Home › A Cluster of Berries › Green Currant Wine
Green Currant Wine
Take full grown currants still green in colour. Stem and weigh and allow for each three pounds one gallon water. Mash and proceed as with Gooseberry Champagne, using brown instead of white sugar.
BLACK CURRANT BRANDY (For Intestinal Disorders) In one gallon cold water place two gallons black currants. Let heat gradually and boil one-half hour. Remove and cool; add two gallons deodorised pure spirits; stir and strain, mashing fruit to extract juice. To juice add four pounds sugar and place in a cask. Wash fruit pulp in half-gallon each of water and spirits; mash and strain again; add two more pounds sugar and pour in with first liquor (in cask). May be used in a month but improves with age.
Two related preparations run together: a country wine from unripe currants, and a fortified currant cordial. Neither is self-contained, and the first depends on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book.
- The recipe is incomplete on its own"Proceed as with Gooseberry Champagne" means the sugar quantity, straining and bottling all live in that entry. Read it first; on its own this page gives you only a fruit-to-water ratio.
- Green currants are the pointUnderripe currants carry high acid and very little sugar, which is what gives the finished wine its sharp, almost dry character. It also means the sugar addition is doing all the alcohol work, not the fruit.
- Three pounds to the gallon is leanThree pounds to the gallon sits at the low end -- modern country-wine practice runs about 3-4 lb of fruit per gallon for a light wine and more for anything with body, so expect something on the thin, acidic side.
- Brown sugar changes more than colourBrown sugar may change more than colour -- brown sugar of this period was generally less refined than today's standard product. Light brown, or white sugar with a spoonful of molasses, is the safer substitution; dark brown will dominate the fruit.
- Wild fermentation was assumedWild fermentation was probably assumed -- unless the Gooseberry Champagne entry calls for yeast, a cask of this kind would have relied on ambient and fruit-borne yeast. For a predictable result use a sulphited must, a wine yeast and an airlock; otherwise there is a real risk of acetobacter souring the batch.
- "Deodorised pure spirits"This means food-grade neutral grain spirit at high proof, the sort sold today as 151 or 190 proof neutral alcohol. It does not mean denatured, methylated or rubbing alcohol, which are poisonous and must never go into a drink.
- Two gallons of currants into one of waterThe fruit is measured by volume, not weight; two gallons of berries is roughly 10-12 lb. The half-hour boil is there to break the fruit down completely, and it will cook off any fresh-fruit aroma.
- The medical heading is period framing"For intestinal disorders" reflects the nineteenth-century use of blackcurrant and brandy cordials as domestic remedies. Treat it as a liqueur, not a treatment.
- Strength and keepingThe recipe adds two and a half gallons of high-proof spirit in all (two gallons, plus half a gallon in the second washing) against a gallon and a half of water, the currant juice and six pounds of sugar, which should put the cordial somewhere around 25-40% depending on the proof of the spirit -- strong enough to keep. The month looks like a minimum rather than a peak.
Currants were a staple of the British and North American kitchen garden well into the twentieth century, valued precisely because they were too sour to eat out of hand and so went straight into jelly, shrub, wine and cordial. Blackcurrant in brandy has a long domestic-medicine pedigree, sitting alongside the French crème de cassis that emerged from Burgundy in the nineteenth century, and it is often said that household books labelled such cordials with a complaint they were held to relieve — a convention that, by this account, let a bottle of spirits sit respectably in the medicine cupboard. The green-currant wine belongs to a different tradition, the thrifty use of hard, unripe fruit, picked green for its acid and pectin and put into wine rather than wasted. Worth noting that in the United States, cultivation of Ribes was widely restricted from the 1910s onward because the plants host white pine blister rust, which is why blackcurrants nearly vanished from American recipe books for most of the century after this one was printed.