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GINGER WINE (a quick way of making)
The best time for making ginger wine is the spring or autumn. Boil together seven gallons of water, nineteen pounds of sugar, and nine ounces of best Jamaica ginger, bruised, for half an hour. Remove the scum carefully as it rises, and leave the liquid until the next day. Chop very small nine pounds of raisins--two-thirds of which should be Malaga, and one-third muscatel. Put these into a twelve-gallon cask, with a gallon and a half of good whiskey, or any other spirit, and four lemons, cut into slices. Let these ingredients stand until next day; then put with them the cleared ginger liquid, being careful to leave any sediment behind, and to strain it. As there is no fermentation, the cask may be bunged immediately. The wine will be ready for fining, by mixing with it one ounce of dissolved isinglass, in a fortnight. In another fortnight it may be bottled. Probable cost, 10d. per gallon, exclusive of the spirit.
This is not a fermented wine at all but a sweetened, spirit-fortified ginger cordial, made at a scale that suits a Victorian cellar rather than a modern kitchen. Everything about it scales down cleanly except the vessel.
- Scale it down hardThe finished quantity is roughly eight and a half imperial gallons, near 40 litres. Divided by sixteen it becomes about 2 litres water, 540 g sugar, 16 g bruised ginger, 255 g chopped raisins, 425 ml whisky and a quarter of a lemon, which will just fill a 3-litre jar.
- Imperial gallonsCassell's is a British book: a gallon here is 4.55 litres, not the 3.79-litre US gallon. Seven gallons of water is about 32 litres, and the twelve-gallon cask holds some 55 litres.
- Jamaica gingerDried whole ginger root, then reckoned the finest grade and sold by origin. Bruise it by cracking the rhizomes with the flat of a knife or a mallet so the cut surfaces open without powdering; ground ginger will cloud the liquid and cannot be strained out.
- The raisinsMalaga raisins are large sweet Muscat grapes dried on the stem; muscatel raisins are the same grape, often dried whole with seeds. Any good Muscat or jumbo raisin works. They are here for body and vinous flavour, not sweetness, so chopping them fine genuinely matters for extraction.
- "As there is no fermentation"That claim is optimistic. Nineteen pounds of sugar and nine pounds of raisins carry wild yeast, and the finished liquid is only about 6-7 per cent alcohol, far too weak to prevent it. Do not bung tight and walk away, and do not seal into bottles without checking; a slow ferment in a closed vessel builds real pressure. Use an airlock or a loosely covered jar.
- Fining with isinglassIsinglass is collagen from fish swim bladders, dissolved in a little acidulated liquid and stirred in to drag suspended solids to the bottom. It is still sold for brewing. Racking the clear liquid off the sediment twice, a fortnight apart, achieves much the same thing without it, and keeps the drink vegetarian.
- Timing and strengthA fortnight to fine, a fortnight to settle, then bottle. It is drinkable at once and better after three months, when the raw spirit has married with the sugar and ginger. Expect something around table-wine strength or below, not a fortified wine.
- Cost noteTenpence a gallon excluding the spirit reflects a period when sugar was cheap and whisky was the expensive line in the account. The spirit is now overwhelmingly the largest cost.
Green ginger wine was a fixture of the British Victorian household, a warming winter drink poured neat, mulled, or mixed with hot water for a cold. The commercial trade is generally traced to London ginger wine makers of the eighteenth century, Stone's among them, and by Cassell's day the drink was familiar enough that the book offers both a proper fermented version and this quick fortified shortcut. What distinguishes the two is instructive: real ginger wine ferments raisin sugar into alcohol over weeks, while this recipe simply buys the alcohol in a bottle and steeps the flavours into it, a domestic economy of time rather than money. The Jamaica ginger specified reflects the nineteenth-century view that West Indian dried ginger was the finest and most aromatic grade available, African ginger being reckoned the hotter, a preference that also drove the American patent-medicine trade in ginger extracts. The drink survives chiefly in the whisky mac, ginger wine cut with Scotch, still ordered in British pubs in cold weather.