Fox Grape Wine

A wild-yeast country wine with no yeast, no thermometer and no hydrometer — the method a Virginia household would have used with whatever grapes the fences and woods produced. It can be made, but nearly every control a modern winemaker relies on has to be supplied by the reader.

• The measures in gallonsA bushel of grapes runs roughly 40–50 lb depending on how tightly packed; twenty-two quarts of water is 5½ gallons. Expect somewhere around 8–10 gallons of must from a full bushel, which is a large batch for a home kitchen. Scaling to a single 5-gallon carboy means roughly half the recipe.
• Fox grapesVitis labrusca — the native American species that gave rise to the Concord. They are intensely aromatic, thick-skinned, low in sugar and very high in acid, which is exactly why the recipe dilutes them with water and adds sugar rather than fermenting the juice straight. Concord or Niagara grapes behave much the same way.
• Two pounds of sugar per gallonThat is a high addition; together with the sugar in the diluted juice it points to a wine somewhere in the low teens of alcohol if fermentation runs to dryness, though the figure depends entirely on how ripe the fruit was. With no hydrometer, the original cook had no way to know where she would land; a starting gravity reading tells you at once.
• The wild fermentNo yeast is called for because the fruit and the air supplied it. Twenty-four hours of standing on the mashed fruit is the pitch: native yeasts on the skins begin the work. A modern batch fermented this way may come out clean or may go sharp and vinegary, and there is no way to predict which. A packet of wine yeast removes the gamble.
• StrainingThe instruction to keep the seeds out is not fussiness. Crushed fox grape seeds contribute a hard, green bitterness, which is why the mash is pressed and strained rather than fermented to the end on the solids.
• Closing the bungThe most consequential line. Fourteen days open covers the vigorous phase, but fermentation rarely finishes that neatly, and sealing a cask that is still working builds real pressure. Use an airlock rather than a solid bung, and confirm with successive gravity readings that fermentation has stopped before any tight closure.
• VesselsA wooden cask needs conditioning and harbors bacteria in its staves; glass or food-grade plastic with an airlock is more forgiving. "Not quite full" is right during fermentation — leave headspace for the foaming cap — but the wine should be racked to a full, topped-up vessel afterward, since air is what turns country wine to vinegar.
• Time and yieldThe recipe stops at the bung, but the wine is not drinkable there. Reckon on several months in bulk, with rackings off the sediment, before bottling; labrusca wines are usually best young rather than aged for years.
• LegalityHome winemaking is permitted in the United States within federal volume limits and subject to state law. Check your state before committing a bushel of fruit.