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RASPBERRY WINE (another way) (Bruise fine ripe raspberries)
Bruise fine ripe raspberries with the back of a wooden spoon, put them into a stone jar, and pour over them an equal quantity of cold spring water. Leave them until the next day, strain off the liquor, and press the fruit. Dissolve in a small portion of the liquor one pound of loaf sugar for each quart of wine. Stir this into the rest, put the wine into a cask, and stir every day. When fermentation ceases, close the cask. In three months the contents will be ready for use.
A wild-fermented fruit wine of the old English household sort, written for someone who already kept a cask and knew what fermentation looked like. The proportions are sound; the process assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: do not close the cask earlySealing a vessel while fermentation is still producing carbon dioxide builds pressure that will blow a bung or burst glass. "When fermentation ceases" means no bubbling for several consecutive days, and in practice a fermentation lock does the job the old open cask and daily stirring did.
- Working out the quantitiesFruit and water are in equal quantity (the recipe does not say whether by weight or by volume), and sugar is one pound for each quart of the strained liquor. Measure the strained liquor rather than guessing beforehand.
- Loaf sugarCone or loaf sugar was highly refined white sugar sold in a solid block and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Spring waterClean, untreated water, as distinct from a questionable town or well supply. Filtered or bottled still water serves the same purpose.
- Stone jar and caskA glazed stoneware crock for the steeping, then a small wooden barrel for the ferment. A food-grade plastic bucket and a glass demijohn cover both stages, and glass lets you see whether the ferment has actually stopped.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast on the fruit skins and in the air of the still-room. That works, but it can equally give vinegar or a mould bloom. A packet of wine yeast is what a modern maker would add, and it removes most of the guesswork.
- Cleanliness does the work the recipe leaves outEverything the must touches should be sanitised. An uninoculated open ferment in a dirty vessel is where old fruit wines went wrong, and the book simply assumes a scoured crock.
- Three months, and afterThree months gives a young wine that is drinkable but harsh. Racking off the sediment and keeping it longer improves it considerably.
Fruit wines were the domestic end of English winemaking: grapes were an import, but raspberries, currants, gooseberries, elderberries and cowslips grew in the garden and cost nothing but labour. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, offers this one as "another way", indicating that the book gives more than one method. The method here, a cold water infusion on bruised fruit rather than a boiled must, keeps more of the raspberry's aroma.