Home › G › Gooseberry Wine, Efferves- cing
Gooseberry Wine, Efferves- cing
INGREDIENTS. -To every gallon of water allow 6 lbs. of green gooseberries, 3 lbs. of lump sugar.
This wine should be prepared from unripe gooseberries, in order to avoid the flavour which the fruit would give to the wine when in a mature state. Its briskness depends more upon the time of bottling than upon the unripe state of the fruit, for effervescing wine can be made from fruit that is ripe as well as that which is unripe.
The fruit should be selected when it has nearly attained its full growth, and consequently before it shows any tendency to ripen. Any bruised or decayed berries, and those that are very small, should be rejected. The blossom and stalk ends should be removed, and the fruit well bruised in a tub or pan, in such quantities as to insure each berry being broken without crushing the seeds. Pour the water (which should be warm) on the fruit, squeeze and stir it with the hand until GRAVIES. all the pulp is removed from the skin and seeds, and cover the whole closely for 24 hours; after which, strain it through a coarse bag, and press it with as much force as can be conveniently applied, to extract the whole of the juice and liquor the fruit may contain. To every 40 or 50 lbs. of fruit one gallon more of hot water may be passed through the marc, or husks, in order to obtain any soluble matter that may remain, and be again pressed. The juice should be put into a tub or pan of sufficient size to contain all of it, and the sugar added to it. Let it be well stirred until the sugar is dissolved, and place the pan in a warm situation; keep it closely covered, and let it ferment for a day or two. It must then be drawn off into clean casks, placed a little on one side for the scum that arises to be thrown out, and the casks kept filled with the remaining "must," that should be reserved for that purpose. When the active fermentation has ceased, the casks should be plugged upright, again filled if necessary, the bungs to be put in loosely, and, after a few days, when the fermentation is a little more languid (which may be known by the hissing noise ceasing), the bungs should be driven in tight, and a spile-hole made to give vent if necessary. About November or December on a clear fine day, the wine should be racked from its lees ees into clean casks, which may be rinsed with brandy.
After a month it should be examined to see if it is sufficiently clear for bottling; if not, it must be fined with isinglass, which may be dissolved in some of the wine: 1 oz. will be sufficient for 9 gallons.
In bottling the wine it will be necessary to wire the corks down, or to tie them down with string. Old champagne bottles are the best for this wine. In March or April, or when the gooseberry bushes begin to blossom, the wine must be bottled, in order to insure its being effervescing.
SEASONABLE. Make this the end of May or beginning of June, before the berries ripen.
A country "champagne" made by wild fermentation in cask and finished with a deliberate bottle fermentation. The proportions are sound, but almost every piece of equipment named here has a modern equivalent worth knowing.
- The hinge: bottle pressureThe briskness comes from bottling while sugar remains unfermented, and that is where the danger lies. Use genuine sparkling-wine bottles rated for pressure, wired or caged closures, and store them somewhere a burst bottle can do no harm. A plain wine or squash bottle will fail.
- Scale and yieldThe ratio is per gallon of water: 6 lb green gooseberries, 3 lb sugar. A UK gallon of finished wine fills about six 75 cl bottles, so even a modest batch of 5 gallons is thirty bottles and needs real cask or demijohn capacity.
- Sugar and strength"Lump sugar" is simply refined cane sugar, sold then in loaves and cut down; granulated is the direct substitute. Three pounds to the gallon is a heavy sugar loading, and the wine is bottled before all of it has fermented out, leaving residual sugar for the bottle fermentation.
- Warm waterThe recipe says only "warm": hand-hot rather than boiling is the likely sense. Boiling water on the pulp can set pectin and give a permanent haze, which is why a pectic enzyme is standard in modern fruit wines.
- No yeast is namedBeeton relies on wild yeast from the fruit skins and the air, which is why the must sits covered for a day or two before casking. Current practice pitches a cultured wine or champagne yeast after a light sulphite treatment, which is the single biggest improvement in reliability.
- Do not crush the seedsThe instruction to break every berry without crushing the pips is deliberate: the seeds carry bitter, oily notes. Bruise by hand or with a wooden masher, never in a blender.
- Cask vocabularyThe must is the unfermented juice, the marc the pressed husks, the bung the cask stopper and the spile-hole a small vent bored beside it. In a glass demijohn all of this reduces to an airlock, loose at first and then sealed.
- Racking and fining"Racked from its lees" means siphoned off the sediment; rinsing the cask with brandy was a crude sanitiser, now replaced by a sulphite or proprietary steriliser. One ounce of isinglass to 9 gallons reflects the coarse leaf isinglass of the period; modern liquid isinglass and other finings are far more concentrated and should be dosed by their own instructions.
- The calendarPick and pulp in late May or early June while the berries are full-sized but hard, rack in November or December, bottle in March or April. The schedule is not decorative: bottling in spring catches the yeast as it rouses with rising temperature, which is what makes the wine effervesce.
Gooseberry wine was the English kitchen garden's answer to champagne, and Victorian cookery books treat it with unusual seriousness, perhaps because the resemblance was thought close: a hard, acid, underripe fruit fermented lean and bottled with a little sugar left in it behaves much like a cool-climate grape. The gooseberry itself was a northern English obsession in the nineteenth century, with gooseberry clubs and prize shows competing over berry weight, and the fruit was cheap and abundant in a way imported wine was not. Beeton's insistence on unripe fruit is a point of period debate she settles in the text itself, noting that effervescence depends on the timing of bottling rather than the ripeness of the berry. Home-made gooseberry wine faded in Britain over the twentieth century, a period in which American gooseberry mildew arrived and commercial sparkling wine became affordable.