal diffusion; press out the liquor, mix it with the juice, and add fourteen pounds of loaf sugar. When the sugar is dissolved, transfer the whole to a cask large enough to leave some space unfilled, put in the bung and bore a hole through it with the gimlet, and allow the vessel to stand where the temperature is not less than seventy degrees, for a month. By that time the fermentation will have greatly decreased. Add three pounds of sugar, dissolved in two quarts of warm water, shake the cask well, and bung it as before. In about six or eight weeks, on listening at the bunghole, your ear will inform you whether fermentation has ceased, if so rack off the clear liquor from the sediment, and mix with it a quart of the best French brandy. Set it by in the cellar for about two months, when the liquor is again to be racked off into a clean but not new cask, which should be quite filled; it must now be tightly bunged down, so as to exclude the air perfectly, and be preserved for at least a year at a temperature of seventy degrees. When necessary the cask should be for this purpose kept near a fire.
A full-scale country wine of the kind English households made from garden fruit, sized for a cask rather than a demijohn. Most of the technique still stands; the equipment and the sanitation assumptions are what need updating.
- Imperial gallonsCassell's is a British book, so these are imperial gallons of 4.55 litres, not US gallons of 3.79. Three gallons of currants is roughly 13.6 litres of fruit by volume, and the finished batch runs to about 34 litres — some 45 standard bottles. Scale down by a factor of five or ten unless you actually own a cask.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a solid cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent. The two additions total 17 lb across roughly 7.5 gallons, which at full attenuation puts the wine in the 13 per cent range before the brandy goes in.
- The gimlet hole is the airlockBoring the bung lets carbon dioxide escape while keeping most air out. A modern fermentation lock does the same job better, and lets you see the fermentation rather than listening at the bunghole for it.
- Wild yeastThe recipe names no yeast, relying on what is on the fruit skins and in the room. That is why it insists on 70F (21C) — wild ferments need warmth to get going before spoilage organisms do. A packet of wine yeast removes the gamble entirely, and a crushed Campden tablet per gallon 24 hours beforehand knocks back the competition.
- SanitationEverything that touches the must after pressing should be sanitised. Nineteenth-century casks carried a resident microflora that could be an asset but could equally be what turned a batch to vinegar. Glass carboys and food-grade plastic are easier to keep clean.
- Headspace and topping upThe instruction to fill the second cask completely and bung it tight is the single most important line here. Once fermentation stops there is no more CO2 blanket, and air in the vessel will oxidise the wine or feed acetobacter. Top up with more wine, never with water.
- A year near the fireMaturing at a sustained 70F for a year would have helped carry any residual slow ferment to completion in an unheated house. It also accelerates oxidation and cooks out the fresh fruit character. Modern practice ages country wine cool, around 55-60F (13-16C), and gives it the same twelve months.
- The brandyA quart of brandy into roughly seven gallons lifts the alcohol by only a point or two — it is there as a preservative and for body, not to fortify in the port sense. Any decent unflavoured grape brandy will serve.
- Acid and pectinRed currants are very high in both. Expect a sharp wine that needs its full ageing to soften, and a persistent haze unless you add pectic enzyme to the must before fermentation.
Fruit wines like this one were a standard use for a glut of garden currants in British households, where redcurrant bushes cropped heavily in July and the fruit would not keep. Cassell's carries a run of similar wine recipes — gooseberry, elderberry and cowslip among them — made on much the same pattern of pressed juice, water on the marc, a large quantity of sugar to compensate for fruit that ferments to nothing on its own, and a spirit addition at racking. Making these was domestic economy rather than winemaking as a hobby: sugar was cheap enough by the later nineteenth century for a household to commit seventeen pounds of it to a cask, and the result gave a family something to serve that had cost little beyond garden fruit and labour. The reliance on wild yeast, unnamed and unremarked, is worth noticing: Pasteur's work on fermentation appeared in the 1860s, but recipe writing of this kind still treated fermentation as something that simply happened to sweet liquids left in a warm room.