Grape Wine
Take any convenient quantity of perfectly ripe grapes. Mash them so as to break all the skins, and put them in a tub or other clean vessel, and let them remain twenty-four hours; with a cider-press or other convenient apparatus, express all the juice, and to each gallon of juice thus obtained add from two to two and a half pounds of white sugar (if the grapes are sweet, two pounds will be enough), put the juice and sugar in a keg or barrel, and cover the bung-hole with a piece of muslin, so the gas can escape and dust and insects cannot get in; let it remain perfectly quiet until cold weather, then bung up tightly. This wine will need no clarifying; if allowed to rest perfectly still it can be drawn off perfectly clear.--Mr. W. A. S.
Grape Wine.
Pick the grapes from the bunch, mash thoroughly, and let them stand twenty-four hours. Then strain and add three pounds of sugar to every gallon of juice. Leave in a cask six months, and then bottle, putting three raisins in each bottle.--Mrs. R. L.
Grape Wine.
Press the grapes, and when the juice settles, add two pounds of white sugar to four quarts of juice. Let it stand twenty-four hours, drain, put in a cask; do not stop tightly till the fermentation is over.--Mrs. R. A.
Three versions of the same country wine, differing mainly in sugar. All rely on wild yeast on the grape skins and on an open vessel during the violent first fermentation; the hinge is that nothing gets sealed tight until fermentation has genuinely finished.
- Do not bung earlyMr. W. A. S. waits for cold weather, Mrs. R. A. waits for fermentation to stop, and both are saying the same thing. A barrel or bottle closed while carbon dioxide is still being produced will either blow its bung or burst. Modern practice is a fermentation lock, and a hydrometer reading that has held steady for several days before anything is sealed.
- Sugar and strengthTwo to three pounds of sugar per gallon of juice, on top of the grapes' own sugar, makes for a strong wine, and more sugar than a wild ferment is likely to convert fully, so some sweetness usually remains. The instruction to use only two pounds for sweet grapes is the one adjustment that matters.
- Wild yeast is the weak pointNone of these versions pitches yeast. Skin yeasts will usually start a must this sugary, but they also bring acetobacter and spoilage organisms. A packet of wine yeast and a crushed potassium metabisulphite tablet per gallon, added the day before, is how the same result is reached reliably now.
- The twenty-four hour restThis is a skin maceration, which pulls colour and tannin from the fruit. In a warm kitchen it may also be long enough for fermentation to begin on its own, though the recipes do not say so. Keep the tub covered with cloth, not a lid.
- Pressing without a cider pressA nylon straining bag squeezed by hand, or a small basket press, does the work of the cider press. Do not push pulp through a fine sieve with force; hard pressing extracts bitter tannin from seeds and stems.
- The raisinsMrs. R. L.'s three raisins per bottle add a little sugar and body, and may feed a slight secondary fermentation. The quantity is small, but if the wine is bottled before fermentation has truly finished, pressure can build; sound corks and stout bottles are worth using.
- Quantities and yieldGrapes give roughly a gallon of juice for something in the region of 12 to 18 lb of fruit, depending on variety and how hard they are pressed, so a five-gallon batch needs a large quantity of grapes. Five gallons fills around twenty-five standard bottles.
- Time in the caskSix months is a minimum, not a target. Wine from a wild ferment usually needs a year in glass before the rough edges settle, and racking off the sediment twice during that time will do more for clarity than the recipe's advice to simply leave it alone.
Grape wine appears in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) as a farm product rather than a luxury, which is why Marion Cabell Tyree prints three contributed versions side by side and lets them disagree. Virginia grapes at the time meant native and hybrid stock — Scuppernong, Catawba, Norton, Concord — because European vines had failed repeatedly in the humid Southeast, a problem generally traced to native pests and fungal diseases including phylloxera. Those American grapes are low in sugar and high in acid, which is exactly why every version here adds two or three pounds of sugar per gallon: without it the wine would have been thin and sour. The book's inclusion of cider presses, kegs and bung-holes among the cake and pickle receipts is a reminder that a Virginia household of the 1870s expected to process its own fruit crop, and that a barrel of wine in the cellar was ordinary provisioning.