Grape Wine
To a gallon of grapes-wild or cultivated, and stemmed -allow a gallon of boiled rain water. Mash the grapes and let stand in the water a week, not straining all this time. Then strain and allow for each gallon of liquor three pounds of loaf sugar. Place in cask in warm spot. When fermentation ceases close bung.
A short, old-fashioned country wine recipe that relies on wild yeast and warm weather rather than measurement. Most of what it leaves out is what a modern maker would consider the actual work.
- The hinge: do not bung too soon"When fermentation ceases close bung" is the whole safety of the method. A cask or jug sealed while gas is still being produced builds pressure and can burst; primary fermentation looks finished long before it is. Modern practice is a fermentation lock from the start and no true sealing until the wine has been still for weeks and a hydrometer reads steady.
- A gallon of grapesThis is a volume measure of whole stemmed fruit, perhaps 5 to 7 lb, which yields well under a gallon of juice. Diluting it with an equal volume of water is characteristic of native-grape wines rather than a mistake.
- Boiled rain waterRainwater was valued for being soft, and boiling was the only sterilising step available. Use filtered or dechlorinated tap water; chlorine and chloramine inhibit yeast and give off-flavours.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. Three pounds per gallon of liquor is a very heavy addition -- more sugar than a wild ferment is likely to take all the way down, so the wine may well stop sweet rather than dry.
- The week-long mashLeaving mashed grapes unstrained for a week depends on wild yeast on the skins outcompeting everything else. It often works and often does not: vinegar bacteria and surface mould are the usual failures. A cultured wine yeast, a covered vessel and daily punching down of the cap are how this is done now.
- "Warm spot"Read this as 65 to 75F. Much warmer and the ferment throws harsh, solventy flavours; much cooler and wild yeast may stall partway, leaving sugar behind.
- TimingVigorous fermentation runs a week or two, then slows for several more. The recipe gives no figure because the maker was expected to watch the bung-hole rather than a calendar.
- YieldAround a gallon and a half of liquor from a gallon of grapes and a gallon of water, less the lees. Racking off the sediment once or twice before bottling is not mentioned here but makes the difference between clear wine and muddy wine.
- One legal noteHome winemaking for personal use is permitted in most jurisdictions, often with volume limits per household. Distilling any of it is a separate matter and is not.
Recipes like this belong to the American native-grape tradition rather than to viticulture in the European sense. Wild grapes across the eastern and midwestern United States, chiefly the fox grape and riverbank grape and their garden descendant the Concord, run low in sugar and high in acid and in the sharp "foxy" aromatics of Vitis labrusca. Watering the mash and adding several pounds of sugar per gallon was the standard corrective: it lowered the acid, raised the potential alcohol, and made a drinkable cordial-strength wine out of fruit that would otherwise be too fierce. The instruction to use boiled rainwater and a cask kept in a warm corner belongs to a household economy in which such equipment was long in ordinary use, and in which the yeast was simply whatever came in on the skins.