Home › The Principles of Cookery › Damson Wine
Damson Wine
Get sound ripe fruit, reject all that is stale and mouldy; pick off the stalks, and to four gallons of damsons add four gallons of boiling water. Let them soak four or five days, stirring them regularly every day with the hand. Add to every gallon of liquor three and a half pounds of good lump sugar, and when this is quite dissolved, put the whole into a cask with one quart of spirits to every three gallons. Let it remain twelve months, when it may be bottled for use.
A country fruit wine at full farmhouse scale — eight gallons of must before sugar. Everything here works, but the original assumes a cool cellar, a wooden cask and wild yeast, and it is silent on the points a modern winemaker would want spelled out.
- Scale it down firstEight imperial gallons of fruit and water is roughly 36 litres of combined bulk before sugar, and the liquor drawn off the fruit will be less than that; either way it is a farmhouse quantity. A quarter or an eighth batch in a food-grade fermenting bucket and demijohn is a more realistic starting point; the ratios hold at any size.
- Which gallonCassell's is British, so these are imperial gallons of 4.55 litres, not US gallons of 3.79. The fruit is measured by volume rather than weight; four imperial gallons of whole damsons is nearer 25 lb, though loose packing makes any weight equivalent only a rough guide.
- Sugar"Lump sugar" is simply refined cane sugar in loaf or cube form; ordinary granulated white sugar is the same thing. Three and a half pounds per gallon is a high-sugar, sweet, fortified style — expect a dessert wine rather than a table wine.
- The fermentation is wildNo yeast is specified because the recipe relies on wild yeasts on the fruit skins and in the cellar. Results were unpredictable then and are more so now. Adding a sachet of wine yeast and a Campden tablet to the must the day before gives a clean, reliable ferment.
- Don't crush the stonesStirring "with the hand" breaks up the fruit cap without smashing the pits. Damson kernels carry amygdalin, and while a few are said to impart the marzipan note found in old plum wines, crushing them wholesale is best avoided.
- Mould mattersThe instruction to reject stale and mouldy fruit is not fussiness. Blue moulds on stone fruit can produce patulin, and rot also brings acetic bacteria that will turn the batch to vinegar.
- The cask needs an airlockA cask left open ferments to vinegar. Fit an airlock or a loosely bunged fermentation trap until the ferment finishes, then top up so there is no headspace before the long ageing. Modern practice: rack off the lees after the first month and again a few months later.
- The spiritsThe "spirits" are unspecified; brandy is the likeliest in this period, but any plain brandy or neutral spirit at 40% will serve. Note that the recipe adds it at casking rather than at the end; modern practice is to fortify after fermentation has finished, since the added alcohol will slow the yeast and leave more residual sugar.
- Twelve months is not optionalDamson wine is harshly tannic and astringent young. A year in bulk, then further time in bottle, is what turns it drinkable. It is a wine to start in September and forget about.
Damsons — the name is generally traced to damascene, the plum of Damascus — have grown in English hedgerows and orchard corners for centuries, and their sharpness, small size and heavy stone make them poor eating and excellent preserving fruit. Country wine recipes like this one belong to a domestic tradition that ran alongside, rather than beneath, commercial grape wine: households with a glut of damsons, elderberries, cowslips or parsnips turned them into cask wine because the fruit would otherwise rot and because imported wine carried duty. It comes from a point when this kind of cellar work was still common in country houses but already fading in towns. The fortification with a quart of spirits per three gallons is telling — it was insurance as much as flavour, raising the alcohol enough to keep the cask sound through a year in a cellar of uncertain temperature.