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Wine, Apricot
Take ten gallons of river-water and boil it for half an hour; then set it to cool in clean vessel. Take forty-five pounds of ripe apricots, cut them into thick slices, and put them with the juice into the water, adding twenty-five pounds of the best loaf sugar. Stir well, cover closely, and leave till the following day; then boil the fruit and liquid together, stir in the whites of eight eggs well beaten, and take off the scum as it rises. When the liquor is clear and the fruit reduced to a pulp, press, strain through a fine sieve into a cooler, add the kernels, and stir well. Spread good yeast on both sides of a slice of toast, and when the liquor is at the proper warmth work it well two days; strain it through a jelly-bag into the cask, put on the bung lightly, and let the liquor work over, keeping the cask full. When it has done fermenting, add two quarts of French brandy and two ounces of white sugar-candy. Put in the bung, fasten it well, keep the liquor for twelve months, and then bottle it. It must remain a year or more in bottle, for apricot wine being very rich is improved greatly by age.
This is a ten-gallon country wine of the old farmhouse kind, and one of its steps puts it beyond modern practice. The problems are worth understanding even if the wine never gets made.
- The kernels are the reason to stopThe instruction to "add the kernels" means the seeds from inside the apricot stones, added to flavour the must with something like bitter almond. Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed or steeped in a watery, enzyme-active liquid. The recipe gives no quantity at all; if the kernels from any large share of forty-five pounds of fruit went in, the amount would be well outside any range treated as tolerable today.
- Cyanide does not ferment awayLong fermentation and two years of ageing are sometimes assumed to clear the liquid of everything undesirable. Free cyanide is volatile, but amygdalin extracted from the kernels can remain in the liquid, and there is no way to judge the level in a homemade wine by taste, smell or clarity.
- Toast-and-yeast pitchingSpreading yeast on toast and floating it on the must was a common way to inoculate a country wine before packaged yeast. It works, but it also carries whatever else is living on the bread and in the room, and an open two-day "working" period gives acetic bacteria a clear run at ten gallons of sugary juice.
- No measurements that matter are givenThere is no gravity reading, no acid figure, no temperature beyond "the proper warmth", and no sulphite. Twenty-five pounds of sugar to forty-five pounds of fruit in ten gallons is a very sweet must, and whether it finishes dry, sticks halfway, or restarts in the sealed cask is left entirely to luck and the cellar.
- The vocabulary, for readingLoaf sugar is refined cane sugar, sold as a hard cone and broken up for use. Sugar-candy is large crystallised sugar. The egg whites are a fining agent, coagulating in the hot liquid and dragging haze and pulp up into the scum. A jelly-bag is a close-woven cloth cone. "Working over" means letting the fermentation foam push out of the loosely bunged cask, the cask being topped up to keep air off the wine.
- River waterThe half-hour boil was one period method of making river water fit to use, and a reminder of how much the quality of the domestic water supply mattered to a Victorian winemaker.
- If you want apricot wineUse a current fruit-wine recipe with measured sugar, acid and yeast additions and no kernels.
Cassell's belonged to a long English tradition of household fruit wines, made not as imitations of Bordeaux but as a way of turning a glut of orchard fruit into something that would keep. The kernel is a characteristic detail of the period: cooks prized the bitter-almond note in apricot, peach and cherry stones and used it in ratafias, macaroons and cordials, without our present understanding of the risk. The two quarts of French brandy at the end are doing familiar work, raising the alcohol to a level that would survive a year in cask and a year in bottle in an unheated house, in the same way that fortification preserved port and sherry on their sea voyages. The advice that a rich wine improves with keeping is sound; the rest of the method belongs to its century.