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Red Champagne, British
Take forty quarts of ripe green gooseberries, crush them in a tub, pour on them ten gallons of soft water that has been well boiled and become cold, add three pounds of sliced beetroots that have been boiled, without breaking their skins, for twenty minutes, stir well ten minutes, and leave, covered up, to steep four days, stirring well three times daily. Strain the liquor, and filter it through a flannel bag into a cask; add thirty pounds of best loaf sugar in small lumps, two ounces of best ginger bruised, the thin rinds of four lemons, and an ounce of best isinglass dissolved in a quart of the liquor. Leave the bung out till the fermentation has ceased, then add a quart of brandy, put in the bung, and secure it with paper and sand. Keep the wine in a cool cellar twelve months, then put it into champagne bottles, wire the corks, and seal them. It will be in high perfection in six months more, and is exceedingly fine.
This is a full cask-scale country wine — about twelve gallons of finished sparkling gooseberry wine — written for a household with a cellar and a cooper. Everything scales down cleanly by ten.
- The quantities in modern termsForty quarts of gooseberries is perhaps 60 lb of fruit; ten gallons is British imperial, so about 12 US gallons of water. Divided by ten the recipe becomes 4 quarts (roughly 6 lb) gooseberries, 1 imperial gallon water, 5 oz cooked beetroot, 3 lb sugar, a scant 1/4 oz ginger, the rind of half a lemon, and a scant 1/4 pint (about 4 fl oz) brandy.
- "Ripe green gooseberries"Most likely a green-skinned variety picked ripe rather than underripe fruit, though the recipe says no more than this.
- Soft waterWater boiled and cooled to drive off dissolved gas and drop out some hardness. Any low-mineral bottled or filtered water serves; boiling it is still worth doing to sterilise, but cool it fully before it touches the fruit.
- No yeast is namedThis is the hinge. The recipe relies entirely on wild yeast from the fruit skins during those four days of open steeping, which is why it demands stirring three times a day. Modern practice is to add a measured wine yeast, since wild ferments are unpredictable and can stall or turn acetic.
- Isinglass and loaf sugarIsinglass is a collagen fining from fish swim bladders; gelatin or bentonite does the same clarifying work and is easier to source. Loaf sugar in small lumps is simply hard refined sugar broken up to dissolve — granulated sugar is equivalent in effect.
- The beetrootColour only, and the instruction to boil it whole and unbroken is to keep the pigment in the root rather than in the cooking water. Beet colour in wine is unstable and will drift from pink toward brownish over a year in cask.
- Bung, paper and sandLeaving the bung out is the primary ferment venting itself; the paper-and-sand dressing goes on afterwards, once fermentation has stopped and the bung is in, to seal the cask against air. A modern fermentation lock handles the venting stage better and lets you see when activity has stopped.
- Bottling pressureChampagne bottles, wired corks and "six months more" suggest this is meant to finish with a live secondary ferment in the bottle. Use genuine sparkling-wine bottles rated for pressure and cage the corks; ordinary still-wine bottles can burst. Confirm the ferment has actually finished with a hydrometer before bottling rather than trusting the twelve months.
- YieldAs written, roughly twelve imperial gallons — some seventy champagne bottles. About a year and a half from crushing the fruit to "high perfection."
Sparkling gooseberry wine was the great English stand-in for champagne through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was taken seriously: gooseberries have a high acid and moderate sugar profile that ferments to something genuinely crisp and grape-like, and the fruit grew in nearly every kitchen garden in Britain at a time when French wine carried heavy duty. The beetroot here is doing purely cosmetic work, tinting the wine to imitate a pink champagne, and this period was as much about the appearance of the imported article as the taste.