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Strawberry Wine
A simple method of making strawberry wine is to add a little strawberry-juice to good flavourless currant wine. To make it from fresh fruit, bruise three gallons of strawberries, and pour upon them three gallons of water. Let them infuse twenty-four hours. Strain the liquor through a canvas bag, and add eight pounds of lump sugar, two gallons of cider, one ounce of powdered red tartar, and the thin rind of a fresh lemon. When putting the wine into the cask a little brandy may be added if liked.
A country wine of the old English type: fruit, water, sugar and cider, left to ferment on whatever yeast the fruit and air provide. The proportions are sound, but the method assumes a cellar, a cask and a good deal of knowledge the book does not bother to write down.
- The gallons are imperialCassell's is a British book, so a gallon here is 160 fl oz, about 4.5 litres — roughly a fifth larger than a US gallon. Three gallons of berries is around 13.5 litres by volume, some 15-18 lb of fruit, and the finished batch runs to five or six imperial gallons. Scale the whole thing down by a factor of five or ten unless you have the vessels.
- Red tartar is argolPowdered red tartar is crude potassium bitartrate scraped from the inside of red wine casks — the unrefined form of cream of tartar. Plain cream of tartar is the modern equivalent and does the same job: it acidifies the must and helps the wine drop clear. One ounce to five or six gallons is a modest addition.
- No yeast is named, and that mattersThe recipe would have relied on wild yeast from the berry skins and from the cider, which may be part of why the cider is there; the book does not say. Much modern cider is pasteurised or preservative-treated and may not ferment. A named wine yeast, pitched after the 24-hour infusion, is what a current recipe would call for.
- Twenty-four hours is an infusion, not a fermentThe point of the first day is to draw colour and flavour out of the bruised fruit before the solids are strained off. In warm weather it can turn sour quickly; keep it cool and covered, and do not extend it in the hope of more flavour.
- Lump sugarOrdinary granulated sugar. Lump sugar was simply loaf sugar broken up, and was bought by weight — eight pounds is eight pounds either way.
- The caskA cask was left slightly open or bunged loosely so the ferment could vent. A glass demijohn with an airlock does the same thing and lets you see what is happening. Whatever the vessel, everything the must touches should be sanitised, or acetobacter turns the batch to vinegar.
- The brandySpirit added at cask-filling raises the alcohol and helps preserve a wine that will sit for a year or more. The book gives no quantity, only 'a little'; it is optional, and the wine will keep without it if properly sealed.
- Timing and yieldThe book gives none. Expect a vigorous ferment for a week or two, then months of quiet conditioning, and no drinking before six months — strawberry wine is thin and rough young. A five-gallon batch fills roughly thirty standard 750 ml bottles.
Strawberry wine belongs to the English tradition of country or "made" wines — cowslip, elderberry, parsnip, gooseberry — brewed in households that could not afford imported grape wine but had fruit going soft in July. The opening suggestion, to fake it by adding strawberry juice to a bland currant wine, is characteristic of Cassell's practical streak: currant wine was cheap and neutral enough to carry any flavour lent to it. The cider in the full recipe supplies fermentable sugar, and may well also have served, though the book does not say so, as a source of live yeast at a time before packaged yeast strains were available. The powdered red tartar is a reminder of how closely domestic brewing shadowed the commercial wine trade: the crust scraped from the inside of wine casks was a commercial commodity, chiefly refined into cream of tartar.