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Gooseberry Wine
To every gallon of gooseberries add three pints of boiling water. Let it stand two days, then mash and squeeze out the juice, to every gallon of which add three pounds of sugar. Put it in a cask and draw off about the usual time of drawing off other wines. Mrs. R. T. H. A.
A wild-fermented country wine of the simplest sort: fruit, water, sugar, and whatever yeast is on the skins and in the air. Everything that matters is in what the recipe leaves out.
- The hinge: keep air off itOnce the sugar goes in, the must needs to ferment under a lid and airlock rather than in an open crock. Left exposed, acetobacter turns a promising wine into gooseberry vinegar within weeks, which is the usual fate of old recipes written for tight wooden casks and reproduced in open bowls.
- A gallon of gooseberriesMeasured by volume, not weight — roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb of fruit. Three pints of boiling water is about 1.4 litres, poured over to soften the berries and start extraction.
- "Let it stand two days"At modern room temperature this is a warm soak, not a cold one, and it will often begin fermenting on its own before you press. Cover it with cloth against insects and expect a smell of yeast by the second day.
- Sugar and strengthThree pounds of sugar to a gallon of juice puts the starting gravity somewhere in the region of 1.110 to 1.120, so a potential alcohol in the low-to-mid teens: a strong, dry country wine if it ferments out, sweet if the yeast stalls first. The recipe says nothing about yeast because the wild yeast was left to do whatever it did.
- What the recipe assumes you knowNo yeast, no pectic enzyme, no nutrient. Gooseberries are high in pectin, so a wine made this way is usually cloudy and stays cloudy; modern practice adds pectic enzyme after the boiling water has cooled and a cultured wine yeast once the must is below 80F.
- The caskA cask would ordinarily be kept topped up once the violent ferment had passed, so as to leave little air space. A glass carboy or food-grade plastic fermenter does the same job; top up as the foam subsides so the vessel stays full.
- "The usual time of drawing off"Probably racking off the lees, though the phrase can also mean drawing the finished wine off the cask into bottles. In modern terms, siphon off the lees once vigorous fermentation stops, roughly six to eight weeks, and again a couple of months later before bottling; it will improve with keeping.
- YieldExpect roughly a gallon of finished wine, four or five 750 ml bottles, from the quantities given.
Gooseberry wine was a standby of English and Anglo-American households, and it was notoriously used to imitate champagne, a young, still-fizzing bottle carrying some of the same sharp lift. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) collected such recipes from contributors by name — here Mrs. R. T. H. — and its wine section sits alongside blackberry, currant and elderberry, all fruits a Virginia garden produced faster than a family could eat them. Gooseberries themselves largely disappeared from American kitchens in the twentieth century: the bushes host white pine blister rust, and federal and state restrictions on planting Ribes species from the 1910s onward broke the habit of growing them. That is why a fruit ordinary enough in 1879 to merit its own wine recipe is now something most American cooks have never tasted.