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Grape Wine, Sparkling
Take the grapes before they are fully ripe, put stalks and fruit into a convenient-sized tub, delicately clean, bruise them until every berry is broken, and to every pound of fruit add a quart of cold water. Leave them for three days, stirring them two or three times every day. Strain and add three pounds and a quarter of lump sugar to every gallon of liquid. When this is dissolved, put the wine at once into the cask, which should be kept full to the bung. It is well to reserve half a gallon for the purpose of filling it up as the fermentation subsides. In ten days add one pint of brandy and a quarter of an ounce of isinglass to every five gallons of wine. Keep the cask in a cool cellar. The wine should be bottled in champagne bottles when the vines are in bloom the following summer, and the corks must be wired down. Time, a fortnight to make. Probable cost, 4s. per gallon, exclusive of the brandy.
A Victorian country wine rather than a wine in the modern sense: unripe grapes heavily diluted with water, sugared to strength, then bottled to catch the second fermentation. Several instructions need translating before the quantities make sense.
- Imperial measuresCassell's gallon is the imperial gallon, 160 fl oz or about 4.55 litres — a fifth larger than the US gallon. The sugar rate of 3¼ lb per imperial gallon works out at about 325 g per litre of must, which is what drives the alcohol here, since underripe grapes diluted with roughly two and a half times their weight in water contribute very little of their own.
- The dilution is deliberateA quart of water to every pound of fruit is about two and a half parts water to one part grapes by weight. Unripe English grapes were fiercely acidic, and water plus sugar was the standard way of taming them. Do not read this as a recipe for grape juice wine; it is closer to a sugar wine flavoured with grapes.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone — plain granulated white sugar is the equivalent. Nothing is gained by using an unrefined sugar here.
- IsinglassA collagen fining agent from the swim bladders of fish, still sold for beer and wine clearing. A quarter ounce to five gallons is about 7 g to 23 litres. Modern fining is usually done with bentonite, gelatine or a proprietary finings blend, and much of the time not at all.
- No added yeast, no sulphiteThe three-day soak with twice-daily stirring is relying on wild yeast from the grape skins and the air of the room. Contemporary practice adds a cultured wine yeast and a measured dose of potassium metabisulphite, since a spontaneous ferment on a heavily diluted must can as easily go to vinegar as to wine.
- "Keep the cask full to the bung"This is the instruction that matters, and it still does. Air space above a fermenting or resting wine invites acetic bacteria and oxidation, which is why half a gallon is held back for topping up as the froth subsides.
- The bottling cue, and its hazard"When the vines are in bloom the following summer" is a folk calendar for early summer, when rising cellar temperatures restart a stalled ferment — that renewed activity in the bottle is what makes the wine sparkling. It is also what bursts glass. Only true sparkling-wine bottles rated for pressure will do, wired or caged, and a residual-sugar and gravity check with a hydrometer is how this is controlled now rather than by guesswork.
- "Time, a fortnight"That covers only the active work. The wine is in cask from autumn until the following summer, and in bottle for months after that.
- YieldRoughly a gallon of finished wine for every four pounds of grapes, given the water addition — about six bottles per gallon.
Cassell's belongs to a long English tradition of making wine from whatever the garden gave, and the instruction to pick the grapes before they are fully ripe is the giveaway: in most British seasons outdoor vines never did ripen, and the fruit was gathered acid and sugared into submission. Adding water and sugar to stretch and correct a thin must was standard for gooseberry, rhubarb, currant and grape wines alike, and gooseberry "champagne" made this way was a familiar country imitation of the real thing. The brandy and the isinglass are borrowed from commercial cellar practice — fortification for stability, fining for brightness — while bottling when the vines flower is pure vernacular timekeeping, a way of saying "when the cellar warms and the wine wakes up" to households that owned no thermometer. The shilling costings that Cassell's attaches to most of its entries place this squarely in the late-Victorian middle-class kitchen, where home-brewed wine was reckoned an economy as much as a pleasure.