Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sage Wine, Red

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.