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Red Currant Wine
To a quart each of currant juice and sugar allow two quarts of water. Place in a cask unstopped, for three weeks, when place bung in loosely for a week longer-until all danger of fermentation is past. Then seal tight and let stand a year before using.
A one-gallon country wine reduced to its bare bones: juice, sugar, water, time. Everything the original leaves out — yeast, sanitation, and how to tell when fermentation is actually finished — is what makes or breaks it now.
- Do not seal earlyThis is the hinge. "Until all danger of fermentation is past" is guesswork; a sealed vessel with live yeast in it builds pressure and can burst glass or blow a bung across the room. Modern practice is to confirm with a hydrometer: the same reading on three consecutive days, at or below about 0.996, before anything is closed tight.
- The measurementsA quart of granulated sugar is roughly 1 lb 12 oz (800 g). With a quart of juice and two quarts of water, plus the volume the dissolved sugar itself adds, the batch comes out to somewhere around a gallon, putting the sugar in the region of 210 to 240 g per litre -- enough for a strong wine, on the order of 12 percent alcohol or more if it ferments dry.
- Juice quantityA quart of red currant juice takes something like 4 to 5 lb of fruit, crushed and pressed or strained through a jelly bag. Currants are high in pectin, so juice run cold and slow gives a clearer wine than juice extracted with heat.
- YeastThe recipe assumes wild yeast from the fruit and the air, which in a nineteenth-century cellar with a well-used cask was a reasonable bet. A packet of wine yeast gives a predictable, clean ferment; without it the batch may stall or go to vinegar.
- "Cask unstopped"An open vessel for three weeks is the vigorous primary ferment, when the yeast wants oxygen and the foam needs somewhere to go. A food-grade bucket with a loose lid does the same job; after the first week or two, rack into a demijohn under an airlock rather than leaving it open to acetobacter.
- SanitationNothing here is sterilised. Every surface the juice touches — press, bucket, siphon, jug — should be cleaned and then sanitised, or the wild bacteria will get there before the yeast does.
- Acid and balanceRed currants are sharply acidic, around 2 to 3 percent titratable acid. Diluting one part juice to two parts water is not thrift alone; undiluted currant wine is punishingly tart. Even at this ratio the finished wine is bracing, which is why many old recipes sweetened it again at bottling.
- The yearCurrant wine is genuinely rough young and does settle with age. Rack it off the sediment two or three times over the first six months, then bottle; a year from the pressing is a fair minimum.
Currant wine was long a common homemade wine of English and American households, made where grapes would not ripen and, by most accounts, drunk without apology at table. Red currants (Ribes rubrum) crop heavily on very little attention, come ripe all at once, and carry enough acid and pectin to make both jelly and wine from the same picking. The formula is a version of what is often described as the old country-wine rule of thumb, roughly a quart of sugar and a set volume of water to each quart of juice, adjusted by the sourness of the fruit. Currant growing later fell away sharply in the United States: from the early twentieth century, Ribes plantings were restricted in many states as an alternate host of white pine blister rust, and while those bans have largely been lifted, the fruit never fully returned to American kitchens.