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Raisin Elder Wine
Crush eight quarts of ripe elderberries in a tub or earthen pan, mix with them five pounds of good moist sugar, and let them lie for twenty-four hours. Pick thirty-six pounds of good Malaga raisins from their stalks, stone and cut them small, and pour on them nine gallons of boiling soft water, then stir them well, and leave the vessel closely covered till the day following. Boil the elderberries and their juice half an hour, skimming well until quite clear, and strain it on to the raisins, stirring the mixture twenty minutes. Three days after this, strain the liquor well, put it into a ten-gallon cask upon the thin rinds of six lemons and two Seville oranges, and, leaving the bung out, let it ferment; minding to keep the cask filled up as it works out. When it has ceased hissing, put in a quart of brandy, and stop it up for two months; then rack it off into a clean vessel, filter the dregs, and fill the cask again, adding six ounces of sugar-candy and an ounce of isinglass dissolved in a little water. Secure the bung well, and let it stand ten months; then bottle it, seal the corks, and in six months more commence using it.
A full ten-gallon cask of country wine on an eighteen-month schedule, from a period when raisins did the work now done by cultivated yeast and added sugar. Everything here still works, but the quantities and the equipment need translating.
- Boil the berries, and only the berriesElder stems, leaves and unripe green berries contain cyanogenic compounds and should be excluded entirely; strip the fruit from every trace of stalk. The half-hour boil works in your favour here, since heat breaks these compounds down, though the recipe itself frames the boil as a skimming and clarifying step.
- Scale it downNine imperial gallons is close to eleven US gallons, and the finished cask holds ten imperial gallons. Divide every quantity by ten for a manageable one-gallon batch: roughly 3½ lb raisins, about 1 lb elderberries, 8 oz sugar, the rind of half a lemon.
- Elderberries by volumeEight quarts of crushed berries is about 10-12 lb of fruit. Weigh rather than measure if you can; a quart of loose berries and a quart of crushed berries are not the same thing.
- Moist sugar and sugar-candy"Moist sugar" is unrefined light brown sugar, still damp with molasses. Sugar-candy is crystallised rock sugar, added here at racking to sweeten and round the finish; plain granulated sugar does the same job.
- Malaga raisinsLarge muscat raisins from Andalusia, sold on the stalk and stoned by hand, which is why the recipe tells you to pick and stone them. Muscat raisins or good sultanas substitute directly; buy them seeded and skip that step.
- Soft waterRainwater or any low-mineral water. Hard tap water will throw the flavour and can leave a chalky edge; filtered or bottled soft water is closer to the intent.
- Fermentation vessel"Leaving the bung out" and keeping the cask topped up is the Victorian way of excluding air while gas escapes. A demijohn with an airlock does it better. Sanitise everything, and consider pitching a wine yeast rather than trusting the ambient flora on the raisins.
- Isinglass and finingIsinglass is a collagen fining agent from sturgeon swim bladders, still sold for beer and wine but easily replaced with bentonite or gelatin finings. An ounce to ten gallons is a generous dose by modern standards.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only for a short window from late December to February. If unavailable, use the rind of a regular orange plus a little extra lemon; the point is aromatic bitterness, not sweetness.
- The long waitTwo months stopped, ten months in cask, six months in bottle — a year and a half before the first glass. Elderberry wine is genuinely harsh young and this is not padding.
Elder was often called the Englishman's grape, a traditional tag rather than a documented coinage, and the reason is easy enough to see: the hedgerow shrub fruited freely across Britain and its dark, tannic juice gave country winemakers something closer to red wine than any other native fruit could manage. Raisins are the other half of the equation. Before cheap beet and cane sugar, imported dried fruit was one of the fermentable bases used for English "made wines", supplying sugar, body and the wild yeasts on its skins all at once, and thirty-six pounds of Malaga raisins would have been a substantial grocery order. Warmed with spice, elder wine was the standard winter cordial of the English household well into the nineteenth century, pressed on travellers and invalids alike, and it counted among the domestic beverages an ambitious household was still expected to lay down for itself rather than buy.