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Wine from the Leaves and Stalks of the Grape
The following is Dr. Macculloch's recipe for making this wine:--"The young leaves may be taken at any period from vines which have been cultivated for this purpose, and from which no fruit is expected. In other cases they may be obtained from the summer pruning. The tendrils and green shoots are equally useful. The claret vine may be cultivated for this purpose, in which case the wine will have a red colour. The leaves are best when young, and should not have attained more than half their growth; they should be plucked with their stems. In the neighbourhood of London they require to be carefully washed to remove the taste of soot which so often adheres to them: sometimes that is insufficient. From sixty to eighty pounds of such leaves being introduced into a tub of sufficient capacity, seven or eight gallons of boiling water are to be poured on them, in which they are to infuse for twenty-four hours. The liquid being poured off, the leaves must be pressed in a press of considerable power; and being subsequently washed with an additional gallon of water, they are again submitted to the action of the press. "The sugar, varying from twenty-five to thirty pounds, is then to be added to the mixed liquors, and the quantity being made up to ten gallons and a half, the process for making gooseberry wine is to be followed. Although the water is here directed to be boiling hot, it must be remembered that it is immediately cooled down to that temperature which is most efficacious in extracting the several soluble ingredients of the fruit."
A country wine built on vine prunings rather than fruit, given at a scale no domestic kitchen now works at. The recipe is also deliberately incomplete: it hands the fermentation itself over to the book's gooseberry wine entry, so read the two together before starting.
- The hinge: this is only half a recipeEverything here concerns the extraction — infusion, pressing, sugaring, making up to volume. Fermentation, skimming, casking, racking and bottling all come from the gooseberry wine method referred to at the end. Without that second set of instructions there is nothing to tell you when to stop.
- ScaleSixty to eighty pounds of leaves and ten and a half imperial gallons of must is roughly 48 litres of finished wine, around sixty-four bottles. A tenth of the recipe still gives six bottles and needs about 6-8 lb of leaves.
- Sugar and strengthTwenty-five to thirty pounds of sugar in ten and a half gallons is roughly 250 g per litre, a potential alcohol near 15 per cent. With a wild ferment that will very likely stick sweet. Modern practice is to take a hydrometer reading and add sugar to a target rather than by fixed weight.
- YeastNo yeast is named in this passage; the fermentation, and with it any leaven, belongs to the gooseberry wine method referred to at the end, which should be consulted on that point. A packet of cultured wine yeast removes the main cause of failure, and Campden tablets twenty-four hours beforehand suppress the competition.
- The press"A press of considerable power" means a fruit or cider press. Leaves hold liquid stubbornly. Without one, a straining bag twisted hard recovers most of the infusion, though the second gallon wash becomes more important.
- Soot, and its modern equivalentThe London soot Macculloch warns about was coal smoke settling on foliage. The equivalent worry now is spray residue and roadside grime: take leaves only from vines you know to be unsprayed, and wash them regardless.
- Which leavesYoung leaves at half growth, taken with their stems, plus tendrils and green shoots — in practice, summer pruning material. Older leaves are tough and give little. Macculloch says only that cultivating the 'claret vine' for this purpose gives a red-coloured wine; he does not explain why.
- Boiling waterHis closing note matters: the water is poured on boiling but drops immediately on contact with 60-plus pounds of cold green leaf. Nothing is being cooked. Macculloch's own explanation is that it settles at the temperature most efficacious for extracting the soluble ingredients.
- TimingTwenty-four hours of infusion is what Macculloch specifies; much longer risks stemmy, grassy notes. How long the finished wine needs in bulk or bottle the recipe does not say.
The Dr. Macculloch cited here is John Macculloch (1773-1835), a Scottish physician and geologist whose Remarks on the Art of Making Wine, first published in 1816, went through several editions and was drawn on by later English cookery compilers — which is how a passage of his prose ends up sitting verbatim in a Cassell's dictionary decades later. His project was to put British country wine-making on a rational footing, treating sugar, water and plant material as measurable quantities rather than folk proportions. Vine leaves suited that programme: as he says, they may come either from vines grown expressly for the purpose or from ordinary summer pruning, and an English vine under glass or on a south wall rarely ripened fruit worth pressing. The result belongs to the same tradition as parsnip, cowslip and gooseberry wine, in which the flavouring material is essentially a tea and the alcohol comes from added cane sugar.