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Raspberry Wine
Mix together eight pounds sugar, eight quarts soft water, and one gallon juice of raspberries. Ferment as for Blackberry Wine. For a sweeter wine allow two quarts of water to each quart of juice and three pounds sugar. The berries for this must be simmered till soft in their own juice, strained, and the pulp washed out with a little additional water to be added, strained.
A country fruit wine of the standard nineteenth-century pattern: juice, water, sugar, and time. The recipe assumes you have already read the blackberry wine entry, which carried the actual method, so the working details have to be filled in.
- What "soft water" meansRainwater or any water low in dissolved minerals — hard well water was thought to cloud the wine and slow the ferment. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water works; if using tap water, let it stand overnight so chlorine dissipates, since chlorine inhibits yeast.
- Scale and yieldEight quarts of water plus a gallon of juice plus eight pounds of sugar gives roughly three and a half US gallons of must, or about seventeen 750 ml bottles. Ferment in a vessel of at least five gallons; the first days throw a vigorous foam.
- The missing yeastThe recipe adds no yeast; period practice for wines of this kind generally relied on wild yeast from the fruit and the air, sometimes started with a piece of toast spread with brewer's barm, though what the blackberry entry itself specified cannot be checked from this page. Modern practice is a packet of wine yeast, which ferments more predictably and reduces the risk of the acetic and lactic spoilage that turned much homemade country wine to vinegar.
- Sugar and the two versionsEight pounds in roughly three and a half gallons is a heavy sugar loading, enough that the ferment may well stop before all of it is used, leaving some sweetness rather than a dry wine. The second, "sweeter" formula -- three pounds of sugar to each quart of juice with two quarts of water -- is heavier still and will stall well short of dry, leaving a syrupy dessert wine. Anyone wanting a predictable result should measure the starting gravity with a hydrometer rather than trusting the ratios.
- Cooked juice for the sweet versionNote that the second method calls for simmering the berries in their own juice before straining. Heat sets pectin, so the wine may stay hazy; a pectic enzyme added to the cooled must clears it and also frees more juice from the pulp.
- SanitationThe single point on which modern practice diverges most from the original. Every vessel, spoon, siphon and bottle should be sanitised before it touches the must. Nineteenth-century cellars accepted a certain rate of failure; there is no need to.
- Fermenting vessel and airlockFerment openly under a cloth for the first three to five days while the cap of pulp works, then rack into a jug or carboy under an airlock. Open fermentation past that point invites vinegar bacteria.
- Do not bottle earlyThe recipe gives no finishing point. Bottle only when fermentation has fully ceased and the gravity has held steady for two weeks running — residual sugar plus live yeast in a corked bottle produces enough pressure to burst glass.
Household fruit wines were a routine part of the American and British domestic year well into the twentieth century, and raspberry was among the fruits commonly used: the fruit is fragrant, acidic enough to keep, and too perishable to sell far from where it grew. A grower with more berries than the market could take turned the surplus into wine, vinegar, shrub or jam. That the recipe cross-references blackberry wine rather than repeating the method is typical of these books -- the technique was assumed to be common knowledge, and only the proportions were thought worth printing.