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Wine, Currant, White
Bruise forty pounds of fruit in a tub holding fifteen or twenty gallons, and add to it four gallons of water. Stir the whole well, and squeeze till the pulp is thoroughly separated from the skins. Leave these materials at rest for about twelve hours, and then strain them through a canvas bag or fine hair sieve, and pass one gallon of fresh water through the marc. Dissolve twenty-five or thirty pounds of white sugar in the juice thus obtained, and make up the whole quantity by an addition of ten gallons and a half of water. The proportion of sugar here given is for a brisk wine: if a sweet wine is required, there must be forty pounds of sugar. White sugar is recommended as much the best; if moist sugar be used, somewhat more will be necessary. The must being now prepared, the fermentation and subsequent treatment must be exactly the same as for gooseberry wine. If brandy is to be added, it should be done towards the end of the fermentation in the cask. For the above quantity some will put in a quart of brandy alone; others first mix it with honey. Whether the wine should be racked off from the lees at the end of six months, put into a fresh cask for six months longer before it is bottled, or be allowed to remain the whole time in the lees, must depend upon the state of the wine. The bottling should be carefully attended to.
A full-scale Victorian country wine, sized for a household cask rather than a demijohn. Nothing here is unsafe, but the quantities, the reliance on wild yeast and the unmeasured sugar all need translating before you start.
- The hinge: do not bottle until fermentation has finishedThe recipe assumes you can judge "the state of the wine" by eye and smell. Modern practice is to confirm with a hydrometer that the gravity has been stable for a fortnight, and to have racked off the lees at least once. Bottling a wine still working produces sparkling wine at best and burst glass at worst.
- Gallons are imperialCassell's gallon is the imperial one, about 1.2 US gallons or 4.55 litres. The finished batch is roughly 15.5 imperial gallons, near 70 litres, which is about 90 standard bottles. To make a manageable amount, divide everything by ten or fifteen.
- No yeast is namedThe must was left to ferment on whatever yeast the fruit and the air provided. The recipe gives no reason for the twelve-hour rest, which comes after the bruising and squeezing and serves to loosen the pulp from the skins. Today a measured sachet of wine yeast is pitched instead; the wild route gives unpredictable results and a real chance of a vinegary or otherwise spoiled ferment.
- Marc and mustThe marc is the spent pulp and skins left after pressing, and the extra gallon of water rinses the last sugar and juice from it. The must is the sweetened, unfermented liquid, ready to ferment.
- Sugar and the sweetness of the resultTwenty-five to thirty pounds of sugar in this volume comes to roughly 9 to 11 per cent potential alcohol, and since the book contrasts it with the sweet version it is the drier of the two; "brisk" in period usage suggests a lively, faintly effervescent wine rather than a dry one. Forty pounds is more than the yeast is likely to ferment out, leaving sugar behind for a sweet wine. "Moist sugar" was unrefined or part-refined sugar that kept its molasses and moisture, so more is needed by weight and it carries its own flavour.
- Vessels and hygieneThe recipe calls only for a tub holding fifteen or twenty gallons and says nothing about its material or how it was cleaned. Use food-grade plastic or glass and a proper sterilising solution; a canvas straining bag can be replaced with a nylon mesh bag, and a fine hair sieve with a fine stainless one.
- The brandyA quart added late in the cask ferment is a fortifying and keeping measure, though in this volume it lifts the strength by well under one per cent. It is optional. Mixing it with honey first, as the book allows, simply sweetens it back up.
- Airlock, not an open caskThe book says nothing about how the cask was stopped, referring the reader to its gooseberry wine recipe for the fermentation. Use an airlock through the whole ferment and keep the vessel topped up after racking; a pale wine left with headspace will darken with oxidation.
White currant wine belongs to the large British family of "country wines" — fruit, sugar and water fermented at home because grapes would not ripen and imported wine carried duty. Cassell's places it in a run of such recipes, cross-referring to gooseberry wine for the fermentation, on the reasonable assumption that a reader who had made one had the cask, the tub and the patience for the rest. White currants are a pale variety of the red currant, Ribes rubrum, valued for wine precisely because they gave a light-coloured liquid that could be presented as a substitute for a white grape wine; red currants were more often turned into jelly or a darker cordial. The scale of the recipe — forty pounds of fruit, a fifteen-gallon tub, a cask stood a year before bottling — reflects a household with a productive fruit garden and a cellar, and a year's drinking to lay down at once. Sugar at these quantities had only become affordable to such households over the nineteenth century, a shift often linked to the prominence of country winemaking in Victorian manuals.