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Potato Wine
Wine of good quality may be made from frosted potatoes, if not so much frosted as to have become soft and waterish. The potatoes must be crushed or bruised; a wooden mallet answers the purpose. If a plank of wood is made hollow, in the manner of a shallow bowl, they may be bruised with a mallet or put into a cider-press. Boil ten gallons of water with half a pound of hops and half a pound of common white ginger. This water, after having boiled for about half an hour, must be poured upon the bruised potatoes, into a tub or vessel suited to the quantity to be made. After standing in this mixed state for three days, yeast must be added to ferment the liquor. When the fermentation has subsided, the liquor must be drawn off as pure as possible into a cask, adding half a pound of raw sugar for every gallon. After it has remained in the cask for three months it will be ready for use.
A country wine built to salvage frost-damaged potatoes, written for a reader who already kept a cask and a tub. The instructions are workable but leave out the single most important figure.
- The missing quantityNo weight of potatoes is given for the ten gallons of water. Country wine practice commonly works to something in the region of 4 lb of potatoes per gallon, which would put this near 40 lb, but the original is genuinely silent and the strength of the finished wine will vary accordingly.
- Why frosted potatoesFreezing converts some of the tuber's starch to sugar. Tubers that have gone soft and watery have broken down too far and risk spoiling the batch, which is presumably why the recipe excludes them.
- Discard green or sprouted tubersGreen skin and sprouts carry solanine, which is bitter and toxic and is not removed by boiling water or fermentation. Frost damage is acceptable; greening is not.
- Scale it downTen gallons is about 45 litres and needs a food-grade fermenting bin, not a wooden tub. A fifth of everything gives two gallons, a manageable amount for a domestic kitchen.
- Hops and gingerHalf a pound of hops in ten gallons is a heavy hand by modern taste, and "common white ginger" most likely means scraped dried root rather than ground. The hops act as much as a preservative as a flavouring; a quarter of the stated amount is closer to what a current palate expects.
- Yeast"Yeast must be added" meant barm from a brewing or baking tub. Use a dried wine yeast, pitched once the liquid has cooled below about 25C/77F, and keep the vessel under an airlock rather than open to the room.
- Sugar and starch hazeHalf a pound of raw sugar per gallon is added after the first ferment, so expect the wine to continue working in the cask. Potato musts are starchy and often stay cloudy for months; racking off the sediment two or three times does more for clarity than time alone.
- Do not bottle earlyThree months in a cask is a minimum, not a guarantee. Bottle only when the specific gravity has been stable for a fortnight, or the residual sugar will restart in glass.
Potato wine belongs to the thrift end of Victorian domestic economy, where a cellar of frost-bitten tubers was a problem to be solved rather than a loss to be written off. Frost splits potato starch into sugars, and any sugar in a nineteenth-century household could in principle be fermented, and potato wine seems often to have been printed beside parsnip, beetroot and mangold wines. The hops and ginger are the tell that this is closer in spirit to small beer than to grape wine: hops were the standard household preservative for a liquor with no great alcoholic strength to protect it, and ginger supplied the warmth that the base material entirely lacked. The point of such recipes was less the drink than the lesson, that nothing edible in the house need be thrown away. Potato wine has never had much of a reputation for delicacy, and its survival in print says more about the cost of waste than about the quality of the result.