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Wine, Ginger
Take eighteen or twenty pounds of sugar, dissolve in nine gallons and a half of boiling water, and add ten or twelve ounces of bruised ginger-root. Boil the mixture for about a quarter of an hour, and when nearly cold, add to it half a pint of yeast, and pour it into a cask to ferment, taking care to fill the cask from time to time with the surplus of the liquor reserved for that purpose. When the fermentation ceases, rack off the wine, and bottle it when transparent. Very often the outer rind of a few lemons is boiled together with the ginger intended for the wine, to impart to the wine the flavour of lemon-peel.
A country wine on a Victorian household scale: nine and a half gallons is roughly 43 litres, which assumes a cellar and a cask. The proportions divide down cleanly, and the only genuinely critical points are sanitation and knowing when fermentation has actually stopped.
- Divide by ten firstThe full batch is about 43 litres. A workable trial is 4.3 litres of water, 2 lb (900 g) sugar, and 1 oz (30 g) bruised ginger root, with a little extra liquor held back for topping up.
- Sugar loadingEighteen to twenty pounds in nine and a half gallons is roughly 190-210 g of sugar per litre, enough for about 11-12% alcohol if the yeast finishes. A brewing yeast is likely to stall well short of that and leave the wine sweet.
- Half a pint of yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed off a brewing tub, a slurry rather than a measured dose. A 5 g sachet of dried wine yeast does the same job for the scaled-down batch and ferments far more predictably.
- Bruised ginger rootRoot crushed rather than sliced, to open the fibres; dried whole root and fresh root were both used. Ground ginger is a poor substitute here, as it clouds the wine and is slow to clear.
- Filling the caskTopping up replaces the liquid thrown out of the bunghole as the yeast works, keeping air off the surface. In a modern demijohn the airlock does this, but the vessel still wants to be filled to the neck once the vigorous stage passes.
- When fermentation ceasesJudge this with a hydrometer, not by eye. Bottling wine that is still working produces glass grenades, and a heavily sugared must can restart weeks after it appears quiet.
- Racking and clearingSiphon off the lees into a clean vessel and leave it until genuinely transparent, which for ginger wine usually means two to three months. Sanitise every vessel, tube and bottle with a proprietary steriliser; souring in the cask is one way these recipes failed.
- The lemon peelPare only the coloured zest. Pith carried into the boil turns bitter over the months the wine sits, and the bitterness does not fade.
- YieldThe full recipe gives something over fifty 75 cl bottles. The tenth-scale version gives five or six.
Ginger wine belongs to the large family of British country wines — sugar, water, yeast and a flavouring, fermented in the household rather than pressed from grapes. It rose on cheap West Indian sugar and on ginger arriving in quantity from India and Jamaica, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it was a fixture of the domestic cellar: warming and faintly medicinal. Commercially bottled green ginger wines were sold alongside it, and the practice of lengthening a glass with whisky, later christened the Whisky Mac, is generally traced to that habit rather than to any single inventor. In Cassell's it appears as "Wine, Ginger," an entry in an alphabetical dictionary, a preparation well within the competence of a cook who already managed the household beer.