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Home-Made Tokay
To each quart of grape juice add one pound Sultana raisins, chopped. Let stand in a tub or jar two weeks, stirring each day several times. Strain and place in cask with loose bung for four days then stop tight for eight months and it will be ready to bottle. If not then clear settle it as for peach wine.
A raisin-boosted country wine that relies on wild yeast and a long bulk aging. It works, but almost every step assumes materials and habits that have changed.
- The hinge: the juice must be able to fermentNearly all bottled and boxed grape juice sold now contains potassium sorbate or benzoate, which will stop fermentation dead. Use fresh-pressed juice from crushed grapes, or a juice whose only ingredients are grapes (and possibly ascorbic acid).
- Wild yeast was the assumptionThe original fermentation would have started from yeast on the grape skins, and the open tub stirred several times a day suits an uninoculated ferment. Dried sultanas are a much less reliable yeast source than fresh skins, and with pasteurized or preserved juice a ferment may not start at all; modern practice is to pitch a measured wine yeast.
- "Loose bung" means an airlockThe loose bung let carbon dioxide escape during the vigorous phase. A water-filled airlock does the same job and keeps out fruit flies and acetobacter, which turn wine into vinegar.
- Do not stop it tight too soonSealing a cask or carboy while fermentation is still active builds real pressure. Wait until the airlock has been quiet for several days and the gravity has stopped falling before closing anything up.
- What the raisins are forSultanas add sugar and body. Chopping them helps; whole raisins give up very little. Figure roughly a pound of raisins to a quart of juice as written, which makes a heavy, sweet wine by modern taste.
- Vessels"Tub or jar" means wood, stoneware or glass. Do not use aluminum, galvanized metal or unglazed reactive pottery for the open stage; food-grade plastic buckets and glass carboys are the current equivalents.
- "Settle it as for peach wine"A cross-reference to the companion recipe, whose method is not reproduced here; period instructions of this kind usually mean letting the wine stand and drawing the clear liquid off the sediment. Modern equivalents are fining with bentonite or isinglass, followed by racking into clean vessels.
- Scale and yieldThe recipe is given per quart of juice and scales directly. Allow for loss to sediment and racking, so expect to bottle less than you started with.
- SanitationEight months is a long time for a spoilage organism to work. Everything touching the wine after the open ferment should be sanitized; this is the single largest difference between period country wine and a reliable modern batch.
Tokay is one of the great borrowed wine names. The original comes from Tokaj in northeastern Hungary, whose botrytized aszú wines were a byword for sweet luxury across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and American producers and household writers alike attached the name to almost any rich, sweet, amber wine. It was doubly confusing in the United States because Flame Tokay, an unrelated table grape, was planted heavily in California, and "Tokay" also circulated as a generic label for sweet fortified wine. A home version like this one, thickened with chopped Sultanas, belongs to the long tradition of domestic country wines that filled the chapters on fruit in American household books: cheap, made from a seasonal glut, and named after something far grander than what was in the cask.