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Catawba Wine
Allow a quart of soft water to each gallon of crushed fruit. Let it stand one week; strain, and to each gallon allow a pound of loaf sugar. This should be fit to bottle in a year.
A skeletal nineteenth-century country wine formula: crush grapes, dilute, wait, sweeten, wait a year. It assumes knowledge the modern cook does not have, so the gaps matter more than the instructions.
- The hinge: nothing here is sanitizedThe whole method depends on wild yeast already on the grape skins and on scrupulously clean vessels. Any modern attempt should use sulfite-rinsed or otherwise sanitized equipment, since spoilage organisms, including the bacteria that turn wine to vinegar, take hold readily where the must is left exposed.
- "Soft water"Water low in dissolved minerals: rainwater or spring water in the period. Distilled or filtered water is the modern equivalent. Period writers generally specified soft water for brewing and wine-making, though this recipe gives no reason for the preference.
- Quantities and scaleA quart of water per gallon of crushed fruit, then a pound of sugar per gallon of strained liquid. A gallon of crushed grapes is roughly 7 to 8 lb of fruit; the recipe states no yield, and after straining off skins and seeds and later racking off sediment the finished quantity will be appreciably less than the gallon of crush you began with.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in hard cones and broken or scraped off as needed, prized because it was cleaner-tasting than the brown sugars of the day. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement.
- One pound of sugar is a light handA pound per gallon on top of the grapes' own sugar gives a modest wine, likely at or below the strength of an ordinary commercial bottle. Period recipes for stronger fruit wines commonly call for two to three pounds.
- "Let it stand one week"This is the primary ferment on the skins, which is where Catawba gets its colour and its musky aroma. It needs to be loosely covered against insects but never sealed — a sealed jar during active fermentation builds pressure.
- Bottling at a yearThe year is a rough proxy for "fermentation has finished and the wine has fallen clear." Bottling wine that is still working produces broken glass; modern practice checks with a hydrometer and racks off the sediment two or three times before bottling.
- LegalityHome winemaking for personal use is permitted in most jurisdictions within volume limits, but the rules vary. Distilling the result is a separate matter and is not permitted without a licence anywhere in the United States.
The Catawba is an American grape, a chance seedling usually described as a labrusca-vinifera hybrid, of disputed origin — claimed for the Carolinas and also for Maryland by way of John Adlum — and said by tradition to be named for the Catawba River, which was propagated widely after Nicholas Longworth planted it on the Ohio River hills near Cincinnati in the 1820s and 30s. For a few decades before the Civil War, Ohio Catawba was among the best-known wines in the country — Longworth's sparkling version was praised on both sides of the Atlantic and Longfellow wrote a poem in its honour — until vine disease and the westward shift of the industry to California ended the boom. What survived was the household habit: Catawba, Concord and other labrusca grapes grow easily in eastern gardens, and books like this one printed brief fruit-wine formulas alongside jellies and preserves as simply another way to use up a heavy crop before it spoiled.