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Raisin Wine Vinegar
Raisins from which wine has been made will make excellent vinegar, and as the stalks are very acid care should be taken to pick them out, and throw them into the cask in which the vinegar is being made. Take the raisins which have been used to make nine gallons of wine. Put with them the dregs and stalks, and pour four gallons of hot water over the whole. Cover the tub, and stir its contents occasionally. When no more goodness is to be got out of the fruit, strain the liquor, put it into a cask, and let it stand nine or ten months before it is bottled.
This is a second pressing: the recipe assumes you have just made nine gallons of raisin wine and are standing over a tub of spent fruit. Scaled down and given a modern vessel it works, but the single thing the original leaves out is the one that decides whether you get vinegar or mould.
- Air is the hingeAcetic fermentation is aerobic: the bacteria need oxygen. Use cloth or a loose lid over a wide-mouthed crock or food-grade bucket, never an airlock, and leave plenty of headspace above the liquid.
- Scale it downThe proportion is what matters: the marc from nine gallons of wine to four gallons of hot water, roughly one part water to two parts wine originally made. For a domestic batch, take the drained raisins and lees from a single gallon of wine and cover with about two quarts of hot (not boiling) water.
- You need a starterA working cellar or brewhouse would likely have carried resident acetic bacteria; a modern kitchen may not. Add a live, unpasteurised vinegar or a vinegar mother to the strained liquor, or it may go mouldy or simply stay flat. Discard the batch if you see fuzzy coloured mould rather than the pale grey film of a mother.
- "When no more goodness is to be got out"In practice four to seven days of soaking with occasional stirring, in a warm room. The point is to leach residual sugar and alcohol out of the fruit; press the raisins lightly when you strain.
- The stalksThe instruction to pick out the stalks and throw them into the cask is deliberate: the text says they are "very acid", and treats that acidity as desirable in vinegar. If you leave them out the vinegar will simply be softer.
- Warmth, and nine or ten monthsAcetification runs best at 75-85F. At that temperature the liquor may taste like vinegar in six to eight weeks; the long cask standing in the original is for clearing and mellowing, not for souring, and can be shortened to two or three months in a covered jar.
- "Cask" and "tub"Read cask as any inert vessel that is not metal — glass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic. Never use aluminium, iron or unlined copper with vinegar.
- BottlingStrain through muslin, bottle, and either refrigerate or heat to about 160F for a few minutes to stop further change. Unpasteurised vinegar will keep growing a mother in the bottle, which is harmless but cloudy.
- Strength is unknownThere is no way to judge the acidity of the finished product by eye. If you intend to use it for pickling rather than for the table, test it with titration strips; homemade vinegar is often well below the 5 per cent needed for safe preserving.
Raisin wine was the mainstay of British home winemaking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when imported grapes were dear and dried fruit was not: a cask of raisins, sugar and water gave something wine-like without a vineyard. The entry belongs to a whole economy of the second use — the spent fruit, lees and stalks left after racking the wine still held sugar and alcohol, and turning them into vinegar meant nothing was thrown away. The name itself records the process: vinegar comes from the Old French vin aigre, sour wine, and household vinegar was commonly wine or ale that had been deliberately let go sour in a warm corner. Pasteur's work on fermentation in the 1860s showed that acetic souring was the work of a living organism, though the genus Acetobacter was not named until the end of the century, so a book of this kind could describe the practice confidently while still explaining it only as goodness got out of the fruit.