Home › The Principles of Cookery › RAISIN WINE, WITH CIDER (a light wine)
RAISIN WINE, WITH CIDER (a light wine)
Cut thirty pounds of Malaga raisins, take out the stones, put them into a tub, and pour over them five gallons of boiling water; add the rind of ten Seville oranges and their juice; stir all well ten minutes, and let them infuse ten days, closely covered up, stirring every day. Press the fruit in a hair bag, and strain the liquor through a fine sieve, put it into a sweet ten-gallon cask, and fill up with strong cider. Stir it twenty minutes, cover the bung-hole with a tile, and let it ferment four or five days, filling up the cask as the liquor works out. When it has ceased hissing, dissolve half a pound of sugar-candy and an ounce of isinglass in two quarts of the wine; pour it into the cask, stir well, and in two hours afterwards add a quart of French brandy. Stop up the bung, paste paper over it, put sand upon that, and leave it twelve months in a cool cellar. You may then bottle it, seal the corks, and keep it nine or ten months in the bottles.
A country wine of the old English type: dried grapes rehydrated and fermented with hard cider standing in for fresh juice. Everything hinges on scale and on the cask being clean and full.
- ScaleFive gallons of water, thirty pounds of raisins and a ten-gallon cask make roughly sixty modern bottles. Divided by ten it becomes a manageable one-gallon batch: 3 lb raisins, 4 pints boiling water, one Seville orange, topped up with hard cider.
- "Strong cider" means alcoholic ciderNineteenth-century cider is fermented cider, dry and often 6-8% alcohol. Modern unfermented apple juice or sweet cider will not do the same job; it simply adds sugar and water to be fermented from scratch.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast carried on the raisins and in the cider. Commercial raisins today are frequently sulphured and coated with oil, which suppresses that flora, and pasteurised cider carries none at all. A packet of wine yeast is the reliable modern substitute.
- A "sweet" caskSweet here means clean and untainted, not sugared. Casks were sweetened by scalding and by burning a sulphur match inside. Any modern fermenter should simply be sanitised; glass carboys or food-grade plastic are far easier to keep sound than wood.
- The tile over the bung-holeThis is a crude airlock: it keeps insects and dust out while carbon dioxide escapes and the froth works over the rim. A water-seal airlock does the job without the loss of liquor, and "filling up the cask as it works" matters because headspace exposed to air breeds vinegar bacteria.
- Isinglass and sugar-candyIsinglass is a fining agent made from fish swim bladders, still sold for clearing beer and wine; an ounce to ten gallons is a generous but plausible dose. Sugar-candy is simply large crystalline sugar. Both are added only after the violent fermentation has stopped hissing.
- The brandyA quart of spirit to ten gallons lifts the finished alcohol by roughly a percent and helps the wine keep through its long cask ageing. The recipe has it go in two hours after the finings, without saying why.
- Seville orangesBitter oranges, in season only in midwinter. Their acidity and the oils in the peel are doing real work here, supplying the tartness that raisins alone lack. Ordinary sweet oranges are not a like-for-like swap; a mix of orange peel with lemon juice comes closer.
- The waitingTwelve months in cask, then nine or ten in bottle, is not padding. Raisin wines are harsh and yeasty young and need the time to knit. Store cool and dark, and expect a deposit.
Raisin wine belonged to the great English tradition of domestic "made wines" -- cowslip, elderberry, ginger, gooseberry -- produced at home by households that could not or would not pay the duty on imported French and Iberian wine. Dried Malaga grapes were shipped in vast quantities and arrived already concentrated, effectively a shelf-stable must that could be reconstituted whenever the housekeeper had time and a spare cask. Cutting the water with cider is a frankly economical move, and a very English one: it supplies fermentable sugar, acidity and apple character in a single cheap ingredient, and in cider counties it was more readily to hand than grape juice ever was. Cassell's, compiled for a late-Victorian middle-class readership, prints such recipes at the point where home production was giving way to the bottle bought at the grocer's, and the elaborate finishing here -- isinglass fining, a brandy dose, the bung sealed under paper and sand -- shows a household still expecting to keep a cellar and manage it properly.