Cider Wine
One gallon sweet cider, three pounds sugar. Put in a cask and let it ferment. Keep the vessel full so that it will run over. Let it stand fifteen days. Put the corks in a little tighter every day. Let it stand three months then bottle and seal up.--Mrs. E. B.
A farmhouse country wine: apple juice boosted with sugar and left to its own devices. The method works, but two things in it need translating before you start — what "sweet cider" has to be, and what happens when you seal a vessel that is still producing gas.
- Pressure is the hingeTightening the corks a little each day, then bottling and sealing, assumes the maker can judge by feel when fermentation has finished. If it has not, sealed glass bottles become grenades. Do not bottle until a hydrometer shows the same reading over several days, and use bottles rated for pressure if any sweetness and gas remain.
- Sweet cider means raw juiceIn the nineteenth century "sweet cider" was simply fresh-pressed apple juice, unfermented as opposed to "hard." Modern supermarket cider or juice containing potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate will not ferment at all. You need juice preserved by nothing, or by pasteurisation only.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast on the fruit and in the cask, which on a farm that pressed its own apples would likely have been plentiful. With modern juice the fermentation may fail to start, stall, or go to vinegar; a packet of wine yeast is the reliable substitute.
- Three pounds of sugar per gallonFresh apple juice carries only about 5-7 percent potential alcohol on its own; three pounds of sugar per gallon adds a great deal more, taking the must well past what many yeasts will finish. The likely result is a strong wine with noticeable residual sweetness rather than a dry one.
- Keeping the vessel full so it runs overThis is deliberate blow-off: the rising froth and scum carry themselves out over the lip, and topping up excludes air. A jug with an airlock accomplishes the same thing with less mess and less risk of contamination.
- The caskAny small wooden or glass vessel of about a gallon. Do not use a container with a screw closure during the active fifteen days; the original's loose cork was, in effect, an escape valve.
- TemperatureUnstated, as always in these books. A steady 60-70F suits both the fifteen-day vigorous stage and the three-month settling; warmer gives harsh, fusty flavours.
- YieldOne gallon fills about five 750 ml bottles, less what is lost to overflow and to the lees left behind when racking.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and appearing in printings dated both 1878 and 1879, drawn from contributions by named and initialled housekeepers of Virginia and her sister states, records a domestic economy in which apples were a bulk crop and cider the everyday drink. Virginia orchards had been planted for pressing since the colonial period, and cider — by winter, vinegar by spring — was the cheapest way to keep the harvest. "Cider wine" is the sugared, cellared version: an attempt to lift a farm beverage toward the dignity of a table wine without buying grapes or spirits, and a step short of the apple brandy that Virginia distillers also made from the same presses. Recipes like this one, credited only to "Mrs. E. B.", show how much of the book's authority rested on ordinary households whose measurements were confident and whose temperatures and timings were left to judgement.