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To Make Port Wine
To make Port Wine.
RECIPE No. 6.
To 13 gals. spirit, 40 o. p., add : 55 66 66 water, 1 wine vinegar, 30 lbs. sugar, 1/2 oz. ground cinnamon infused in one quart water "ground cloves 50 Cayenne pepper-seeds, “ “ " 1 oz. tannin dissolved in half pint alcohol, 95 per cent.
Color with mallow flowers. (See "Wine Colorings.") An infusion of torrefied prunes is a very good Port aroma. (See "Recipe No.19," Brandy.) Common prunes cut and infused in spirit without being burned or torrefied, is also a good flavor for Port wine.
To make Port Wine.
RECIPE No. 7.
To 60 gals. wine made by our method of fermentation, add: 30 lbs. sugar, 3 gals. spirit, 40 o. p., 1/4 lb. powdered orris root infused in one gallon boiling water, and strained when cool, 1 quart cinnamon water (see above recipe), 1 66 clove " " 1 oz. tannin powder dissolved as above.
To make Port Wine.
RECIPE No. 8.
To 5 gals. fermented elderberry juice, add : “ “ spirit, 40 o. p., ELDERBERRY JUICE FOR MAKING PORT WINE. 153 40 gals. water, 1/4 oz. ground cloves infused in one quart of water, + " ground cinnamon 66 “ “ 1/4 lb. powdered orris root infused as directed in the the last recipe, 50 Cayenne pepper seeds, 20 lbs. sugar.
Fermented Elderberry Juice used in the above recipe.
RECIPE No. 9.
Press out the juice of the berries and put it in a fermenting cask. To each 40 gallons juice, add 20 lbs. of sugar, then let the juice ferment two or three days at a temperature of from 75 to 85 Fah., and stop the fermentation when the juice attains the degree of sweetness you desire. After fermentation, add : one gallon alcohol, 95 per cent, to each 10 gallons of juice, and let it stand ten days, then rack it off through a flannel filter. As a general thing, you should not let the juice ferment longer than 48 hours, or you may destroy too much of the sugar. Boiled Elderberry Juice for making Port Wine.
RECIPE No. 10.
Put the elderberries in a copper kettle (tinned over inside) and cover them with water; let them boil five minutes and afterwards put them in a clean cask. Add 1 gal. alcohol, 95 per cent, to each 10 gals. of the juice; this is done to preserve it. Elderberries thus prepared will make a first quality Port wine.
These four entries belong to the nineteenth-century trade of compounding: building a saleable "Port" out of neutral spirit, sugar, water, colouring and flavour infusions rather than out of grapes. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the formulas themselves are not usable as food.
- Raw elderberry juiceRecipe No. 9 presses the berries and ferments the juice without ever heating it. Uncooked elderberry juice, and any green fruit, leaf or stem carried through with it, contains cyanogenic glycosides that cause vomiting and cramping; this is the reason modern elderberry preparations are cooked. Recipe No. 10 does boil the fruit five minutes, though the book gives no reason for it beyond what follows about preserving the juice with alcohol.
- Orris rootPowdered orris (iris rhizome) was a standard fixative in the flavouring trade and still appears in perfumery and in some gin botanicals in trace amounts. It is a known skin and respiratory sensitiser and is not sold or handled as a domestic food ingredient in the quantities called for here.
- "40 o. p."Forty degrees over proof on the old British scale, roughly 80 percent alcohol by volume. Tens of gallons of liquid are being dosed with spirit at that strength, and the finished strength varies widely from formula to formula.
- Missing quantitiesSeveral of the spirit, water and vinegar figures in these formulas have not survived legibly, so the alcohol content and the acid balance of the finished liquid cannot be reconstructed from the page. There is no way to scale or correct them honestly.
- Cayenne pepper-seedsFifty seeds per batch, in Nos. 6 and 8, supplying a warm bite. The formulas also add tannin powder separately, so heat and astringency are being built in by two different routes.
- Torrefied prunesTorrefied simply means roasted or scorched, here almost to burning. The resulting infusion contributes caramel and a faint smokiness, which was the trade's shorthand for the raisined, oxidised note of wood-aged wine.
- Mallow flowers and tanninThe book colours the wine with mallow flowers and cross-references its own "Wine Colorings" section, and adds an ounce of tannin dissolved in alcohol for astringency. Both are corrections applied to the finished liquid rather than anything arising from fermentation.
- The tinned copper kettleRecipe No. 10 specifies copper tinned inside because bare copper in contact with fruit acid dissolves into the juice. Worn or scratched tinning was a genuine source of copper poisoning in period kitchens and small factories.
- If you want PortBuy Port, or follow a current recipe for a fruit wine from a modern winemaking source with measured gravities and sulphite additions. Nothing on this page substitutes for that.
Books like this one were sold to grocers, publicans and small "rectifiers" in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a bottle labelled Port might contain no grape at all. Genuine Port comes from the Douro valley in northern Portugal, fortified with grape spirit partway through fermentation to leave it sweet and strong; its long popularity in Britain and North America created a demand that cheap compounding rushed to fill. Elderberry was the classic stand-in, dark, tannic and cheap, and it had been used to stretch and colour real Port for so long that Portuguese growers are traditionally said to have periodically tried to have elder trees uprooted near the vineyards. The presence of orris root, mallow flowers, cayenne seeds and roasted prunes in these formulas shows the craft for what it was: not fermentation but imitation, assembled from a perfumer's shelf and priced to undercut the genuine article. Food and drink adulteration on this scale is often cited among the reasons pure-food legislation arrived in Britain and the United States between the 1870s and 1906.