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Raspberry and Currant Wine
Pick fifteen quarts of ripe red currants from the stalks, pour upon them four gallons of cold river water that has been boiled, and cover the vessel close until the next day. Then pick twenty quarts of red raspberries nicely, pour on them six gallons of cold water, and cover them also closely. Press the juices out of the fruits in a hair-bag, and first strain, and then filter each separately into the cask; stir into it thirty-six pounds of strong, bright moist sugar, and covering the bung-hole with a tile, leave it to ferment without yeast. Keep the cask filled up, and when it has ceased hissing, add to it two quarts of French brandy, then stop it up securely at the bung, but leave the vent-peg out three days, then fasten that in, and set the barrel in a cool cellar for three months. It must now be racked and returned into the cask, the lees being well filtered, the bung well secured, and left nine months; then bottle it, seal the corks, and keep in bottle for a year.
A full-scale Victorian country wine, built for a ten-gallon cask and a cellar you can leave alone for two years. Everything about it scales down cleanly except the patience.
- Imperial measuresCassell's gallons and quarts are imperial: a gallon is 4.55 litres, a quart 1.14 litres. The ten gallons of water alone come to about 45 litres, and the finished volume is somewhere near 55 litres, or roughly seventy 75 cl bottles. Divide the whole recipe by ten for a manageable 5-litre demijohn batch.
- "Moist sugar"This is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar, damp and pale brown, the ordinary grocer's sugar of the period. Light brown soft sugar is the closest modern match; plain white sugar works but gives a cleaner, thinner wine.
- The sugar load is very highThirty-six pounds into roughly 50 litres of must is about 320 g of added sugar per litre, before the fruit's own sugars. Wine yeast stalls somewhere around 15-16% alcohol, so a good deal of that sugar was never meant to ferment out. Expect a sweet, heavy wine, closer to a cordial than a table wine, and reduce the sugar sharply if you want it dry.
- River water, boiledBoiling was the period's most dependable way of making surface water fit to use. Use filtered tap water; if yours is chlorinated, boil it and let it stand overnight, or the chlorine will give the wine a medicinal note.
- Fermenting "without yeast"The recipe relies on wild yeasts on the fruit skins; the overnight steep is for extraction, and may also have helped the wild ferment get going. Wild ferments are slow, unpredictable, and prone to going to vinegar. A sachet of neutral wine yeast, and a Campden tablet in the must twenty-four hours before pitching, gives you the same wine with far less risk of losing the batch.
- The hair-bag and the filteringA coarse horsehair straining bag; a nylon straining bag or a double layer of muslin does the same work. The instruction to strain and then filter each juice separately matters less than getting the pulp out before the vigorous ferment begins.
- Tile over the bung-hole, airlock insteadA tile laid loosely over the bunghole lets carbon dioxide escape while keeping insects out. It also lets air in, which is what the tradition of "keeping the cask filled up" was fighting. A water airlock does the job properly, and topping up to reduce headspace after racking is still the single most useful habit here.
- "When it has ceased hissing"The audible end of active fermentation, usually two to four weeks. A hydrometer reading that holds steady over three days is the real test, and it matters because the brandy goes in next: adding spirit to a still-working ferment traps pressure.
- The brandyTwo quarts of brandy in some 55 litres raises the alcohol by only about a percent and a half. Its real function is preservative and aromatic. Any decent unflavoured brandy will do; "French" here means Cognac-style rather than anything specific.
- The long waitThree months, rack, nine months in bulk, then a year in bottle. Two years is not padding for a sweet fruit wine with spirit in it, which is raw and hot when young. Seal the corks as directed -- wax is the usual method -- and store bottles on their sides in the cool.
Country wines like this belonged to the same corner of the English household economy as jam and bottled fruit: a way of using a glut of soft fruit that would otherwise spoil within days of picking. Red currants bring acid and tannin, raspberries bring perfume, and the pairing is often said to have been a favourite in nineteenth-century domestic manuals precisely because currants alone make a thin, sharp wine. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, one of several Cassell's cookery compilations that appeared under various titles across the later nineteenth century, assumes a cask, a cellar and the room to lose fifty-odd litres of liquid for two years, which tells you as much about the intended reader as the recipe does about the wine. The fortification with brandy follows the port model that dominated British taste at the time, and the direction to ferment "without yeast" reflects a period when wild fermentation on the fruit's own skins was simply how fruit wine was made.