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Sage Wine, Green
Take nine pounds of good honey, and boil it with ten gallons of river-or rain-water and the whites of ten eggs well beaten. Boil for one hour, skimming till the liquid is clear; while hot, pour it upon forty pounds of good Malaga raisins freed from stalks, stoned and cut small, and three pecks of green sage-leaves freshly gathered and shredded roughly. Cover the preparation closely, and stir now and again during forty-eight hours. At the end of that time press the fruit in a hair bag, strain the liquid into a clean vessel, and on the following day draw off what is clear into a cask. Filter the lees, and add them with the rinds of six lemons and four Seville oranges pared thin, and the juice of both strained. Keep the cask open for four or five days and well filled up; when the liquor has done hissing, wait a day, then add three half-pints of brandy and an ounce and a half of best isinglass dissolved in two quarts of the wine. Secure the bung carefully, and store in a cool dry cellar for twelve months; then, if fine, bottle the wine; if not, rack it off into a clean vessel, filter the dregs two or three times through a flannel bag, and fill the cask again. Add a pint more brandy and four ounces of sugar-candy: then stop the cask up again, and bottle the wine in three months. If kept for half a year this wine will be excellent and highly flavoured.
A full ten-gallon cask of country wine, worked with wild yeast and finished over more than a year. Nothing here is dangerous, but the quantities and vessels belong to a household with a cellar and a cooper.
- Scale it down firstThe batch is ten gallons of water, 9 lb honey and 40 lb raisins — on the order of fifty litres of finished wine. A one-gallon test batch means dividing everything by ten: about 14 oz honey, 4 lb raisins, an egg white, and a tenth of the sage — still the better part of two dry quarts of loose shredded leaf.
- A peck of leavesA peck is eight dry quarts, about 9 litres of loose volume. Three pecks of roughly shredded fresh sage is a very large infusion. Sage is strongly resinous and bitter in quantity; many modern country-wine recipes call for considerably less, and a first attempt at this proportion may taste medicinal.
- Gills and half-pints"Three half-pints of brandy" is 30 imperial fl oz, about 850 ml, or around 2 per cent of the volume, added once fermentation has finished to fortify and protect the wine. A gill, if you meet one elsewhere in this book, is a quarter of a pint.
- The egg whites are a clarifier, not an ingredientBeaten whites are boiled with the honey so that the coagulating albumen traps scum, which is then skimmed off. Skim until the liquid runs clear before pouring it over the fruit, or the wine will carry a permanent haze.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the raisins and the air, which is why it wants stirring for forty-eight hours in a covered vessel. Results are unpredictable and can turn to vinegar. A modern batch would be pitched with a wine yeast, and every vessel sanitised rather than merely "clean".
- "Done hissing"This is the end of vigorous fermentation, when the cask stops audibly outgassing — roughly what an airlock going quiet tells you now. Keeping the cask brim-full during that stage is the point: headspace above a fermenting wine invites acetic bacteria.
- SubstitutionsMalaga raisins are large, sweet muscatels; ordinary muscat raisins are the nearest thing. Seville oranges are the sour marmalade sort, in season only in midwinter — bitter orange peel plus a little extra lemon juice stands in. Sugar-candy is simply large crystal sugar. Isinglass, a fish-derived collagen fining, is still sold to brewers; gelatine or bentonite does the same work.
- A hair bagA coarse bag of woven horsehair, used for pressing. Unbleached calico, a jelly bag or a nylon straining bag serves; press firmly but do not wring the fruit to a pulp or you will drive fine sediment through.
- The long timetable is realTwelve months in cask, racked if not clear, then three more months, then "half a year" in bottle. Herb wines of this type are harsh young and need the time; do not judge it before eighteen months.
Sage wine belongs to the long English tradition of country wines made when grapes were not an option and honey or dried fruit supplied the sugar — a lineage running from the metheglins and herb meads of the seventeenth century into the Victorian still-room. Sage itself carried a heavy freight of medicinal reputation: the old tag Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto — why should a man die who has sage in his garden — was still being quoted in Victorian household books, and a green sage wine drunk by the glass in spring was often said to be a tonic as much as a pleasure. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revision of the 1870s Dictionary of Cookery aimed at a large middle-class readership, gathered such recipes wholesale from earlier manuscript and printed sources, which is why the instructions assume a cellar, a cask, a hair press and a household able to buy raisins by the forty pounds.