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Wine, Mulberry
Gather the mulberries before they are quite ripe, bruise them in a tub, and to every quart of the bruised berries put the same quantity of water. Let the mixture stand for twenty-four hours, and then strain it through a coarse sieve. Having added to every gallon of the diluted juice three or four pounds of sugar, allow it to ferment in the usual way. When fine in the cask, bottle it.
A country fruit wine written for someone who already knew how to run a cask; almost all the technique hides behind the phrase "in the usual way." The points below fill in what a Victorian household cook took for granted.
- "Ferment in the usual way"This is the hinge, and the original leaves it blank. In modern practice it means: pitch a wine yeast into the sweetened juice, keep it at roughly 65-70F under an airlock until the vigorous fermentation stops, then rack off the sediment into a clean vessel and leave it to clear. The recipe does not say whether yeast was to be added or the fruit's own wild yeast relied on; fruit wines left to wild yeast are unpredictable in flavour.
- Imperial measuresCassell's gallon is the imperial gallon, about 4.5 litres, not the 3.8-litre US gallon; the quart is 40 fl oz rather than 32. Scaled to US measures, 3-4 lb of sugar per imperial gallon is roughly 2.5-3.3 lb per US gallon of diluted juice.
- How much sugar means how much alcohol3-4 lb of sugar per imperial gallon is a heavy sugar charge; the wine will finish strong, and at the upper end sweet. Mulberry juice, already cut with an equal volume of water, carries little sugar of its own, so the added sugar is doing nearly all the work.
- Why underripe fruitMulberries are low in acid when fully ripe, and a very ripe crop tends to give a flat wine; picking slightly early keeps more of the acidity that helps it keep. Modern fruit-wine guides commonly add a little acid or lemon and test it rather than trusting the fruit.
- The 24-hour soakThis is a cold maceration to pull colour and flavour out of the pulp before fermentation, not a fermentation stage. Left in a warm kitchen for a full day with no yeast pitched and no sulphite, it can go vinegary or mouldy; cover it, keep it cool, and do not extend the time.
- StrainingA coarse sieve will pass a great deal of pulp, which is fine at this stage. Mulberry juice stains permanently, so use stainless, glass or food-grade plastic rather than anything wooden or porous, and expect purple hands.
- "When fine in the cask"Fine means clear, with the yeast fully settled and no bubbles rising. Bottling before that point is the classic way to burst bottles, since residual fermentation in a sealed bottle builds real pressure. Give it several months and a hydrometer reading that has held steady for a fortnight.
- YieldExpect about five bottles from an imperial gallon after racking losses.
Mulberry wine belongs to the English tradition of household fruit wines and cordials made from whatever the garden produced in quantity, alongside elderberry, damson, gooseberry and cowslip. Black mulberries (Morus nigra) were widely planted in British gardens from the sixteenth century onward, and the trees outlived the fashion; a mature mulberry drops far more fruit than a household can eat, it bruises within hours of picking, and it does not travel, which is exactly the profile of a fruit that gets fermented rather than sold. That the recipe appears in a general dictionary of cookery, with fermentation dismissed as "the usual way," may suggest how routine cask work still was in the kitchens the book addressed, though how much can be read off that phrase is uncertain.