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Gooseberry Wine
Use fully grown but not thoroughly ripened berries, removing blossoms and stems and bruising fruit without crushing seeds or skins. To twenty pounds of berries add two gallons rain-water, stirring and mashing fruit until it is cleared from the skin. Let stand six hours then strain free of seeds and skins and bring resulting juice to a boil. Have dissolved fifteen pounds sugar and add this to juice as it heats. Meantime let seeds and skins be soaking in a gallon of water. When the sugar and first liquor are at boiling point add this second quantity, strained. Measure it all and add sufficient water to bring whole quantity up to five gallons. Let this ferment in cask, covering bunghole with cheesecloth and allowing room for fermentation. When this has ceased stop the bung and let wine stand six or seven months before using.
A full five-gallon country wine, scaled for a cask and a cellar. The proportions are sound, but nearly everything about the handling of the vessel and the water has been superseded.
- The hinge: underripe fruit is deliberateGooseberries picked full-sized but still hard carry high acid, which is what gives this wine its bite and helps it keep. Fully ripe fruit tends to make a flabbier, sweeter wine.
- Rain-waterCollected rainwater was the soft, chlorine-free water of the period. Use filtered or bottled water, or tap water left uncovered overnight; modern roof runoff is not a sanitary source.
- Scale and yieldTwenty pounds of berries and fifteen pounds of sugar make five gallons, roughly twenty-five bottles. Quartering it to a single gallon jug (5 lb berries, about 3 3/4 lb sugar) is far more practical in a domestic kitchen.
- Sugar levelThree pounds of sugar per gallon is a strong country-wine ratio; with the fruit's own sugar it implies a high potential alcohol, and in practice such a must either finishes strong or stalls sweet short of completion. Modern practice is to add part of the sugar at the start and feed the rest in stages.
- Wild fermentationThe recipe relies on yeast from the fruit skins and the air. Since the juice here is boiled, and the second liquor is added at boiling point, most of that wild yeast is killed, so a packet of wine yeast is effectively required.
- The bunghole and cheeseclothCheesecloth lets in acetobacter as readily as it lets out carbon dioxide, and a long open ferment is how country wine turns to vinegar. A fermentation lock on a demijohn does the same job without the exposure.
- Cask and sanitationA wooden cask is neither necessary nor easy to keep clean. Use glass or food-grade plastic, and sanitize everything the cooled must touches.
- "When fermentation has ceased"Judge this by a hydrometer reading stable over several days rather than by the sound of the airlock. Bunging a cask that is still working builds pressure; bottling too early does the same in glass.
- Six or seven monthsThat is a minimum, not a maximum. Rack off the sediment at about two months and again before bottling, and the wine will be clearer and cleaner than the original method allows.
Gooseberry wine was one of the workhorses of the English and American country cellar, made in households that had no vineyard but did have a hedge of Ribes uva-crispa producing more fruit than could be eaten or preserved. Because a well-made batch developed a sharp, faintly effervescent character when young, it was often sold and served as a substitute for champagne, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers grumbled regularly about sparkling wine of doubtful origin being gooseberry in disguise. The gooseberry itself was a genuine popular obsession in industrial northern England, where growers' clubs competed for the heaviest single berry well into the Victorian era. American enthusiasm was shorter-lived: in the early twentieth century, currants and gooseberries were found to host white pine blister rust, and federal and state eradication programs pulled out plantings across much of the country, which is a large part of why recipes like this one now read as antique.