Grape Wine
Take 1 gallon of grapes and add 1 gallon of water after bruising the grapes. Let stand for 8 days and then draw it off.
To each gallon of wine add 3 pounds of white sugar, stirring it in. Let stand 10 or 12 hours, when it can be bottled. -Miss Josie Jones, Oxford Mills,
A wild-ferment country wine of the plainest kind: crushed grapes, water, sugar, no yeast, no airlock, no hydrometer. It can be made, but the instructions leave out most of what keeps modern winemaking predictable and safe.
- Do not bottle at 10 to 12 hoursThree pounds of sugar per gallon stirred into an active ferment and then corked is how bottles burst. Fermentation of that sugar takes weeks, not hours, and it must finish in a vessel fitted with an airlock or under a loose cover before anything goes into glass with a stopper.
- Which gallonA Canadian recipe of 1913 means the imperial gallon, 160 fl oz, about 4.5 litres, not the US gallon of 128 oz. It matters here because the sugar is dosed per gallon: 3 lb in an imperial gallon is roughly 20 percent sugar by weight, a very sweet, high-alcohol must.
- A gallon of grapesMeasured loose by volume, an imperial gallon of whole grapes is about 5 to 6 lb of fruit, so the finished wine is heavily watered. Ontario growers in 1913 were mostly working with Concord and similar labrusca grapes, which are high in acid and low in sugar, which is why so much water and sugar appear.
- The eight-day standThe fruit and water simply sit together on the skins, relying on wild yeast from the fruit; the recipe does not say whether the vessel was covered. Modern practice is to crush, add a cultured wine yeast, keep the cap pushed down under the juice twice a day, and ferment under a cover rather than open to the room.
- "Draw it off"Means racking the liquid off the skins and pulp, leaving the sediment behind. Do it with a siphon rather than pouring, and repeat every few weeks as more lees drop out; the recipe assumes one racking only, which leaves a cloudy, yeasty wine.
- What is missingNo sanitising of vessels, no sulfite, no acid or sugar measurement. Sanitised equipment and a hydrometer reading before and after fermentation are the two additions that turn this from a gamble into a repeatable wine.
- YieldNearer one and a half imperial gallons of liquid, since a gallon of whole grapes gives well under a gallon of juice; after losses to pulp and lees, expect roughly eight 750 ml bottles.
Five Roses was a flour brand, and its cook book was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, many of them printed over the sender's name and town — here Miss Josie Jones of Oxford Mills, a village in eastern Ontario. That a milling company could set grape wine, ginger beer and hop beer alongside the puddings says something about 1913: Canada had no national prohibition until the wartime measures of 1918, and provincial dry laws came and went on their own schedules, so household wine needed no apology or euphemism. Recipes of this type — bruise the fruit, water it, sugar it heavily, bottle it — belong to a long tradition of English and North American country wines made from whatever was in the garden or the fencerow, and the water and sugar were a matter of taste and volume, stretching a small crop of native labrusca grapes into a milder, sweeter drink.