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Sage Wine, Red
Take three pecks of red sage-leaves, free them from the stalks, shred them roughly, and pour over them four gallons of boiling soft water. Cover the vessel closely, and let it stand for one day. Take forty-five pounds of good Malaga raisins, pick them, cut them in halves and stone them; then pour over them six gallons of water that has been well boiled and become lukewarm. Stir well, and cover them up. Then mix the contents of the two vessels, add the rinds of ten lemons, pared very thin, and their juice. Let all infuse for five days, stirring twice daily. Place in a clean ten-gallon cask six ounces of sugar-candy and an ounce of bitter almonds blanched and beaten to a paste, together with a spoonful of brandy. Strain the liquor upon them, filling to the bunghole of the cask, which must be tightly covered. Let the liquor work out, keeping the cask full, and on the fermentation ceasing, put in a quart of brandy, and stop up the bunghole for two months. Then rack the liquor into a clean vessel, filter the lees, and return all that is clear into the cask again with six ounces more of sugar-candy, a pint of brandy, and an ounce and a half of isinglass dissolved in two quarts of the wine. Stop the cask effectually, and store for twelve months. At the end of the year bottle the wine, and when it is eighteen months old it will be fit for use. This is an excellent stomachic wine.
This is a ten-gallon country wine of the old English kind, and two of its ingredients put it outside what can responsibly be reproduced. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific problems.
- Bitter almondsAn ounce of blanched bitter almonds beaten to a paste is the reason not to make this as written. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which enzymes in the crushed nut convert to hydrogen cyanide in the presence of water — exactly the conditions here, and with no heat step to drive it off. The dose is spread through ten gallons, so the danger is not that a single glass would kill, but that the amount is entirely unmeasured. Unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere for this reason; the flavour they were valued for is the same benzaldehyde note now supplied by almond extract.
- The quantity of sageThree pecks is roughly six dry gallons of leaves, steeped and left in the must for five days. Common sage carries thujone in its volatile oil, and an infusion on this scale in a beverage meant to be drunk by the glass sits uneasily with modern guidance on culinary sage. There is no measured extraction here to work from.
- Open fermentation in a caskFermenting in a cask -- The liquor works out at the bunghole with the cask topped up by hand, with no acid measurement, no sulphite, and no instrument for confirming that fermentation has actually finished before the bunghole is stopped for two months. Sealing a cask that is still active is how casks split. Use a current winemaking text if you want to ferment fruit wine.
- Archaic measures, for readingA peck is eight dry quarts, about two gallons; forty-five pounds of raisins and ten gallons of total liquid make this a genuinely industrial household batch. Sugar-candy is simply large crystallised sugar, the equivalent of rock sugar today.
- Soft waterThe instruction to use soft water is not decorative. Carbonates in hard well water raise pH, and rainwater or other soft water was commonly preferred for country wines.
- IsinglassIsinglass is collagen from the swim bladders of fish, dissolved and used as a fining agent to drop haze out of suspension. It is still used in traditional cask beer, though gelatin and bentonite have largely replaced it, and it means the wine is not vegetarian.
- Racking and the lees"Rack" means to siphon the clear wine off the sediment without disturbing it; "filter the lees" means to recover what clear liquid can be strained from that sediment. The terms are unchanged in modern winemaking.
- "Stomachic"The closing line is a medical claim of the period, not a recommendation. Sage wines and cordials were made and sold as digestive tonics.
Sage wine belongs to the long English tradition of country wines — raisin-based liquors flavoured with garden herbs, flowers and fruit, made in quantity by households that had a cask and a cool cellar but no vineyard. Raisins, usually Málaga muscats, supplied the sugar and the body that English grapes could not, and the herb supplied identity and a medicinal excuse; sage in particular had a centuries-old reputation as a strengthener of the stomach and the memory, which is what the word stomachic at the end is doing. Recipes of this shape appear in English domestic manuscripts and printed books from the seventeenth century onward, and Cassell's was compiling in the later nineteenth century. The bitter almonds and unmeasured herb infusions they call for reflect a period when both were ordinary grocery items rather than controlled ones.