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QUINCE WINE (another way)
Take twelve quinces, cut them into slices, and boil for a quarter of an hour in a gallon of water. Then add two pounds of lump sugar; ferment, and add one gallon of lemon-wine, and one quart of brandy or other spirit.
A Victorian country wine, written for a reader who already knew what "ferment" involved and needed only the proportions. Almost everything the modern maker needs — yeast, vessel, timing — is left unsaid.
- The missing instruction"Ferment" here assumes ambient wild yeast or a spoonful of ale barm, and a cool cellar. A modern maker would pitch a wine yeast into the cooled, sweetened liquid and fit an airlock; without that, the result is as likely to go to vinegar as to wine.
- QuantitiesTwelve quinces is roughly 4-5 lb of fruit. The gallon is an imperial gallon, 4.55 litres, not the US 3.79; the quart is 40 fl oz. Scaled down, the ratio is about 1 lb quince and 8 oz sugar per 2 pints of water.
- Lump sugarRefined sugar sold in cones or blocks and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Two pounds is very little sugarThe sugar -- Two pounds of sugar in a gallon of water is a modest charge, giving a potential of perhaps 9-10 per cent alcohol in the quince ferment itself. Diluted by the gallon of lemon wine, the strength of the finished drink owes a great deal to the quart of brandy, which makes it a fortified drink rather than a simple bottled wine.
- Lemon-winePresumably a separate recipe elsewhere in the book: broadly, a sugar-and-water must flavoured with lemon peel and juice, fermented on its own. Making this recipe as written means having a gallon of that ready first.
- The fruitQuinces are rock-hard and astringent raw; the recipe says only to slice them, which in practice would have meant cores and peel going in, and much of the pectin and aroma sits there. A quarter of an hour's boiling softens them enough to release flavour; the original does not say to strain, though a modern maker would take the pulp off before the sugar goes in to help the wine clear.
- Pectin hazeQuince is exceptionally high in pectin, and boiling sets it. Period recipes accepted a cloudy wine; a pectic enzyme added to the cooled liquid before fermentation is the modern remedy.
- Vessel and yieldThe finished volume is roughly two and a quarter imperial gallons — around a dozen 75 cl bottles after losses. Ferment in a vessel with headroom and never in anything sealed rigid; a fermenting must under a tight cork builds enough pressure to burst glass.
- TimeThe original gives none. Primary fermentation runs a week or two, after which the wine wants racking off the lees and several months in bulk before the spirit is added and it is bottled.
Quince wine belongs to the long English tradition of "made" or country wines, brewed at home from whatever the garden gave. The quince, Cydonia oblonga, was a common orchard tree in Britain well into the nineteenth century, valued for the perfume it lent to marmalades, cheeses and pies, and its fruit was too hard and too astringent to eat out of hand fonly way to use a heavy crop. This one is the fortified variant: a weak quince ferment stretched with an equal quantity of lemon wine and stiffened with brandy, in the manner of the home-made "cordial waters" that stood in Victorian sideboards alongside bought sherry. The practice of blending one country wine into another was common thrift, letting a small quantity of an expensive or scarce fruit flavour a much larger batch. By the time this dictionary appeared, cheap imported wine and spirits were steadily displacing the home cask, and recipes like this one were already becoming a record of an older domestic economy rather than everyday instruction.