Raisin Wine
INGREDIENTS.-10 lbs. of raisins, 1 lb. of sugar, water. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d. per gallon.
Pick some sound large raisins, and chop them very finely. Pour a gallon of hot water upon them, and press the liquor through a bag. Let it stand 12 hours, then put in the sugar, and leave it to ferment. When this has ceased, cask it, bung it, and leave it for 3 months, when draw it offinto another cask, which it must quite fill. Bung very closely and bottle 10 months later. A year afterwards it will be ready.
TIME. About 2 years.
SEASONABLE. - Make this in autumn.
RASPBERRY CREAM.
A country wine of the simplest kind: raisins supply both the sugar and, in the Victorian version, the wild yeast. The long timeline is the whole method, and the one thing worth attending to is that nothing is sealed until fermentation has genuinely finished.
- The hinge: do not bung too soon"When this has ceased" is doing a great deal of work. Casking or bottling a wine that is still working will build enough pressure to blow a bung or burst glass. Modern practice is to confirm with a hydrometer reading that is stable over several days rather than judging by the sound of the airlock.
- Proportions and yield10 lb raisins, 1 lb sugar and one gallon of water gives roughly a gallon of finished wine, about six 750 ml bottles. The must will be very thick before pressing; expect to lose volume to the pulp, so top up to a full gallon after straining.
- Cost figures"3s. 6d. per gallon" is pre-decimal British currency and reflects Victorian prices only. It has no bearing on what raisins cost now.
- RaisinsUse unsulphured, unoiled dried fruit where you can find it. Dried vine fruit is often coated with oil, and pale fruit in particular may be treated with sulphur dioxide; both can hinder a spontaneous ferment. Chopping (or a brief blitz) matters because whole raisins release their sugar slowly.
- YeastThe original relies on whatever yeast is present on the fruit and in the room, which is why the ferment was unpredictable. A sachet of dried wine yeast pitched once the must has cooled to about 20C gives a reliable, clean result.
- "Press the liquor through a bag"A jelly bag or a nylon straining bag in a large bowl. Squeeze firmly rather than letting it drip; the pulp holds a lot of liquid. The 12-hour stand afterwards lets the coarser sediment drop.
- Racking"Draw it off into another cask, which it must quite fill" is racking into a vessel with no air space. Headroom in a maturing vessel leads to oxidation and acetic spoilage, so a demijohn should be filled to the neck, topped up if necessary.
- The timetableThree months in cask, rack, ten months to bottling, then a further year: about two years in total, as the recipe states. The wine is drinkable earlier but will be harsh; raisin wine genuinely improves with the long rest.
Raisin wine belonged to a well-established English tradition of household "made wines" - fermented from whatever fruit, flower or root the garden and larder supplied, in decades when grape wine carried heavy import duty and was a purchased luxury. Dried grapes had a particular advantage over fresh fruit: they kept, so a batch could be started in autumn without waiting on a harvest, and their concentrated sugar produced a strong wine without much added sweetening. Beeton's household books carried such recipes alongside ginger, elderberry, cowslip and rhubarb wines, treating them as ordinary domestic manufacture rather than a hobby. The two-year timescale, casually noted at the end, says a good deal about the period: this is a recipe for a settled household with cellar space and no expectation of a quick return.