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Domestic Wines (Draw off what will run without)
and draw off what will run without squeezing. | Then press the rest, and if not sweet enough add a sufficient quantity of sugar to make it so. Let it ferment, and add to it a little honey and sugarcandy; then fine it with the whites of eggs and a little isinglass, and draw it off for use.
Balm Wine.
Take 40 lbs. of sugar and 9 galls. of water, boil it gently for 2 hours, skim it well, and put it into a tub to cool. Take 24 lbs. of the tops of balm, bruise them and put them into a barrel with a little new yeast, and when the liquor is cold pour it on the balm. Stir it well together and let it stand 24 hours, stirring it often. Then close it up, and let it stand 6 weeks. Then rack it off and put a lump of sugar into every bottle. Cork it well, and it will be better the second year than the first.
To make Scurvy-Grass Wine.
Take the best large scurvy-grass tops and leaves, in May, June, or July; bruise them well in a stone mortar, put them in a well-glazed earthen vessel and sprinkle them over with some powder of crystal of tartar; then smear them with virgin honey, and being covered close, let it stand 24 hours. Set water over a gentle fire, putting to every gallon 3 pints of honey, and when the scum rises take it off and let it cool; then put the stamped scurvy grass into a barrel, and pour the liquor to it, setting the vessel conveniently endways, with a tap at the bottom. When it has been infused 24 hours, draw off the liquor, strongly press the juice and moisture out of the herb into the barrel or vessel, and put the liquor up again; then put a little new yeast to it, and suffer it to ferment 3 days, covering the place of the bung or vent with a piece of bread spread over with mustard seed, downward, in a cool place, and let it continue till it is fine and drinks brisk. Draw off the finest part, leaving only the dregs behind; afterwards add more herbs, and ferment it with whites of eggs, flour, and fixed nitre, verjuice, or the juice of green grapes, if they are to be had; to which add 6 lbs. of the syrup of mustard, all mixed and well beaten together, to refine it down, and it will drink brisk, but is not very pleasant; being here inserted among artificial wines rather for the sake of health, than for the delightfulness of its taste.
To make Cheap and Wholesome Claret.
Take a quart of fine draft Devonshire cider, and an equal quantity of good Port. Mix them, and shake them. Bottle them, and let them stand for a month.
To make Dry Wine.
Those who like a dry wine, should put into the vat, at the commencement of the vinous fermentation, an ounce or two of calcined gypsum, in fine powder.
This is a run of short country-wine receipts, printed one after another, with the tail of an earlier one at the top. Two of the four call for additives that no longer belong anywhere near a fermenting vessel, which is why the block above carries a caution.
- Calcined gypsum is the problem"To make Dry Wine" directs an ounce or two of calcined gypsum — plaster of Paris, calcium sulphate hemihydrate — into the vat. This is the old practice of "plastering," which lowers pH and drops potassium as tartrate. Food-grade calcium sulphate does exist and is used in brewing, but calcined gypsum off a builders' shelf is not something to stir into a drink.
- Fixed nitre is not a fining agentThe scurvy-grass wine finishes with "fixed nitre" beaten in with egg white and flour. Fixed nitre is the alkaline residue of deflagrated saltpetre — largely potassium carbonate — and is a caustic laboratory chemical. It is added here in an entirely unmeasured quantity.
- The scurvy-grass itselfCochlearia officinalis, a coastal brassica, was gathered as an antiscorbutic. Correct identification of a small seashore crucifer is not a beginner's job. The compiler himself admits the result "is not very pleasant."
- Balm is lemon balmMelissa officinalis, not bee balm or balsam. Twenty-four pounds of bruised tops to roughly ten gallons of must is an enormous charge of herb by modern standards — modern herb wine recipes generally use far less per gallon.
- Scale and sweetnessForty pounds of sugar to nine gallons of water is about 4.5 lb per gallon, well above the roughly 2.5–3 lb per gallon that yields a dry-to-medium table wine. With period yeasts this would have stuck sweet and strong; the added lump of sugar per bottle then gives a light secondary fizz.
- Archaic termsCrystal of tartar is cream of tartar, potassium bitartrate. Verjuice is the sour juice of unripe grapes, or in England often crab apples. Isinglass is a collagen fining made from fish swim bladders, still sold for beer and wine, though gelatin and bentonite have largely replaced it.
- The bread-and-mustard bungA crust smeared with mustard seed laid over the vent appears to serve as a primitive airlock: it would let carbon dioxide escape, and mustard's volatile oils are antimicrobial, which may be why it was used. A water-filled fermentation lock does the same job without the guesswork.
- The claret is not a claretCider and port shaken together and bottled for a month is a blending trick, not a wine. It is harmless, but it will taste of oxidised cider and fortified sugar rather than Bordeaux, and it needs no fermentation at all.
- If you want to make herb wineUse a current recipe with measured sugar, a known yeast strain, a hydrometer and sanitised equipment. Nothing in these four paragraphs supplies those numbers.
Mackenzie's compendium gathers its wine receipts from a much older stratum of English household books, where "wine" meant anything fermented at home from sugar, honey, fruit or herbs — grape wine being an import and a luxury. Balm wine and scurvy-grass wine both belong to that medicinal end of the still-room: lemon balm was a long-standing cordial herb for the spirits, and scurvy-grass, as its name says, was the recognised English antiscorbutic before citrus displaced it in the navy, sold in London as "scurvy-grass ale" well into the eighteenth century. The compiler's own aside — inserted "rather for the sake of health, than for the delightfulness of its taste" — is a fair summary of the genre. The gypsum note reflects a real commercial practice, generally traced to the sherry and Mediterranean trades, where plastering the must was used to sharpen and brighten a flabby wine; it was legal, widely argued over by nineteenth-century chemists, and eventually written out of winemaking.