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RAISIN WINE (another way)
A raisin wine possessing the flavour of Fontaigne may be made in the following manner. Take six pounds of raisins, boil them in six gallons of water, and when perfectly soft rub them through a colander to separate the stones. Add the pulp to the water in which the raisins have been boiled, pour this mixture upon twelve pounds of white sugar, and suffer it to ferment, with the addition of half a pint of yeast. When the fermentation has nearly ceased, add to it a quarter of a peck of elder flowers contained in a bag, which should be suspended in the cask, and removed when the wine has acquired the desired flavour. When the wine has become clear, it may be drawn off into bottles.
A full six-gallon country wine, written for a household with a cask and a cool cellar. The elder flowers are not a garnish but the whole point: they are there to imitate a muscat grape aroma, and they must come out before they take over.
- ScaleSix imperial gallons is about 27 litres, which fills roughly thirty-six 75 cl bottles. The proportions divide cleanly by six if you want a single gallon: 1 lb raisins, 2 lb sugar, 1 gallon water.
- A quarter of a peck of elder flowersA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is about 2 quarts of loose blossom; the number of heads needed will vary considerably. Use only the creamy open florets, stripped from their green stalks; the stems and leaves of elder are bitter and contain cyanogenic compounds, and they also give a rank, cat-like note.
- Taste the flower bag dailyElderflower can tip from muscat to musty quickly. Suspend the bag, taste every day, and pull it as soon as the aroma is clearly there, as the recipe directs -- likely a matter of days rather than weeks.
- Half a pint of yeastMost likely liquid barm skimmed from a fermenting beer or ale, which is no longer available in a domestic kitchen. A 5 g sachet of dried wine yeast, rehydrated (one sachet is rated for around 5 gallons), does the same work and will not carry beer flavours across.
- Pitch cool, not hotThe raisins are boiled, so cool the must to around 25C or below before the yeast goes in; hot must will kill it. The recipe gives no instruction on how the cooling was managed.
- Stones and pulpMuscatel and Malaga raisins of the period had seeds, hence the colander. Modern seedless raisins need no straining — boil, mash, and add pulp and liquid together. Sultanas give a paler wine, dark raisins a more sherried one.
- Open cask, modern vesselFerment in a food-grade bucket with a loose cover for the vigorous first days, then rack into a demijohn under an airlock. The recipe names a cask but says nothing about how it was covered; sanitised equipment and an airlock are more reliable protection against vinegar bacteria.
- BottlingTwelve pounds of sugar in six gallons, plus the sugar carried in the raisins, could take the wine to somewhere around 12 to 15 per cent if it ferments right out, though it may well stop sweeter and weaker than that.
- Bottling safelyBottle only when the hydrometer has been stable for a fortnight and the wine is bright. \
"Fontaigne" is most likely Frontignan, the Languedoc port whose sweet Muscat had been a byword for perfumed dessert wine in Britain since the eighteenth century — the same wine sold as "Frontiniac". Raisin wines like this one were the standard domestic route to something wine-like in a country with few vineyards and, for most of the nineteenth century, high duties on imported wine: dried grapes travelled cheaply, kept indefinitely, and carried enough sugar and body to ferment into a passable sweet wine. The elderflower is the giveaway that this is imitation rather than invention. Elder blossom shares aromatic compounds with Muscat grapes, and adding it to raisin or gooseberry wine to counterfeit a muscat "frontignac" was long-established household practice, recorded in English receipt books. The recipe reflects a Victorian view of fermentation as an ordinary domestic process, on the same footing as pickling or preserving.