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Wine, Currant, Red
Bruise eight gallons of red currants with one quart of raspberries. Press out the juice, and to the residuum, after pressure, add eleven gallons of cold water. Add two pounds of beetroot sliced as thin as possible to give colour, and let them infuse, stirring frequently, for twelve hours; then press out the liquor as before, and add it to the juice. Next dissolve twenty pounds of raw sugar in the mixed liquor and three ounces of red tartar in fine powder. In some hours the fermentation will commence, which is to be managed as in the case of gooseberry wine. When the fermentation is completely over, add one gallon of brandy; let the wine stand for a week, then rack off, and let it stand for two months. It may now be finally racked off, bunged up in the cask, and set by in a cool cellar for as many years as may be required to ameliorate it.
This is a full cask batch of English country wine, close to twenty gallons of finished liquid. Everything about it assumes a cellar, a fruit press and a cooper's barrel; scaled down by a factor of ten it becomes a manageable demijohn project.
- The hinge: do not bung until fermentation has stoppedThe instruction to "bung up in the cask" comes only after two months of settling, and that order is not negotiable. Sealing a fermenting cask or carboy traps carbon dioxide and will blow the bung or burst the vessel; an airlock or loosely covered vat is required until the wine is genuinely still.
- Gallons are imperialCassell's is a British book, so a gallon is 4.55 litres, not 3.79. The eleven gallons of water are about 50 litres.
- "Eight gallons of red currants" is a volume, not a weightFruit measured by the gallon was normal in the period but converts only roughly: eight imperial gallons of currants is somewhere in the region of 40 to 50 lb depending on how they are heaped. If you scale the recipe, keep the ratio of fruit to water to sugar rather than trying to fix an exact poundage.
- Red tartarThis is argol, the crude reddish potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks, used here as an acid and to encourage a clean ferment. Cream of tartar is the refined equivalent; three ounces across the whole batch is a modest addition.
- Raw sugarRaw or "moist" sugar of the period was unrefined cane with molasses still in it, nearer today's light muscovado than white granulated. Twenty pounds in this volume gives a wine of ordinary table strength, not a heavy dessert wine, before the brandy goes in.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the cellar, which is why it says fermentation "will commence" in some hours rather than telling you to pitch anything. Modern practice is a cultured wine yeast, for the plain reason that a wild ferment can as easily turn to vinegar or go stuck.
- SanitationPresses, tubs, cask and siphon all want proper sanitising before use. This is the single biggest difference between period country wine and reliable results now, and it costs nothing.
- Racking"Rack off" means siphoning the clear wine off its sediment into a clean vessel, leaving the lees behind. The recipe does it twice: a week after fortifying, and again after a further two months, when the cask is bunged up.
- The brandyOne gallon of spirit into fifteen or sixteen of wine is a light fortification, raising the alcohol by perhaps two or three per cent and helping the wine keep in wood over years. It is optional if the wine is going into glass and will be drunk within a year or two.
- BeetrootTwo pounds of thinly sliced beet is there purely for colour, extracted during the twelve-hour infusion of the pressed pulp. It contributes very little flavour at this dilution.
Currant wine belongs to the long English tradition of household "country wines" made from whatever the garden produced in glut: gooseberries, elderberries, cowslips, rhubarb, damsons. Red currants were a staple of the kitchen garden and ripen all at once, which made them an obvious candidate for the press, and the raspberries here are a flavouring addition. Cassell's places the recipe in a run of such wines, and it defers to the gooseberry wine for the actual management of fermentation, a sign that the technique was assumed knowledge rather than something to be spelled out each time. The closing phrase, that the wine should be cellared "for as many years as may be required to ameliorate it", is candid about what these wines were: rough when young, and improved chiefly by patience.