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Another (Take of cold soft water galls)
Take of cold soft water, 10 galls.; strawberries, 9 galls. Ferment. Mix, raw sugar, 25 lbs.; red tartar, in fine powder, 3 oz.; 2 lemons and 2 oranges, peel and juice; then add brandy, 1 gall. This will make 18 galls.
Raspberry Wine.
Take of cold soft water, 6 galls.; cider, 4 galls.; raspberries, 6 galls.; any other fruit, 3 galls.
Ferment. Mix, raw sugar, 18 or 20 lbs.; red tartar, in fine powder, 3 oz.; orange and lemonpeel, 2 oz. dry, or 4 oz. fresh; then add brandy, 3 qts. This will make 18 galls.
Another. Gather the raspberries when ripe, husk them and bruise them; then strain them through a bag into jars or other vessels. Boil the juice, and to every gall. put 1½ lbs. of lump sugar. Now add whites of eggs, and let the whole boil for 15 minutes, skimming it as the froth rises.
When cool and settled , decant the liquor into a cask, adding yeast to make it ferment. When this has taken place, add 1 pint of white wine, or 1/2 a pint of proof spirit to each gall. contained in the cask, and hang a bag in it containing 1 oz. of bruised mace. In 3 months, if kept in a cool place, it will be very excellent and delicious wine.
Mulberry Wine.
On a dry day gather mulberries, when they are just changed from redness to a shining black; spread them thinly on a fine cloth, or on a floor or table, for 24 hours, and then press them. Boil a gall. of water with each gall. of juice; putting to every gall. of water 1 oz. of cinnamon bark and 6 oz. of sugar candy finely powdered. Skim and strain the water when it is taken off and settled, and put to it the mulberry-juice. Now add to every gall. of the mixture a pint of white or Rhenish wine. Let the whole stand in a cask to ferment for 5 or 6 days. When settled, draw it off into bottles and keep it cool.
Elderberry Wine.
Take of cold soft water, 16 galls.; Malaga raisins, 50 lbs.; elderberries, 4 galls.; red tartar in fine powder, 4 oz. Mix ginger in powder, 5 oz.; cinnamon, cloves, and mace, of each 2 oz.; 3 oranges or lemons, peel and juice; then add 1 gall. of brandy. This will make 18 galls.
Another. In making elder-juice let the berries be fully ripe, and all the stalks clean picked from them; then, have a press ready for drawing off all the juice, and 4 hair-cloths, somewhat broader than the press. Lay one layer above another, having a hair-cloth betwixt every layer, which must be laid very thin, and pressed a little at first, and then more till the press be drawn as close as possible. Now take out the berries, and press all the rest in the like manner; then take the pressed berries, break out all the lumps, put them into an open-headed vessel, and add as much liquor as will just cover them. Let them infuse so for 7 or 8 days; then put the best juice into a cask proper for it to be kept in, and add 1 gall. of malt spirits, not rectified, to every 20 galls. of elder-juice, which will effectually preserve it from becoming sour for two years at least.
This is a run of five country fruit wines copied one after another, in the brewer's idiom of the 1820s: everything by the gallon, everything in cask. Several of the measures no longer mean what they say, and the elderberry methods in particular do not meet any current standard for handling that fruit.
- Raw elderberry juice is the problemElder berries, leaves, bark and stems contain cyanogenic glycosides, and raw or under-ripe berries are a documented cause of nausea, vomiting and cramping. The final method here presses the berries cold, infuses the pressed pomace for seven or eight days, and preserves the juice with spirit — the fruit is never heated at any point. The first elderberry receipt likewise ferments the berries raw.
- Stalks and green fruit"All the stalks clean picked from them" is the right instinct, but hand-picking four gallons of elderberries never removes every stem fragment, and a press crushes whatever remains straight into the juice. Green and part-ripe berries carry more of the same compounds than ripe ones.
- Uncontrolled fermentation in caskNone of these gives a gravity, an acidity, a temperature or a fermentation vessel that can be sealed and vented. Wild yeast on nine gallons of strawberries at ambient temperature is as likely to go to acetic acid or worse as to wine, and "draw it off into bottles" after five or six days of active fermentation risks bursting glass. Use a current winemaking text if you want to make fruit wine.
- Red tartarArgol, or crude potassium bitartrate scraped from wine casks — the unrefined ancestor of cream of tartar. It was added to acidify musts made from low-acid fruit and water; modern practice measures acid rather than guessing at three ounces.
- Gallons, and how manyThese are almost certainly imperial gallons (4.55 L), not US. Note also the scale: each batch yields 18 gallons, roughly 80 litres, or about 110 standard bottles.
- Malt spirits, not rectifiedUnrefined grain spirit straight from the still, retaining fusel oils and grain flavour — cheap, harsh, and used here purely as a preservative. "Proof spirit" in this period is around 57 percent alcohol by volume, not the American 50 percent.
- Sugars and raisinsRaw sugar is unrefined cane; lump sugar is refined loaf sugar broken up; sugar candy is large crystallised sugar. Fifty pounds of Malaga raisins in the elderberry wine are not flavouring but the body of the wine itself — dried grape standing in for grape juice.
- Whites of eggs and the mace bagEgg white beaten into the boiling juice is a fining agent; the coagulating albumen carries haze and fruit solids up into the froth that is skimmed off. The bag of bruised mace hung in the cask is a removable infusion, pulled once the spice has given enough.
Fruit wines of this kind were a fixture of the English country household well before they reached compilations like Mackenzie's, which gathered brewing, distilling and cellar receipts alongside dyeing, veterinary and cosmetic ones and reprinted them steadily on both sides of the Atlantic through the 1820s and after. The quantities give away the context: eighteen gallons is a cask, not a kitchen batch, and the recipes assume a press, hair-cloths, a cellar and a household that expected to lay wine down for two years. Elderberry in particular had a double life — it was drunk hot and spiced as a winter cordial, and it was also the standard cheap colourant for adulterated port. Many books of the period give methods for extracting and preserving elder juice in bulk rather than for making a finished wine. The habit of dosing every batch with brandy or malt spirit reflects a period with no reliable way to arrest fermentation or exclude spoilage organisms: alcohol was the preservative of last resort.