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Wine, Clary
Take nine gallons of cold soft water, six pounds of honey, thirty pounds of the best loaf sugar, and the whites of twelve eggs beaten to a froth; mix all these together, and boil for an hour and a half, skimming and stirring nearly all the time. Pour the liquor into a cooler and add four quarts of clary tops in flower; work it at the proper temperature with good fresh ale yeast, keeping it closely covered up and stirred well. Pick, stone, and cut in pieces fourteen pounds of good Malaga raisins; pour over them three gallons of lukewarm water that has been well boiled, stir well, and let them steep for five days. At the end of that time press the fruit in a hair bag, strain the liquor from the flowers, add to it the rinds of ten lemons pared thin and their juice strained, and put this into a cask which it will fill, and keep it open three or four days until the fermentation has entirely ceased. Then add two quarts of French brandy, and stop it up for three months, after which rack it off into a clean cask, filter the lees, and fill the first cask again, adding six ounces of sugar-candy bruised and an ounce of isinglass dissolved in two quarts of wine. Stop it up securely, and keep it eighteen months in a cool, dry cellar; then bottle the wine, seal the corks, and in a twelvemonth it will be fit for use.
A full cask of English country wine, written for a household with a cellar and eighteen months of patience. Nothing here is dangerous, but almost every quantity, vessel and material assumes a scale no modern kitchen keeps.
- The volume is enormousNine gallons of water, three more with the raisins, plus sugar and brandy put the finished cask somewhere in the region of 12-14 imperial gallons, perhaps 55-60 litres, though the hour-and-a-half boil takes some of that back. Divide everything by ten for a manageable one-gallon test batch; the proportions scale cleanly.
- Clary topsClary is Salvia sclarea, clary sage, not common garden sage. Four quarts means four quarts of loosely packed flowering tops by volume, not weight. At the reduced scale that is a little under a pint of fresh flowers.
- Loaf sugar and sugar-candyLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up; ordinary granulated sugar is its direct replacement. Sugar-candy is large crystallised sugar, and the six ounces added at racking is a dosing sugar, not sweetening for its own sake — rock sugar or plain granulated does the same work.
- The sugar load is very highThirty pounds of sugar, six of honey and fourteen of raisins across this volume gives a very high starting gravity, one an ale yeast will not ferment out and that will tax even a wine strain. The result is meant to be a sweet, heavy, fortified wine, not a dry table wine. Expect the fermentation to stall short of dryness.
- Ale yeast versus wine yeast"Good fresh ale yeast" was what a nineteenth-century household could get. Ale strains typically give up around 8-10% alcohol and are likely to stick in a must this sweet. A modern wine or champagne yeast handles the sugar far better; the brandy at the end is what carries it the rest of the way.
- "The proper temperature"For pitching and primary fermentation this is usually taken to mean somewhere around 65-70F. Warmer drives off the clary aroma and encourages fusel character; much cooler and an open-topped ferment of this size will crawl.
- Open cask and modern vesselsThree or four days open, then stoppered, is a period way of venting the violent stage of fermentation. Use a food-grade bucket with a loose lid for the first days and a demijohn with an airlock thereafter. Sanitise everything — the original relied on volume, sugar and alcohol to see off spoilage.
- Hair bag and isinglassA hair bag is a coarse horsehair straining bag; a jelly bag or fine nylon straining bag replaces it. Isinglass is fish-swim-bladder collagen, still sold as a fining agent, though bentonite is easier to use and suits vegetarians.
- Timeline and yieldThree months on the lees, racking, eighteen months in cask and a further year in bottle is not padding; a wine this sweet and this strongly flavoured needs the time to integrate. The full batch gives something on the order of 75-80 bottles, a one-tenth batch around eight.
Clary wine belongs to the long English tradition of country wines made from garden herbs and flowers rather than grapes, a tradition that survived in manuscript receipt books from the seventeenth century into printed household manuals. The plant's name is generally traced to "clear-eye", from the old use of its mucilaginous seeds to lift grit from the eye; on the Continent it was known as muscatel sage, and it is often said that Rhine wine merchants used it to lend a muscat character to thin wines. That reputation is exactly why it appears here efore make make sugar, water and raisins taste like something grander. The construction of the recipe, with its egg-white clarified syrup, its raisin infusion for body, its brandy fortification and its long cask age, is essentially an attempt to build a sack or Malaga-style dessert wine out of English garden materials at a time when imported sweet wine carried heavy duty.