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RAISIN WINE (another way.)
Take two hundredweight of raisins with all their stalks, put them into a large hogshead, and fill it up with water; let them steep a fortnight, stirring them every day; then pour off the liquor, and press the raisins. Put both liquors together into a nice clean vessel that will just hold it, but remember it must be quite full; let it stand till it has done hissing or making the least noise, then stop it close, and let it stand six months. Peg it, and if you find it quite clear, rack it off into another vessel. Stop it close again, and let it stand three months longer; then bottle, and when wanted for use rack it off into a decanter.
A country wine on a cellar scale: no added sugar, no cultured yeast, and a vessel measured in hogsheads. The proportions scale down cleanly, but almost every vessel instruction needs translating.
- Two hundredweightA hundredweight is 112 lb, so this calls for 224 lb of raisins. Since the fruit goes in first and the cask is then filled up with water, that works out somewhere around 3.5 to 4 lb of raisins per gallon of liquid depending on the size of hogshead meant; that is the ratio to keep if you scale down.
- HogsheadA beer hogshead is 54 imperial gallons; the wine hogshead of 63 old wine gallons is about 52.5 imperial gallons — either way somewhere in the region of 240-250 litres. A 5-gallon fermenter with about 20 lb of raisins keeps roughly the same proportions.
- Raisins with all their stalksThe stalks would have contributed tannin and grip, the job stems do in red winemaking, though the recipe itself gives no reason for keeping them. Modern seedless raisins are stemless and the wine will taste rounder and flabbier; a small quantity of grape tannin covers the gap.
- "Till it has done hissing"That is the end of the vigorous primary fermentation, usually one to two weeks at room temperature rather than a fixed period. Stopping the cask close before the hissing stops is how casks burst, which is why the instruction is so emphatic.
- Quite fullFilling the vessel to the brim was the traditional way of excluding air, with the froth pushing out through the bung hole. An airlock does the same work without the loss, and after racking a headspace-free container or an inert gas blanket protects the wine from oxidation and vinegar bacteria.
- Peg itTo peg a cask is to drive in or draw a small spile so you can draw a taste and judge clarity. With glass or plastic you simply look at it: rack when the wine is bright and the lees have compacted.
- Wild fermentationThe recipe adds no yeast, though barm and brewer's yeast were commonly available and other period wine recipes call for them. Raisins carry some wild flora; a sachet of wine yeast and a little yeast nutrient makes a sluggish or stuck ferment much less likely.
- Time and yieldSix months, then three more, then bottling is not padding — an unsulphited, unfiltered wine needs that long to drop clear and lose its raisin rawness. Five imperial gallons gives roughly 30 standard 75 cl bottles.
Raisin wine was the great English substitute wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Imported wine carried heavy duty, while dried fruit from Malaga, Smyrna and Valencia came in cheaply and kept indefinitely in the store cupboard, so a household could make a strong, sherry-ish drink at any season without a vineyard or a grape harvest. Recipes of this kind are generally the ancestors of the whole "country wine" tradition — cowslip, parsnip, elderberry — in which raisins so often appear as the body-building ingredient behind whatever gave the wine its name. Cassell's prints it among a long run of home-brewed wines and cordials, on the assumption that a reader with a cellar and a cask would find nothing odd in committing a couple of hundredweight of fruit and nine months of waiting to the project. The bland instruction to keep the vessel "quite full" and to stop it only after the hissing ends is the whole of the era's fermentation science, condensed: exclude air, and do not seal a cask that is still working.