Ginger Wine
INGREDIENTS for 9 gallons of wine. - To 9 gallons of water allow 27 lbs. of loaf sugar, 9 lemons, 12 oz. of bruised ginger, 3 tablespoonfuls of yeast, 2 lbs. of raisins stoned and chopped, 1 pint of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 12s.
Boil together for 1 hour in a copper (let it previously be well scoured and beautifully clean) the water, sugar, lemon-rinds, and bruised ginger; remove every particle of scum as it rises, and when the liquor is sufficiently boiled, put it into a large tub or pan, as it must not remain in the copper.
When nearly cold, add the yeast, which must be thick and very fresh, and, the next day, put all in a dry cask with the strained lemon-juice and chopped raisins. Stir the wine every day for a fortnight; then add the brandy, stop the cask down by degrees, and in a few weeks it will be fit to bottle.
TIME.-3 months.
SEASONABLE. - The best time for making this wine is either in March or September.
Note.-Wine made early in March will be fit to bottle in June.
GINGERBREAD PUDDING.
A nine-gallon batch of country wine, written for a household with a laundry copper and a cellar. Everything here scales down cleanly, but the equipment and the bottling advice do not translate.
- The "copper"This is the large fixed boiler used for laundry and brewing, not a saucepan and not a cooking vessel you should copy. Boiling sugar-and-lemon liquor for an hour in bare copper leaches metal into an acidic must; use stainless steel.
- GallonsImperial gallons: 9 of them is about 41 litres, not the 34 litres nine US gallons would give. Divide by nine for a manageable single-gallon batch.
- Scaled to one imperial gallon (4.5 L)3 lb sugar, 1 lemon, 1 1/3 oz bruised ginger, about 3 1/2 oz stoned chopped raisins, a heaped teaspoon of yeast, and roughly 2 1/4 fl oz brandy.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent.
- The sugar loadThree pounds per gallon is around 300 g per litre, well past what most yeasts will finish. The ferment stalls and the wine stays sweet by design, which is what Victorian ginger wine was meant to be.
- Yeast"Thick and very fresh" means barm skimmed off ale, pitched at blood heat or below. A modern wine yeast gives a cleaner result and, more usefully, a predictable alcohol tolerance.
- Stopping the cask down by degreesThis is the Victorian substitute for an airlock: the bung goes in gradually as the ferment slows, so carbon dioxide can escape. Use a fermentation lock instead and leave it until the airlock has been still for a week or more.
- BottlingThe instruction to bottle "in a few weeks" is the one place this recipe will hurt you. A very sweet wine with live yeast will restart in the bottle and burst it; check that the gravity has been stable over at least two readings a week apart before bottling, and use bottles rated for pressure if in doubt.
- Yield and costNine gallons is about 55 standard 75 cl bottles. The 12s. average cost reflects sugar and brandy at Victorian prices and tells you this was a substantial household undertaking, not a small experiment.
Ginger wine is a British sweet fortified cordial rather than a grape wine, made from a sugar wash flavoured with bruised root ginger and citrus, and it belongs to the same domestic tradition as cowslip, elderberry and parsnip wines. Commercial green ginger wine is generally traced to eighteenth-century London producers, and by Mrs Beeton's day the drink was a fixture of winter hospitality, warmed against the cold and pressed on visitors and invalids alike; its use as the ginger half of a whisky mac is usually dated later than this book, though the origin of the name is not firmly documented. The recipe gives March or September as the best months and notes that a March batch will be fit to bottle in June.