Currant Wine
Put three pounds of brown sugar to every squeezed gallon of currants. Add a gallon of water, or two, if juice is scarce. It is better to put it in an old wine-cask and let it stand a year before you draw it off. Mrs. Gen. R. E. Lee.[Copied from recipe in her own handwriting.] Currant Wine.
Mash the currants well and strain through a linen towel. Add a gallon of water to every gallon of juice. Allow three pounds sugar to every gallon of the mixture. Put in a cask and cork loosely till fermentation is over. Bottle in September--Mrs. Dr. S.
Currant Wine.
To one gallon well picked and washed currants add one gallon water. Let it stand twenty-four hours, then strain through a flax linen cloth. Add to a gallon of juice and water three pounds brown sugar. Let it stand fourteen days in a clean, open cask.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Three versions of the same simple wild-fermented country wine, from three Virginia households. None gives a yeast, an airlock, or a gravity reading, so the whole process rests on the sugar ratio and on not sealing the vessel too soon.
- The hinge: never seal until fermentation stopsThe two later versions cork loosely or leave the cask open, and that is the instruction that matters. Bottling while the yeast is still working builds enough carbon dioxide to burst glass; wait until bubbling has fully ceased and the liquid has cleared, which usually takes longer than the fourteen days Mrs. Dr. E. allows.
- "A squeezed gallon of currants"Mrs. Lee most likely means a gallon of juice pressed from the fruit rather than a gallon of whole berries, though the phrasing is ambiguous. How much fruit that takes depends on how hard you press.
- Sugar and strengthThree pounds of sugar per gallon of diluted juice is a high sugar ratio, enough on paper for a potential alcohol in the mid teens though a wild fermentation will usually stop short of that, which is why these wines kept. Brown sugar was a common household sugar of the period and contributes molasses colour and flavour; white sugar gives a cleaner, brighter result.
- Wild yeastThese recipes rely on yeast present on the fruit skins and in the air of the kitchen. Modern fruit is often washed or sprayed, and Mrs. Dr. E. washes hers outright, so a fermentation may simply stall or turn to vinegar. A packet of wine yeast is the reliable substitute.
- The caskAn "old wine-cask" was seasoned, unlined oak that had already held wine. A food-grade plastic fermenting bucket or a glass carboy is the practical equivalent; a new charred barrel will overwhelm currants entirely.
- Cold soak versus pressingMrs. Dr. E.'s twenty-four hour soak of whole currants in water before straining extracts colour and tannin from the skins and is closer to what a modern fruit-wine recipe does. The other two press first and dilute after, which gives a paler wine.
- "Bottle in September"The recipes assume currants picked in June or July, so this is two to three months on the lees. Mrs. Lee's year in the cask is the outlier and produces a much softer, more sherry-like wine, with real risk of oxidation if the cask is not kept topped up.
- YieldA gallon of juice plus a gallon of water and three pounds of sugar per gallon yields a little over two gallons, about ten 750 ml bottles.
Currant wine was a common fruit wine of the American household through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made when grapes were unreliable and imported wine expensive or, during blockade, unobtainable. Red currants are high in acid and low in tannin, ferment readily, and yield well from a small bush, which made them a fixture in kitchen gardens; the fruit fell out of favour in the United States in the early twentieth century when currants and gooseberries were banned under federal and state law as hosts of white pine blister rust, a prohibition only gradually lifted. That Mary Anna Custis Lee's recipe is reproduced here from her own handwriting says a good deal about Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree in 1877: the book gathered contributions from named Virginia gentlewomen, and the Lee name carried particular weight with its intended readership in the decade after the war.