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Wine, Raisin
Procure fresh Smyrna or Malaga raisins; pick out the stalks and all defective fruit; chop twenty-eight pounds of these into small bits, and pour upon them three gallons of tolerably hot water, and let them stand to soak for twelve hours. Put the whole into a hair-cloth or clean canvas bag, and with a sufficiently powerful press squeeze out the juice. Put two gallons more of hot water on the marc of raisins; let this remain also twelve hours, and press out as before. Mix the two liquids together; but the skins are not to be used. Add to the juice thus obtained three pounds of white sugar, and put the whole into a proper vessel to ferment. Some add an ounce or two of crude tartar, but no yeast, as the raisins contain of themselves sufficient fermenting principle. This liquor will ferment, and the vessel should be covered with a blanket. When the first fermentation is over, the wine is to be transferred or racked into a clean cask, and suffered to undergo the slow fermentation; it is next to be kept bunged up for three months, and then racked into another cask. In about twelve months it will be fit to bottle. Some add brandy after the first fermentation; but this is not necessary. A still richer wine may be made by increasing the quantity of fruit and leaving out the sugar.
A full-scale country winemaking operation scaled for a household with a fruit press and a cellar. The method is sound in outline, but several of its assumptions no longer hold at a modern supermarket.
- The hinge: check your raisins for sorbateThe hinge: check your raisins for additives -- The recipe relies on wild yeast carried on the fruit, which is why it says to add no yeast. Commercial raisins are often oil-coated, sulphured, or preserved with potassium sorbate, and sorbate in particular prevents yeast from multiplying. Untreated fruit is essential, and in practice a packet of cultured wine yeast is the reliable route.
- Smyrna and MalagaSmyrna raisins are sultanas from the Izmir region of Turkey; Malaga raisins are large muscatels, historically sold still attached to the stalk, which is why the first instruction is to pick out the stalks. Muscat-type raisins give the most aromatic result.
- Scale and yieldTwenty-eight pounds of raisins and five gallons of water in total will yield appreciably less than five gallons of finished wine, the exact amount depending on how hard the marc is pressed and on losses to racking. Quartering the whole thing gives a manageable single-carboy batch.
- Marc, and the pressMarc is the pressed-out pulp and skins. A hair-cloth bag and screw press were standard equipment; a nylon straining bag squeezed by hand works at small scale, though you will extract less. The recipe is explicit that the skins are not to go into the ferment, though it does not say why.
- Crude tartarArgol, the tartrate crust scraped from wine casks, sold as "crude tartar" and roughly equivalent to cream of tartar. It was added to acidify the must, since raisins are low in acid. Modern practice is to measure acidity and correct with tartaric acid rather than guess.
- The blanket, and temperatureCovering the fermenting vessel with a blanket was insulation, not a lid: raisin musts are sluggish and warmth keeps them going. Modern practice is to hold the ferment around 65-75F; cover the vessel with cloth during the vigorous first stage, then fit an airlock once it slows.
- "Bunged up" and rackingBunging means sealing the cask with its wooden stopper for the slow secondary fermentation. Do not seal a modern vessel airtight while any gas is still being produced; an airlock does the same job without the risk to the container. The three-month and twelve-month intervals are realistic for a wine this heavy.
- SanitationThe original asks only for a clean bag and a clean cask, and says nothing further; sulphur matches were one traditional means of treating casks. Sterilise every vessel, tube and bottle with a proprietary steriliser; spoilage organisms, not fermentation, are what ruin a batch of this size.
- StrengthTwenty-eight pounds of raisins plus three pounds of sugar in five gallons of water gives a very high starting gravity, more than the yeast can convert; the ferment will stop at the yeast's tolerance limit and the wine is likely to finish sweet. The optional brandy the recipe mentions is a fortification, and the recipe itself says it is not necessary.
Raisin wine belongs to the long English tradition of "made wines" - domestic ferments of cowslip, elderberry, parsnip, gooseberry and dried fruit, produced in households that could not afford, or could not easily obtain, imported grape wine. Dried fruit had the advantage of being available year-round and of concentrating sugar, so a raisin wine could reach a strength that fresh English fruit never managed; it was often used as a base or a stretcher for other wines. The naming of Smyrna and Malaga fruit places the recipe firmly in the Victorian import trade, when raisins arrived in bulk from Turkey and southern Spain and were, it is often said, graded by port of shipment. Cassell's includes it among a run of home wine and cordial entries, aimed at readers with a cellar, a press and the patience to wait a year for the result.