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Gooseberry Champagne
Take well-filled-out but green berries and top and tail them. To each three pounds allow one gallon soft water. Place berries in a large crock or tub with a little of the water and pound them heavily, mashing thoroughly. Add the rest of the water then stir briskly. Cover with cloth and for each of four days succeeding stir well and often. Then strain off, adding to the clear liquor four pounds of sugar for each gallon. Also, add to each five gallons one quart best brandy. Mix and place in a cask, filling latter full. Place bung lightly on top-the cask on its side in a cool dry place where it will not be shaken in the slightest degree. Let ferment thoroughly-perhaps three weeksthen bottle, corking well and placing bottles on sides. This will be fit to use in eight months and if rightly made will be very like champagne.
A country wine in the old English style, made from unripe gooseberries and expected to finish sparkling. The instructions assume a wild ferment, a wooden cask and cellar temperatures; each of those needs thought before you begin.
- The hinge: do not cork it while it is still workingThe recipe bottles after about three weeks and corks tightly, which is how the fizz was made and also how bottles burst. Ferment to dryness in a carboy under an airlock, confirm with a hydrometer that the gravity has been stable for several days, and only then bottle. If you want it sparkling, use heavy pressure-rated bottles with a measured priming sugar dose, not ordinary wine bottles.
- Scale and yieldThree pounds of fruit to one gallon of water, four pounds of sugar per finished gallon, one quart of brandy per five gallons. A one-gallon test batch is 3 lb gooseberries, 4 lb sugar and roughly 6 oz brandy, which is a manageable way to see whether you like it before committing to five.
- Soft waterRainwater or a low-mineral supply. Treated tap water usually carries chlorine or chloramine, which can taint wine and slow a ferment. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water works; if using tap water, treat it with a crushed Campden tablet and leave it overnight.
- No yeast is namedThe original relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the air of the tub, which is why it needed four days of open stirring. Modern practice is to sulphite the must, wait 24 hours, then pitch a champagne or general-purpose wine yeast with nutrient. The result is far more predictable and much less likely to go to vinegar.
- Green berries are deliberateUnderripe gooseberries carry high acid and firm pectin and very little sugar of their own, which is exactly what gives this its dry, sharp, wine-like character. Ripe dessert gooseberries make something flabbier. Topping and tailing means pinching off the stem and the dried blossom end.
- Sugar and strengthFour pounds of sugar per gallon is a very high starting gravity, well above 1.140, with potential alcohol high enough that most yeasts will stall before fermenting it out and leave the wine sweet. The brandy pushes the strength higher and was there partly as a preservative in an unsulphited cask.
- Cask, bung and vesselA full cask with the bung laid loosely on top is a crude airlock: it lets carbon dioxide out and keeps air from sitting on the wine. A glass demijohn with a water-filled airlock does the same job, and glass is far easier to sanitise than a wooden cask you do not know the history of.
- Pectin hazePounded green gooseberries release a lot of pectin, and eight months in bottle will not clear it. A pectic enzyme added to the cooled must, before the yeast, is the simplest fix and costs nothing in flavour.
- TimingThree weeks describes the vigorous phase only; a wine this sweet at the start will keep working slowly for weeks after. The eight-month figure for drinkability is sound, and a year or more suits it better.
Gooseberry wine passed off, or honestly offered, as a champagne substitute was a fixture of English country cellars from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, and the comparison in the last line was a standard selling point rather than this writer's flourish. The logic is sound: green gooseberries give the sharp acidity and low sugar that make a thin, dry, faintly grassy base, and bottling while the ferment still had a little work left in it produced a natural sparkle in the days before anyone measured residual sugar. Gooseberries suited the purpose because Britain grew them obsessively -- northern gooseberry clubs competed over berry weight through the 1800s -- while grapes for sparkling wine had to be imported at a price most households would not pay. Nineteenth-century writers complained regularly that cheap sparkling wine sold as champagne was gooseberry wine in disguise, a suspicion that says more about how convincing the imitation could be than about the honesty of the trade.