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Wine, Elderberry
The elderberry is well suited to the production of wine. The juice contains a considerable quantity of the principle necessary for a vigorous fermentation, and its beautiful colour imparts a rich tint to the wine made from it. It is, however, deficient in sweetness, and sugar must be added to it. The following is an approved recipe:--Take one gallon of ripe elderberries and put them into about half the quantity of water till they burst, beating them frequently with a stick. Strain the liquor, and return it to the copper. To produce eighteen gallons of wine, twenty gallons of this liquor are required, and for whatever quantity the liquor falls short of this, water must be added to make it up. Boil this along with fifty-six pounds of coarse moist sugar for half an hour, and it is to be fermented in the usual manner when sufficiently cooled, and then it is to be tunned or put into the cask. Put now into a muslin bag a pound and a half of ginger bruised, a pound of allspice, two ounces of cinnamon, and four to six ounces of hops; suspend the bag with the spice in the cask by a string not long enough to let it touch the bottom; let the liquor work in the cask for a fortnight, and fill up in the usual way. The wine will be fit to tap in two months, and is not improved by keeping like many other wines. Elderberries alone may be used.
A country wine written for a brewhouse rather than a kitchen: eighteen gallons is roughly 82 litres, and the sugar is measured out by the half-hundredweight. Scaling down is the first job, and the proportions need thought before you start.
- Strip the fruit from the stalksElder stems, leaves and unripe green berries contain cyanogenic compounds and cause nausea and vomiting. Use only fully ripe, dark berries pulled from the green umbels; a table fork run through the cluster does it quickly.
- The quantities do not add upOne gallon of berries pressed with half a gallon of water cannot yield twenty gallons of liquor. Read the first sentence as the method for extracting juice and the second as the batch target: you need enough berries, worked in batches, to give twenty gallons of coloured liquor before the water top-up.
- Sugar ratioFifty-six pounds of sugar to eighteen gallons of finished wine is about 3 lb per imperial gallon, and nearer 2 3/4 lb per gallon of the twenty gallons of liquor actually boiled. That is in the range of the old country-wine strengths and gives a sweet, strong wine; the final alcohol depends on the yeast and how far the fermentation runs.
- "Coarse moist sugar"Unrefined soft brown sugar, close to modern light muscovado or demerara. Plain granulated will work but drops some of the molasses depth the spicing is pitched against.
- "The copper"The set brick-mounted boiling vessel of a Victorian scullery, not a saucepan. Any large non-reactive stockpot serves; elderberry juice will stain aluminium and react with bare iron.
- "Ferment in the usual manner" and "tunned"No yeast is named because the period relied on wild yeast or a spoonful of brewer's barm. Use a cultured wine yeast for a reliable start. Tunning simply means transferring to the cask; today that is a demijohn with an airlock, and "fill up in the usual way" means topping the vessel to the neck so no air sits over the wine.
- Cool before pitchingThe must should go in at around 20-24C. Yeast added to liquor still hot from the half-hour boil will be killed.
- The spice bag is heavy-handedA pound and a half of ginger, a pound of allspice and 4-6 oz of hops in eighteen gallons reads as mulled wine rather than table wine. Scale to about 1 oz ginger, two-thirds of an ounce allspice and a small pinch of hops per gallon, and taste from week one; suspend the bag clear of the lees as directed and pull it when the spice is where you want it.
- Drink it youngThe note that it is "not improved by keeping" is sound. Two months in cask gives a rough, deeply coloured wine best served warmed and spiced through the winter; the fruit character fades rather than develops.
Elder wine was the great hedgerow wine of the English household, made from Sambucus nigra gathered free in September and turned into something to be drunk hot by the fire. Its heavy spicing with ginger, allspice and cinnamon points to that use: this is the ancestor of the mulled "elder wine" sold from street stalls and public houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, closer in spirit to a warming negus than to a still table wine. The berries' intense colour also made them notorious in the wine trade, and elderberry was widely said to have been used to deepen thin port, a practice that drew enough suspicion to be legislated against in Portugal. The half-hundredweight of sugar here, and the mention of a copper and a cask, mark this as instruction for a house that still brewed as a matter of routine.