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RASPBERRY WINE (another way) (Take forty-two quarts of sound)
Take forty-two quarts of sound ripe red raspberries, gathered in fine weather, pick them, and clear them from the stalks. Put them into a tub, and pour upon them ten gallons of boiling water, cover the vessel up close, and let the raspberries stand until the next day. Then take off the scum, press the fruit through a fine sieve, and when the liquid has stood to settle three or four hours, draw it off clear, and put it into your cask, filter the remainder perfectly clear, and add that. Stir in by degrees twenty-five pounds of good moist sugar, and work it with six table-spoonfuls of fresh ale yeast, mixed well with two quarts of the liquor. Put paper and a tile over the bung-hole, keep the cask full, and let it work over. When fermentation has ceased, stop it up for a month, then rack it off into a clean vessel, filter the lees well, and put the wine again into the cask with an ounce of dissolved isinglass and three pints of French brandy. Secure the bung well, and let the wine remain in a cool cellar twelve months; you may then bottle it, and, sealing the corks, keep it until two years old.
A full-scale country-house fruit wine: roughly fifty gallons of tub, cask and cellar work spread over two years. Everything here still works, but the quantities, the yeast and the vessels all need translating.
- Scale down firstTen imperial gallons is about 45 litres of finished wine, which needs a cask, not a demijohn. Dividing the whole recipe by ten gives a manageable 4.5 litres: about 5 lb (2.3 kg) raspberries, 2.5 lb (1.1 kg) sugar, about a third of a pint (170 ml) of brandy.
- The fruit measure is ambiguousForty-two quarts is a volume of whole berries, not a weight, and berries settle differently depending on how they are tipped in. Reckon it loosely at 50-55 lb (23-25 kg) of fruit to ten gallons of water, and treat that as the working ratio rather than a fixed figure.
- Moist sugarVictorian "good moist sugar" is soft light brown sugar, damp and only partly refined. Plain granulated white sugar gives a cleaner, fruitier wine; light brown adds a faint molasses note closer to the original.
- Sugar level and strengthTwenty-five pounds in ten gallons is around 250 g of sugar per litre, enough for roughly 14 per cent alcohol before the brandy goes in. Ale yeast will stall well short of that, leaving the wine sweet; a modern wine yeast will take it much further and much drier.
- YeastSix spoonfuls of fresh ale barm is the usual leaven in recipes of this kind. A sachet of dried wine yeast, rehydrated and pitched once the must is below 25C, ferments more reliably and will not leave the beery, bready character ale yeast gives to fruit.
- Paper and a tileThe covered bung-hole with the cask left to "work over" is a crude blow-off: fermentation foam pushes out and carbon dioxide keeps air away. An airlock does the same job without losing several litres of wine over the cellar floor.
- Sanitation is the hingeNothing in the original is sterilised, and a wine held two years has that long to go to vinegar. Sanitise tub, cask, siphon and bottles, and keep the vessel topped up after each racking, since headspace air is what breeds acetobacter.
- IsinglassAn ounce of isinglass is a fining, made from sturgeon swim bladders, dissolved and stirred in to drop the haze. Modern isinglass, bentonite or simply longer settling will clear it just as well; bentonite is the vegetarian option.
- The waitingTwelve months in cask and a further year in bottle is not padding. Young raspberry wine is thin and sharply acidic, and the fruit character rounds into something closer to a light dessert wine only with age.
Fruit wines of this kind were a standard use for a glut in English households that had a fruit garden and a cool cellar, and this book gives more than one method for raspberry wine -- the present one is headed "another way". The reliance on ale yeast is telling: purpose-bred wine yeasts were not yet commercially available, so brewer's barm did duty in the household. Isinglass and a dose of brandy at the final racking echo the practice of the wine trade, the first to clear and the second to raise the alcohol enough to hold the wine sound through a long cellaring. Grape wine was imported and taxed; raspberry, elderberry, cowslip and gooseberry wines were what a household could make from its own ground.