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Gooseberry Champagne
Choose gooseberries which, when fully ripe, have little flavour. The green Bath are the best. Take forty pounds of sound, large, hard berries, remove the tops and stalks, and put them into a fifteen-gallon tub. Bruise them sufficiently to burst the berries without breaking the seeds, and pour over them four gallons of lukewarm water. Stir, and squeeze them in the hands until both the juice and pulp are thoroughly separated from the seeds and skins, then leave them until the next day, when the liquid should be drawn off, and the fruit pressed through a coarse sieve, with another gallon of water, to extract as much of the goodness of the fruit as possible. Dissolve thirty pounds of loaf sugar in the juice, and, with water, make the liquid up to eleven gallons. Leave it in the tub, add three ounces of crude tartar, cover it with a blanket, and let the temperature of the place where it is set be from 50deg; to 60deg; Fahrenheit. Let it remain for a day or two, then draw it off into a ten-gallon cask, and keep it well filled near the bunghole, by pouring in the extra gallon as the liquid subsides. When the hissing noise ceases, drive in the bung, and bore a hole by its side, into which a vent-peg must be driven, and this must be loosened every two or three days, to prevent the barred bursting. When all danger of this appears to be over, fasten in the peg tightly. Put the cask in a cool cellar, and let it remain until the end of December. Rack it from its lees into a fresh barrel, and in a month it will, in all probability, be clear enough for bottling. If necessary, it may be fined, by adding an ounce of isinglass, dissolved in a bottle of the wine. It should be bottled when the gooseberry-bushes begin to blossom, and its briskness depends very much upon its being bottled at the right time. Taste the wine before racking it into a fresh vessel, and if it be too sweet, renew the fermentation, either by stirring up the less or rolling the cask. Wine should be bottled in clear, settled weather, and the sooner it is bottled after fining, the brighter it will be. Time, twenty-four hours to stand before straining; ten or twelve days to ferment. Sufficient for ten or twelve days to ferment. Sufficient for ten gallons. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. per gallon.
This is a full ten-gallon batch of sparkling country wine, written for a household with a cellar, a tub and casks. Everything about it scales down, but the pressure at the end of it does not become gentler for being smaller.
- The hinge: bottling for brisknessThe sparkle comes from residual sugar finishing its fermentation in the bottle, and the recipe's cue for that is the gooseberry bushes coming into blossom, i.e. rising spring temperatures waking a wine that still has sugar left. Judged by taste alone this is guesswork; a hydrometer reading and a measured priming addition are how the same effect is now controlled.
- Bottles and pressureAnything intentionally carbonated must go into proper sparkling-wine or beer bottles with crown caps or wired corks. Ordinary still-wine bottles and screw-top jars burst, and the original's own warnings about the cask splitting show the pressures involved.
- Scaling downDivide throughout by ten for a one-gallon batch: 4 lb gooseberries, 3 lb sugar, water to 1 gallon, about ¼ oz (8 g, roughly 2½ teaspoons) cream of tartar. A one-gallon demijohn with an airlock replaces the tub, blanket, bung and vent-peg entirely.
- Crude tartarCrude tartar (argol) is the unrefined deposit from wine casks; cream of tartar, potassium bitartrate, is the refined form and is what to use. It acidifies the must slightly, though gooseberries are already sharp enough that acid is rarely the problem.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white cane sugar broken from a moulded cone. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; dissolve it fully in warm juice before making up to volume, or the reading of any hydrometer will be meaningless.
- Yeast, or the absence of itNo yeast is named because the recipe relies on wild organisms on the fruit and in the tub, which makes the onset and vigour of the ferment unpredictable. A sachet of wine yeast and a sterilising step give a predictable ferment and remove most of the risk of vinegar or mousiness.
- Isinglass and rackingIsinglass is fish-swim-bladder collagen and is still sold as a fining, but bentonite or a proprietary finings kit is easier to dose. Racking off the lees, as directed, does most of the clearing on its own if the wine is left cold and undisturbed.
- Green Bath gooseberriesThe recipe names 'the green Bath' as best and, in the same breath, asks for berries that have little flavour when fully ripe: strong gooseberry flavour is not wanted in a wine imitating champagne. Any large, firm, barely ripe culinary gooseberry serves the same purpose.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling and eightpence a gallon is Victorian pricing and no guide to anything now. Ten gallons is roughly sixty standard 75 cl bottles.
Gooseberry "champagne" belongs to a long English tradition of making sparkling wine from garden fruit, and it appears in Cassell's alongside cowslip, elderflower and rhubarb wines because bottled French champagne was an expensive import while gooseberry bushes stood in many kitchen gardens. The gooseberry was particularly suited to the imitation: high in acid, low in sugar and, in the varieties chosen here, almost flavourless, so that with enough sugar and a spring re-fermentation it produced something pale, sharp and briskly effervescent. The resemblance was thought convincing enough that "gooseberry" is often said to have served as a Victorian byword for counterfeit champagne, though the currency of the joke is easier to demonstrate than the fraud itself.