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Currant and Raspberry Wine
To four gallons of red currants add one quart red raspberries; scald, crush, and strain. On the pulp pour five and a half gallons cold water and one pound sliced red beet, letting stand over night. When strained add this to the juice. Dissolve in the whole ten pounds white sugar and three ounces red tartar. Place in cask and when fermentation has ceased bung tight and let stand eight months.
A country fruit wine on a farmhouse scale: nearly ten gallons of finished liquor from four gallons of currants. Everything here works, but the recipe assumes a cooper's cask, a cool cellar and a maker who knows what a finished ferment looks like.
- Red tartarThis is argol, the crude potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks. Cream of tartar is the refined form of the same salt and is what to use; three ounces across ten gallons is a modest acid and stability adjustment, not a flavouring.
- The beet is for colourSliced red beet steeped overnight in the water leaches betalain pigment to deepen the red. It contributes fermentable sugar and a faint earthiness as well. It can be left out with no harm to the wine.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the cellar. Modern practice is to pitch a dry wine yeast after the must has cooled, which makes the ferment start faster and finish drier and cleaner.
- Do not bung tight earlyThis is the hinge. A sealed cask with any active fermentation left in it builds serious pressure. Ferment under an airlock or a loose cloth, and only seal when the airlock has been still for several days and the hydrometer reading has not moved in a week.
- Scald means heat, not boilCurrants are scalded to soften the skins and free the juice before crushing. Bring them just to steaming with a little water; hard boiling sets the pectin and gives a cloudy wine that never drops bright.
- SanitationA wooden cask was sulphured before use. Whatever vessel you use, sanitise it and everything the must touches; a ten-gallon spoilage is a long and expensive disappointment.
- Eight months, and longerThe stated eight months is the minimum for the wine to fall clear and lose its yeasty edge. Rack off the sediment two or three times during that period, then bottle. Ten gallons is about fifty 750 ml bottles.
- Check your local rulesHome winemaking for personal use is legal in most places but capped by volume, and the caps vary by country and by state.
Currants were one of the great cellar fruits of the nineteenth-century North American and British kitchen garden: they crop heavily, ripen all at once, and are too sharp to eat out of hand, so surplus went to jelly, shrub and wine. Recipes of this kind circulated in agricultural papers and household manuals for decades with only small variations, and the additions here are all doing recognisable work af for colour, tartar for acid and clarity, since the maker was unlikely to have had the means to measure either pH or sugar — instruments of that kind existed but were uncommon in farm kitchens. Currant wine was widely regarded as a respectable domestic product rather than a makeshift, and was often kept as the household's cordial for visitors and for the sick. The tail of that tradition is visible in the confidence of the instructions: no yeast, no thermometer, and eight months of patience assumed as a matter of course.