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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.