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Strawberry Wine
Mash the berries and add to each gallon of fruit a half gallon boiling water. Let it stand twenty four hours, then strain and add three pounds brown sugar to each gallon juice. Let it stand thirty six hours skimming the impurities that rise to the top. Put in a cask reserving some to add as it escapes from the cask. Fill each morning. Cork and seal tightly after the fermentation is over.--Mrs. E.
A simple country fruit wine: macerate, sweeten, ferment in an open-topped vessel, then seal. The instructions assume a cook who has seen it done, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- The hinge: do not seal earlyCorking and sealing while yeast is still active builds pressure that will pop a bung or burst glass. "After the fermentation is over" means no bubbles for several days running and a stable hydrometer reading over two or three days, not simply that the foam has died down.
- Measuring the fruit"A gallon of fruit" is a volume of mashed berries, not a weight, and the recipe does not say which. Any weight equivalent is approximate: a gallon of mashed strawberries weighs roughly as much as a gallon of water. Half a gallon of boiling water goes to that.
- Wild versus pitched yeastNo yeast is named because the recipe relies on what lives on the fruit and in the room. A packet of wine yeast added after the must has cooled gives a far more reliable, cleaner ferment, and modern berries are often washed clean of useful wild flora anyway.
- Sugar and strengthThree pounds of brown sugar per gallon of juice, on top of the sugar in the fruit, is more than a wild ferment is likely to convert; expect it to stall short of dryness with sugar left in, rather than ferment out clean. Brown sugar carries molasses flavour that fights the strawberry; white sugar gives a cleaner result if that matters to you.
- The cask and the topping upFilling each morning from reserved must replaces liquid thrown off by the ferment and keeps air off the wine. A glass carboy with an airlock does the same job more simply and lets you watch the ferment stop.
- SkimmingThe thirty-six hours of skimming removes pulp and scum that would otherwise taint the batch. Straining through muslin will take out the pulp, but scum continues to rise during the thirty-six hours, so some skimming is still wanted.
- SanitationSanitising every vessel, siphon and stopper with a proprietary steriliser is the single change that most improves the odds.
- Yield and patienceWith half a gallon of water added to each gallon of mashed fruit, plus the sugar, reckon on roughly a gallon of finished wine from a gallon of berries. Expect a rough, yeasty drink at three months and a much better one at a year; strawberry wine loses its colour with age and fades toward pale amber.
Fruit wines like this one belonged to the store closet rather than the wine cellar. A Virginia household with a strawberry patch faced a glut of a fruit that will not keep a week, and turning it into wine, along with preserving and drying, was a way of banking the crop. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this appears as the property of "Mrs. E." rather than as an editorial standard, and why it is written in the shorthand of one experienced cook to another. Recipes for blackberry and currant wines appear in the same book, and blackberry preparations in particular had a long-standing reputation as a domestic remedy for stomach complaints as well as a drink.