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Wine, Blackberry
To make an excellent strong blackberry wine, proceed as follows. Take forty-five quarts of ripe blackberries well picked and pressed, and mix them with ten pounds of good honey and twenty-six pounds of strong, bright moist sugar. Boil with twelve gallons of soft water and the whites of twelve eggs well beaten, till the liquor is reduced to ten gallons, skimming it till it is perfectly clear. Strain the liquor into a tub, and let it stand till the following day; then pour it clear of the lees and boil it again for three-quarters of an hour, adding the lees, filtered twice, and two ounces of isinglass dissolved in a quart of water. Skim well, and put in two ounces of Jamaica pepper, two ounces of cloves, and two ounces of best ginger, all bruised, and tied loosely in a piece of muslin. Put into your cooler the thin rinds of six Seville oranges, and a pint of lemon-juice; strain the liquor upon them, stir well, and when cool enough work it with a pint of fresh yeast stirred well into a gallon of the liquor. Cover close, and let it work for four or five days, removing the top scum and stirring twice daily; then strain, and filter it into the cask, put in the bung tightly, keep the cask well filled up, and when it has ceased fermenting, let a day elapse, and add two quarts of French brandy and an ounce and a half of isinglass dissolved in a little water and mixed with a gallon of the wine, an ounce of bitter almonds blanched and slit, and six ounces of sugar-candy broken small. Secure the bung, paste strong white paper or coarse linen over it, and place plenty of sand (wetted a little) over all. Keep the wine in a cool cellar for two years, then bottle it. Seal the corks, and keep it in the bottles for another two years before using. If allowed to lie for a longer time it will still improve, and will be found a beautiful wine.
This is a full country-winemaking operation on a scale few kitchens could handle, and it finishes with an ingredient that no longer belongs in food. The notes below explain the terms and the problems rather than adapting the method.
- The bitter almondsAn ounce of blanched bitter almonds is added to the finished cask. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed, chewed or steeped; in the nineteenth century they were sold freely as a flavouring, though the poisonous character of bitter almond oil was itself well known. They are restricted or unavailable as a food ingredient in many countries today, and long steeping in alcohol extracts the compound. Anyone wanting spiced blackberry wine should follow a current recipe.
- Sealing a fermenting caskThe instruction to drive the bung in tightly, paper it over and weight it with wet sand assumes fermentation has finished. If it has not, carbon dioxide has nowhere to go and the cask can burst. Modern practice uses an airlock for exactly this reason.
- ScaleForty-five quarts of blackberries is roughly 60-70 lb of fruit, boiled with twelve gallons of water and reduced to ten. The finished quantity is about 45-50 litres, or five cases of bottles, and it needs a cellar to hold it for four years.
- Moist sugar"Strong, bright moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar with the molasses still in it, closest to today's light soft brown sugar. Twenty-six pounds of it, plus ten pounds of honey, supplies most of the fermentable sugar, alongside what the fruit itself contributes.
- IsinglassA collagen fining made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, dissolved in water and stirred in to drop haze and lees. Gelatin and bentonite have largely replaced it, though isinglass is still used in some traditional cask ales.
- Jamaica pepperAllspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, not peppercorns. Two ounces each of allspice, cloves and ginger in ten gallons puts this closer to a spiced mead than to a plain fruit wine.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter. Their rind supplies bitterness and aromatic oil rather than sweetness, and ordinary orange peel is not a substitute in kind.
- "Work it"To work is to ferment. A pint of fresh yeast would in this period usually mean barm skimmed from brewing beer, an unpredictable mixed culture; the four or five days of working under cover, with twice-daily stirring and removal of the top scum, suit such a starter.
Blackberry wine belongs to the long English tradition of hedgerow country wines, made from fruit that cost nothing but the picking and the scratches. What sets this version apart is the honey, the heavy spicing with allspice, cloves and ginger, and the brandy at the end: it might be read less as thin cottage fruit wine than as a distant relation of the older sack-meads and metheglins, spiced and fortified drinks that were still being made in country houses well into the eighteenth century, though no direct line of descent is documented. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for a Victorian household that might plausibly still own a cellar, a cask and a cooler, and its home-brewing entries would likely have sat alongside recipes of the ginger beer, cowslip wine and elderberry sort. The four-year wait before drinking, two years in cask and two in bottle, marks it as a laying-down wine for a family that expected to stay put.