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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.