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Mulberry Wine
Shake the ripe or partly ripe berries from tree on to clean sacking or sheeting and place in a tub where they may be well pounded and mashed. Strain, and to each gallon of juice add three pounds of sugar, placing in a cask with open bung. This should ferment and be fit for racking off into another cask in six weeks. Will be fit for bottling and use in eight months.
A country wine of the plainest sort: fruit, sugar, and whatever yeast happens to be on the skins. The method works, but it assumes a cellar, a cask, and a tolerance for variable results that most modern winemakers have traded for a little equipment.
- The hinge: sanitationThe recipe relies on wild yeast and open fermentation, which is why period country wines so often turned to vinegar. Everything the juice touches should be sanitised, and once the vigorous first fermentation slows the vessel needs an airlock rather than an open bung.
- Shaking the treeMulberries do not release cleanly by hand and bruise the moment they are ripe, so shaking onto a sheet is still the standard harvest. Expect leaves, stems and a good deal of insect life; pick it over before mashing. The juice stains badly, cloth especially.
- Sugar and strengthThree pounds of sugar per gallon of juice, on top of the fruit's own sugar, is a heavy must: more sugar than a wild yeast is likely to ferment out, so expect a strong and distinctly sweet wine rather than a dry one. If the gallon is an imperial gallon, as it likely is in a British-influenced text, the proportion is slightly leaner. Either way a hydrometer reading before pitching tells you far more than the ratio does.
- What mulberries lackMulberry juice is low in acid and low in tannin, which is why the finished wine can taste flat and flabby. Modern practice adds acid to bring the must to roughly 6 g/L tartaric, plus a small dose of grape tannin, and a pectic enzyme to stop the wine hazing.
- Cask, or notA small cask left part-empty for eight months will oxidise badly. Glass carboys or food-grade plastic filled to the shoulder do the job the cask was doing, with the advantage that you can see the lees.
- Six weeks and eight monthsSix weeks to the first racking is reasonable for a fruit wine at cellar temperature, though fermentation may finish sooner in a warm room. The eight months before bottling is not conservatism: mulberry wine is coarse when young and needs the time. Bottle only when fermentation has genuinely stopped, or the bottles will burst.
- YieldRipe mulberries give roughly a gallon of juice from 12 to 15 lb of fruit, so a gallon batch is a serious afternoon of picking. Figure four to five 750 ml bottles per gallon after racking losses, depending on which gallon is meant.
Mulberries appear in English and American fruit books far more often as wine, jam or a dooryard nuisance than as fruit for the table, because they bruise on contact and will not travel. The black mulberry, Morus nigra, was long grown in British gardens for its fruit; the white mulberry, Morus alba, arrived across Europe and later America on the back of repeated attempts to establish silk production, since it is the leaf the silkworm eats. Those schemes mostly failed, but the trees stayed, and generations of households were left with an annual glut of soft purple fruit and no market for it. Country wine of this kind was the standard answer to any surplus fruit in a house with a cellar: mash, sugar, wait, and let the wild yeast do the work. The instruction to shake the tree onto sacking is the giveaway that this is a tree in the yard rather than fruit bought by the peck.