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Elderberry Wine
Take quite ripe berries, and after stripping them from the stalks, steep them for five or six days in a tub of water, pressing them frequently during the time. Squeeze out the juice, and pass it through a fine sieve into the vessel in which it is to be boiled; add to each gallon three pounds of good brown sugar, and to every four gallons half a pound of ginger, two ounces of cloves, and an ounce or more of allspice. Boil for rather more than half an hour, then pour the wine into a tub or open cask, put with it some yeast on a piece of toast, and cover it over to work for four of five days, at the end of which time skim and remove it to the cask to ferment. The vent-peg must be loose until the fermentation has ceased, when the cask may be tightly closed, and the wine, after two months' rest, will be good, but better a month or two later. A quart of brandy poured into the barrel when it is about to be sealed up will greatly improve the wine.
A country wine of the old type: no hydrometer, no measured sulphite, no temperature control. The method works, but several steps need translating before you start.
- Strip the stalks properlyThe green stems, leaves and unripe berries of elder carry cyanogenic glycosides and are the reason elder has a reputation for causing nausea. Pick over the fruit and discard any stalk, leaf or red berry; only fully ripe, deep-purple fruit goes in.
- The five-day steepThis cold maceration is drawing colour and tannin out of the skins, not fermenting. In a warm kitchen it will pick up wild yeast and acetic bacteria; keep it cool, covered, and press it frequently as the recipe instructs. Modern practice would shorten this considerably or skip it in favour of crushing and pressing the same day.
- Quantities scaledGallons here are imperial (about 4.5 litres), so three pounds of brown sugar per gallon works out near 300 g per litre — a heavy, sweet, port-like wine. For four imperial gallons the spicing is 225 g ginger, 55 g cloves and 30 g or more allspice, which is a great deal of clove; half that gives a wine you can still taste the fruit through.
- Boiling the juiceHalf an hour at a boil pasteurises the must, drives off volatile spice oils, and can set a pectin haze. Cool to about 20C before the yeast goes in or you will kill it.
- Yeast on toastThe toast is a float for brewer's or baker's barm. A sachet of wine yeast, rehydrated and pitched into the cooled must, is more reliable and will not leave bread flavour behind. Add pectic enzyme at the same stage if you want a clear wine.
- The loose vent-pegThis is the one instruction not to improvise on. Fermenting wine produces a large volume of carbon dioxide, and a sealed cask or a screwed-down demijohn will build pressure until something gives. Use an airlock and leave it in place until bubbling has stopped for several days running.
- Knowing when it is doneThe original judges by the fermentation ceasing. Confirm with a hydrometer at 0.995–1.000, or a fortnight with no change in reading, before racking and closing up. Bottling early is what produces exploding bottles.
- The brandyA quart to a cask of the four-gallon size the spicing implies lifts the alcohol by roughly two or three per cent and helps the wine keep; the recipe itself does not give the barrel's capacity. Any decent grape brandy does the job; add it at racking, then give the wine the two to four months' rest the recipe asks for, which it genuinely needs.
Elder grows in hedgerows across Britain and northern Europe and cost nothing to gather, which is why elderberry wine appears in a great many nineteenth-century household manuals alongside cowslip, parsnip and rhubarb wines. The heavy dosing with ginger, cloves and allspice here suits a wine of the kind commonly warmed and drunk mulled in winter, and elderberry preparations were widely believed to ward off colds and chest complaints — a belief that has outlived its evidence, though elder flower and berry preparations are still sold on the strength of it. The book places it among the wines and cordials a competent housekeeper was expected to lay down herself, at a time when commercial wine was taxed and imported and a barrel of hedgerow wine was a genuine economy. The brandy at the end is the old insurance policy against a barrel turning to vinegar.