501. Currant Wine In The English Style

From twelve to fourteen quarts of currants are mashed, the juice pressed out, and the remnants covered with eighteen quarts of cold water; stir repeatedly, press out again the following day, mix with the juice, and fourteen pounds of loaf-sugar; when the sugar is dissolved, fill the juice into a cask, so as not to fill it entirely; bung, and bore a small hole with a gimlet; let it stand four weeks in a place where the temperature never sinks below 68° F.

After this period add three pounds of sugar dissolved in two quarts of warm water; shake the cask well, and bung again. Six or eight weeks later, when no more noise of the fermentation can be heard going on, decant, add two quarts of brandy; let the wine stand two months in the cellar; then fill into another, but not new cask, which must be entirely filled, and bung. After three or four years, always in a temperature not below 68° F., bottle, and you obtain a delicious beverage, which much resembles good grape wine.

502. English Dandelion Wine

Pluck about four quarts of the yellow petals of the dandelion blossoms; take care that they are clean from insects; infuse them three days in four and a half quarts of hot water; stir it now and then, strain through flannel, and boil the water half an hour with the rind of a lemon and of an orange, some ginger, and three and a half pounds of lump-sugar; after boiling add the lemon and orange, cut into slices, without seeds; let it get cool; add a little yeast on toast. After one or two days the fermentation is done; then fill into a cask and after two months you may bottle.

(The wine is very good against liver-complaints.)

503. Elder Wine

Twenty-six pounds of elderberries are boiled in fifty quarts of water, an hour, while adding one ounce of pimento and two ounces of ginger; place forty-four pounds of sugar in a tub, strain the fluid over it, squeeze all the juice out of the berries, add four ounces of cremor tartari; let the fluid stand two days, fill into a cask, place a brick over the bung-hole, and stir every other day.

When fermentation is complete, add two or three quarts of cognac spirits; bung, and bottle after four months.

504. Ginger Wine

Boil sixteen pounds of sugar and twelve ounces of well-pulverized Jamaica ginger in twenty-four quarts of water half an hour; skim carefully, and let it stand till the following day.

Cut seven pounds of raisins in pieces, remove the seeds, put the raisins in a cask with four, quarts of good brandy or arrack, and three or four lemons, sliced and without seeds: pour over it the fluid, which you decant carefully; bung the cask; clear the wine after a fortnight with one ounce of pale white glue, and bottle after another fortnight.

505. Goosberry Wine

Unripe, but otherwise perfectly developed gooseberries of a good kind are mashed in a tub; after twenty-four hours decant the juice; infuse the berries in lukewarm water twelve hours in the proportion of one quart of water to four quarts of berries; strain; mix it with the decanted juice; add to each twenty quarts of fluid twelve pounds of broken sugar, and let the wine ferment in a warm place. After two or three days fill into a cask; add to each twenty quarts of wine two quarts of best brandy; bung well, and place it in not too cold a cellar; to obtain an excellent gooseberry wine it ought to remain in the cellar five years, yet you may decant after a year: of course the product will be inferior.