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Native Grape Wine
Pick all the perfect grapes from the bunches, wash them and pack them down in a wooden or stone vessel. Pour over them boiling water-about one quart to every bushel of grapes. Tie a cloth over them and let them stand a week or ten days. Then strain it and add three pounds sugar to every gallon juice, mixing it well. Put in demijohns and tie a cloth over the top. Let it stand six months, and then cork it tightly. The wine will be fit for use in nine months.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A wild-yeast country wine of the kind made from whatever grew on the fence line. Everything about it works, but two of the numbers need reading carefully before you commit a bushel of fruit.
- The hinge: do not cork earlyCorking a demijohn while fermentation is still producing gas can burst the glass. The six-month wait is there to let the wine go quiet and drop clear; test that no bubbles are rising and that the wine has stopped throwing sediment before sealing. A fermentation lock in place of the cloth removes the guesswork entirely.
- A bushel of grapesRoughly 40-48 lb of fruit, which will yield perhaps two to three gallons of juice from slip-skin native grapes, depending on how hard they are worked. Two bushels is a realistic home batch.
- The quart of water is almost certainly wrongThe quart of water looks too small -- One quart of boiling water to 40-odd pounds of grapes is a splash. It may be a misprint, or it may be intended only to scald the skins and start them breaking down; the recipe does not say. Treat the figure as unreliable rather than assuming it scales.
- Three pounds of sugar per gallonThat is a strong wine by design, capable of finishing near 14 percent alcohol if the yeast holds out, and it will likely retain some sweetness. Native grapes are low in sugar and high in acid, which is why the sugar load is so heavy.
- Wild yeastThe week to ten days under a cloth relies on yeast on the grape skins and in the air of the room. It works, but slowly and unpredictably, and it is the stage where vinegar bacteria and fruit flies do their damage. A packet of wine yeast pitched after the must has cooled gives a clean, fast start; keep the cloth tied down tight either way.
- VesselsWood or stone were the usual choices for acidic must, which attacks metal, though the recipe gives no reason for the preference. Food-grade plastic buckets or glass carboys are the modern equivalents. A demijohn is a large narrow-necked glass jug, usually 1 to 5 gallons.
- StrainingStrain the pulp off before the sugar goes in, as written, but press gently. Hard pressing of native grapes extracts bitter tannin from skins and seeds.
- TimingNine months is honest for a country wine at this strength; the harshness of the first few months does settle. Rack the wine off its sediment once or twice during the six-month rest for a cleaner result.
"Native" here means an American grape rather than a European one, and in Virginia that could mean Scuppernong and other muscadines in the southeast, or Norton and Catawba and Concord types further inland. European vitis vinifera vines repeatedly failed in the humid East, killed off by black rot, mildew and the phylloxera root louse to which American species are largely resistant, so households worked with what thrived: thick-skinned, tart, musky grapes that needed a great deal of sugar to make a palatable wine. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housewives, and its wine and cordial recipes belong to a domestic economy in which fruit that ripened all at once had to be turned into something that kept.