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Strawberry Wine
Scald berries; press and strain juice; allow to each quart two pounds sugar and one quart soft water. Ferment as for currant wine and leave cask undisturbed for six months before using.
Four lines that assume you already know how to make currant wine, which most readers of this book did. Everything unstated — vessel, yeast, sealing, racking — is the part that determines whether you get wine or vinegar.
- The proportions, read plainlyFor every quart of strained strawberry juice: 2 lb sugar and 1 quart water. That is roughly 900 g of sugar to about 1.9 litres of liquid; once the sugar is dissolved the must comes out somewhere around 350-400 g per litre, well above the 200-250 g/L of a normal table wine.
- Expect a stuck, very sweet fermentNo wine yeast will take that sugar load to dryness; fermentation stalls somewhere around 14–16% alcohol with a great deal of sugar left. The result is a sweet cordial-style wine, which is what the period wanted. If you want something drier, the sugar has to come down, not the time.
- "Soft water"Low-mineral water: rainwater, or boiled and settled water in 1900. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water does the job.
- Scalding the berriesHeating breaks the cells so the juice runs freely and knocks back wild yeasts and moulds on the fruit. Bring the berries just to a simmer, no longer; boiled strawberry loses most of its aroma, which is the only reason to make this wine at all.
- Yeast is assumed, not mentioned"Ferment as for currant wine" points to a method set out elsewhere, which may have relied on ambient yeast, a spoonful from another working cask, or a stated addition of yeast. A modern packet of neutral wine yeast, pitched at about 21C once the must has cooled, is the difference between reliable fermentation and an uncontrolled one.
- The cask must breathe at firstA vigorous ferment throws off a great deal of carbon dioxide. Ferment under an airlock or loose cover, and do not stopper anything tight until fermentation has clearly finished — a sealed jug on an active ferment is a burst jug.
- Six months undisturbedThe instruction is about clarity and settling rather than flavour. In glass, rack off the sediment once at two or three months instead of leaving the wine sitting on dead yeast for the whole period, which gives a stale, savoury note.
- YieldEach quart of juice gives a little under two quarts of finished wine, so about 4 lb of berries for roughly two and a half bottles. Strawberry wine also loses colour quickly; it turns from red to a brownish amber within a year.
Household fruit wines belong to a period when a strawberry crop came all at once and had to be dealt with in a week. Jam, cordial and wine were the three exits, and wine was the one that used the juice a jelly-maker had already pressed out. The instruction to "ferment as for currant wine" is telling: currant wine was a standard domestic wine in English-language household books, and other berry wines were often described by reference to it. Recipes like this sat quite comfortably in books that elsewhere counselled temperance -- home-made fruit wine was frequently presented as a preserve or a tonic rather than as drink, and it appeared in general household compilations well into the era when commercial wine was being argued over from the pulpit.