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Currant Wine
Mrs. J. D. Odell.
One quart of currant juice, three pounds of sugar, sufficient water to make a gallon.
This is a proportion, not a procedure: the book assumes the reader already knows how to set fruit wine working in a crock. Everything that makes it succeed or fail has been left out, so the notes below cover what the original takes for granted.
- The proportions in modern termsOne quart of juice (about 950 ml) and three pounds of sugar (about 1.4 kg) topped up with water to one US gallon (3.8 litres). That is roughly 350 g of sugar per litre of finished must, which is a great deal — well above what a wine yeast will normally ferment out.
- Expect a sweet, strong wineAt that sugar loading fermentation will stop well short of using up the sugar, leaving a good deal of residual sweetness; how much alcohol is actually reached depends entirely on the yeast. Nineteenth-century currant wine was generally meant to be sweet and heavy, closer to a cordial than a table wine. If you want it dry, the sugar has to come down substantially.
- No yeast is namedThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the air, which is why period instructions so often mention skimming and long, slow working. Modern practice is to use a cultured wine yeast, which ferments cleanly and predictably rather than leaving the outcome to whatever lands in the crock.
- The juiceRed currants, crushed and strained; they are tart and high in pectin. Frozen currants work well since freezing ruptures the cells and improves the yield of juice.
- Vessel and ventingThis is the one point that matters. Fermenting liquid produces carbon dioxide continuously, and a sealed glass bottle or a screwed-down jar will burst. Use a fermenter with an airlock, or a crock covered with cloth during the vigorous stage.
- Timing the original omitsPrimary fermentation runs about a week to ten days at room temperature, after which the wine is racked off the sediment and left to clear for several months. Bottling before fermentation has finished is what causes exploding bottles and cloudy wine.
- YieldOne gallon, which is just under five standard 750 ml bottles once you allow for the lees left behind at each racking.
Currant wine was the workhorse of the American home cellar for most of the nineteenth century: red currants grew readily in northern gardens, cropped heavily, and were too tart to be eaten in quantity, so they went into jelly, shrub and wine. Because it was made at home from garden fruit and rarely reached the strength of spirits, it occupied a comfortable middle ground in an era of rising temperance sentiment. Contributions like Mrs. Odell's, given as bare proportions with no method at all, are characteristic of community-contributed cookbooks. The currant's fall from the American garden came later and for reasons unrelated to drink: the bushes host part of the life cycle of white pine blister rust, and cultivation was widely restricted in the early twentieth century, which is why the fruit is far less familiar in the United States today than it remains in Britain and northern Europe.