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RAISIN WINE, WITH CIDER (a strong wine)
Take forty pounds of Malaga raisins, pick them from the stalks, cut them in halves, put them into a sweet eighteen-gallon cask, fill it up with good sound cider, and bung it lightly. After three or four days secure the bung, and at the end of six months draw off into a tub all that runs clear; press the liquor from the fruit into another vessel, filter this and the lees through a flannel bag, and put the whole into a ten-gallon cask, with two quarts of French brandy, the thin yellow rind of three fresh lemons and four Seville oranges, and half a pound of sugar-candy crushed small. Bung the cask securely; after twelve months, bottle the wine, seal the corks, and keep it for two years.
This is a full-scale nineteenth-century cellar operation: forty pounds of fruit and eighteen gallons of cider, then three and a half years before you taste it. Everything about it scales down, but the proportions and the patience are the point.
- Scale it down firstThe original fills an 18-gallon cask and finishes in a 10-gallon one — roughly 82 litres reduced to 45. Divide by ten for a workable batch: 4 lb raisins to about 1¾ gallons (8 L) of cider, 1 cup brandy, and about 3/4 oz sugar. The citrus will not divide neatly at that scale; use one lemon and one orange.
- "Good sound cider" means hard ciderIn British usage of this period cider is fermented and alcoholic, not apple juice. Use a dry, unpasteurised or lightly treated hard cider without added sorbate or benzoate, or the raisin sugars will not ferment.
- A "sweet" caskSweet here means clean and free of any sourness or mustiness, not sugared. In practice: a sanitised food-grade vessel. Glass carboys or a stainless fermenter do the job; a used oak cask needs thorough sweetening before it is safe to trust.
- Why the bung goes in lightlyThe raisins restart fermentation and the cask must vent CO2 for the first few days. A modern airlock replaces the loose bung entirely and is safer — a fully driven bung on an active ferment can split a cask or blow out.
- Do not bottle on the calendar aloneThe six-month and twelve-month intervals assume fermentation has long since stopped. Confirm it with a hydrometer reading stable over two weeks before bottling, or the corks will push and the bottles may burst.
- Ullage is the real enemyThe raisins take up a good deal of the cider, which is why the recipe steps down to a 10-gallon cask; whatever liquor you recover must fill that second vessel to the bung. Any large air gap over a year gives you vinegar or sherry-like oxidation. Top up with more cider, or step down to a smaller vessel.
- Malaga raisins and sugar-candyMalagas are large dried Muscats, sweeter and more aromatic than the sultanas or Thompson seedless on most shelves; Muscat raisins from a Middle Eastern or Spanish grocer are the closest match. Sugar-candy is simply crystallised cane sugar — plain granulated or rock sugar is equivalent.
- Citrus peel only"Thin yellow rind" means zest with no white pith, which turns bitter over a year in alcohol. Seville oranges are bitter marmalade oranges, in season in winter only; a regular orange plus a little extra lemon approximates them.
- YieldThe full recipe gives around 60 standard bottles. The scaled-down version gives about six, ready to drink three and a half years after you start.
Domestic "wines" of this kind filled a real gap in British households: imported wine carried heavy duty through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while raisins, cider and a bottle of brandy were within reach of a middling family. Raisin wine was often said to be among the more respectable of the home-made sort, because dried Muscat grapes brought real grape sugar and grape flavour to a country with little in the way of commercial viticulture, and the result was generally aimed at the sweet fortified wines of Spain and Portugal Ŏ sherry and Madeira Ŏ rather than at claret. Cassell's places it among a long run of country wines from cowslip to parsnip, but this one is the ambitious version: the added brandy, the citrus peel and the two years' bottle age all echo the practices of the commercial fortified-wine trade, and the three-and-a-half-year timetable tells you plainly that it was made by people who expected to be living in the same house when it was ready.