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Whortleberry Wine
Scald berries with boiling water, letting stand well covered in it over night. Measure in the morning and to each gallon allow two pounds sugar, placing in cask to ferment. After this ceases close bung and let stand nine months, when filter and bottle. This may be spiced if liked.
A bare-bones farmhouse wine recipe that assumes you know what a cask is and that fermentation will take care of itself. The hinge is the bung: seal it while the yeast is still working and you have a pressure vessel.
- Do not bung earlyFermentation produces carbon dioxide, and a sealed cask or jug will build pressure until something gives. Fit an airlock and only close the vessel when a hydrometer reads the same for several days running, not merely when the bubbling looks finished.
- What a whortleberry isAn old English name for the bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus, and used loosely in American books for lowbush blueberries and huckleberries. Cultivated blueberries are the practical substitute; they are sweeter and milder, so the wine will be softer than the original.
- Which gallonIf the book is American this will be the US gallon, 3.8 litres; if English, the imperial gallon, 4.5 litres. Two pounds of sugar to the gallon of liquid is enough sugar for a potential alcohol in the low teens by volume, though a wild fermentation may well stop short of that.
- Quantity of fruitNo fruit weight is given at all, which is genuinely ambiguous. Modern blueberry wine recipes use roughly 3 to 4 lb of berries per gallon of finished wine; less than that and the scalding water simply dilutes into something thin.
- YeastThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the air of the cellar. That works often enough, but it also invites acetic bacteria and stuck fermentations. A packet of wine yeast, pitched after the scalded must has cooled to blood heat, removes the gamble.
- Scalding and standing overnightBoiling water on the berries extracts colour and pectin and knocks back surface microbes. Keep the pot covered as instructed, and strain the pulp off before pitching yeast rather than fermenting on the skins for the full nine months.
- The nine monthsThis is bulk aging, and it only works if the vessel stays full. Top up with water or a similar wine after each racking so there is no airspace, or the wine oxidises and turns to vinegar long before bottling.
- "Filter"Racking off the sediment with a siphon two or three times over the nine months does most of the work. If it is still hazy, a pectic enzyme added at the start prevents most fruit-wine haze; filtering afterwards rarely fixes it.
- SpicingCinnamon stick, clove or a blade of mace, added in the last month or two rather than at the start, so the spice does not get scrubbed out by fermentation. Taste and remove as soon as it reads clearly.
"Whortleberry" is one of the older English names for the bilberry, a low heath shrub of northern moorland, and the name is generally thought to lie behind "hurtleberry" and in turn "huckleberry" in North America, where it attached itself to several unrelated Vaccinium and Gaylussacia berries. Wines like this belong to a household economy in which a bumper crop of a perishable wild fruit had to be turned into something that kept: berries were gathered by the pail from common land or wood lots, and what was not eaten or dried went into the cask. Sugar is added at two pounds to the gallon because wild berries are too low in sugar to ferment to a keeping strength on their own, and the nine-month wait reflects the fact that these wines were made once a year. The instructions are terse because nothing in them was novel to the reader; cask, bung and cellar were standing equipment, and the recipe could assume all three.