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Home › Brandy, Whiskey and Imitation Spirits › To Make Sherry Wine
To Make Sherry Wine
To make Muscat Wine. (BY MIXING.) RECIPE No. 3.
To 35 gals. Muscat wine, add : 18 66 honey, 20 “ spirit, 40 o. p. 100 “ distilled water.
Filter.
To make Sweet Wine.
RECIPE No. 4.
To 16 barrels whiskey, add : 34 66 water, 2,000 lbs. sugar, 4 66 coriander seed, infused in half gallon spirit, 95 per cent, 1/2 gal. sulphuric acid.
The latter ingredient is added to clarify the wine.
To make Sherry Wine. (BY MIXING.) RECIPE No. 5.
To 70 gals. Sherry wine, add : 100 lbs. sugar, 40 gals. spirit, 40 o. p., 200 66 water.
Agitate or stir up the above compound for several days.
Neroly is a good flavor for Sherry wine; one drachm dissolved in one pint spirit, 95 per cent, is sufficient for 300 gallons. An infusion of dried peaches is also a good flavor. Infuse one gallon peaches in two gallons alcohol, 95 per cent, as long as you can get any flavor from the fruit. The essence of Sherry wine is also a very desirable flavor, and may be purchased from any respectable essence dealer.
This is not a winemaking recipe in any modern sense. It is a nineteenth-century trade formula for stretching and doctoring bulk wine, and several of its elements put it outside what can safely or legally be made today.
- Sulphuric acidThe sweet-wine formula on this page calls for sulphuric acid to "clarify" the wine; the quantity has dropped out of the text (the "95 per cent" figure belongs to the spirit used for the coriander infusion). Sulphuric acid is a corrosive chemical that causes severe burns on contact and has no place in anything made or drunk at home.
- "40 o. p."O.P. means "over proof": spirit stronger than proof. On the old British Sikes scale 40 o.p. is roughly 80 per cent alcohol by volume, though on the American reckoning of proof it would be lower. Spirit at that strength is flammable and needs careful handling.
- Alcohol lawBeyond the chemistry, compounding spirit into wine for sale is regulated everywhere. These formulas were written for a trade that predated modern labelling and excise rules, and the whole point of them was to sell a cheap blend as something it was not.
- Neroly"Neroly" is neroli, the essential oil distilled from bitter orange blossom, sold to the trade by the drachm (about 3.5 ml). It survives as a perfumery and flavouring material, though the dosing here — one drachm to 300 gallons — reflects how assertive it is.
- The missing unitSeveral quantities appear as bare numerals where the unit has dropped out of the text, so some of the proportions cannot be read with confidence.
- If you want sherryFortified wine made to a current, tested recipe, or simply a bottle of actual sherry, is the answer here. There is nothing in this formula worth recovering for the kitchen.
Books like this one belonged to a specific and now-vanished trade: the wine and liquor "manufacturer" who bought cheap bulk spirit and thin wine and compounded them into something that could be sold under a prestigious name. Sherry, muscat and port were the favoured targets because their sweetness, strength and aromatic character could be approximated with sugar, overproof spirit, water and a few drops of essence — and because genuine imports were expensive. The casual reference to buying "the essence of Sherry wine" from "any respectable essence dealer" shows how organised the supply chain was. This kind of publishing flourished in the decades before the pure food and drink laws of the early twentieth century, in Britain and the United States alike, and it is precisely the practices catalogued here that those laws were written to stop. The book is worth reading as evidence of what was in the bottle before regulation, not as a set of instructions.