Home › Cookery › Wild Black Grape Wine
Wild Black Grape Wine
Pick the grapes from the stem and cover with water. Mash and strain immediately. Add three pounds white sugar to one gallon juice. Garden grape wine is made in the same way. If you prefer a red wine, let the water stand on the grapes all night. The light wine is the best, however. This wine has to be kept much longer than blackberry wine before it is fit for use.--Mrs. M. D.
A bare-bones country wine recipe that assumes knowledge the modern reader does not have: it names no yeast, no vessel, no fermentation time, and no test for when fermentation has finished. Treat it as a proportion rather than a procedure.
- The sugar ratio is the whole recipeThree pounds of sugar to a gallon of juice is roughly 1.4 kg to 3.8 L. Added to the sugar already in the grapes, that is a high potential alcohol, likely higher than an uninoculated ferment will finish, so the wine may stop short and stay sweet. Wild American grapes are more acidic and less sweet than table grapes, which is part of why so much sugar is called for.
- No yeast is specifiedIn 1877 the wine was expected to catch wild yeast from the fruit skins and the air of the kitchen. That works, unpredictably, and it is also how a batch turns to vinegar or grows mold. A packet of wine yeast is the single change most worth making.
- "Cover with water" is unquantifiedThe original gives no ratio of water to fruit, and the amount decides everything about the finished wine. Modern country-wine recipes fix a weight of fruit per gallon of must, which this one leaves entirely to the cook's judgment.
- Never seal the vessel while it fermentsFermentation produces carbon dioxide continuously for days or weeks. A tightly corked or screwed jug will build pressure and can burst. Ferment under a loose cloth or an airlock, and bottle only when fermentation has completely stopped.
- White versus redThe instruction to strain immediately for a light wine and to steep overnight for red is straightforwardly correct: the color and tannin of dark grapes sit in the skins, not the juice. The overnight soak is also the riskier version, since unsulfited fruit standing in warm water invites spoilage organisms.
- Wild grapes are not muscadines or ConcordsWhich wild grape is meant is not recorded -- Virginia's woods hold several native species, including the frost and summer grapes (Vitis riparia, V. aestivalis), small, seedy and sharply acidic. Cultivated grapes, the "garden grape wine" of the note, will give a much softer, sweeter result at the same sugar level.
- "Kept much longer" means a year"Kept much longer" is not defined -- The recipe sets no term, only that this wine needs longer than blackberry wine. High-acid grape wine generally wants extended aging to lose its harshness, so allow it many months before judging it.
- SanitationEverything that touches the juice should be sanitized, not merely washed.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, carries a run of domestic wines and cordials contributed under initials like "Mrs. M. D."; blackberry wine, which this recipe names, is among them. Making wine from wild fruit was a household economy rather than a hobby: the grapes cost nothing but the walk, and the sugar was the only outlay. Virginia's woods yield several native Vitis species, generally lumped together as fox or frost grapes, and their high acid and thick skins are consistent with a recipe that leans on three pounds of sugar per gallon and warns that the wine must sit a long while before it is fit to drink. The casualness of the instructions reflects a period when fermentation was managed by feel and by the yeast already living on the fruit; controlled yeast strains were only beginning to be understood in commercial winemaking in these same decades.