Booze by John Wright

Author:John Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408896655
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Ginger wine

SEASON All year

ORIGINAL GRAVITY About 1120

Ginger wine always reminds me of Christmas. My father was a sort of male matron in a psychiatric hospital. He would often be engaged in ward rounds on Boxing Day and the family would always join him. Going from nurse’s station to nurse’s station we would be plied with Christmas drinks. My grandmother had a famous fondness for ginger wine and was given a glass, or two, at every stop. When we were about to move on to the last ward, I noticed that she was singing quietly to herself. She stood to her full and not inconsiderable height, then, not bending a single limb, crashed to the floor like a felled Douglas fir. We carried her comatose form to the car and took her home.

It is a wine with a long history and a heyday in the Victorian period when it was consumed for ‘health’ reasons; well suited to a lady who was born in the 1880s.

Ginger wine hardly needs describing; it is gingery, fruity and warming down to your toes.

Makes about six 75cl bottles

40g root ginger, peeled

1.5kg sugar

100g raisins, chopped

Pared zest and juice of 2 lemons

1 tsp yeast nutrient

5 g sachet white wine yeast

350ml brandy

Grate the root ginger into a saucepan, add the sugar and 4.5 litres water and boil for 30 minutes, skimming off any scum. Put the raisins into a fermenting bucket and pour over the hot liquid. Cool, then add the lemon zest and juice. Cover and leave to stand for 2 days.

Aerate, stir in the yeast nutrient, then pitch the yeast. Leave to ferment, stirring every day for 5 days.

Leave to settle for a day, then siphon or strain into a demi-john and fit an air lock.

Rack off into a second demi-john when fermentation appears to have ceased. Share the brandy out among your bottles and siphon in the wine. Allow to mature for a year before drinking.

Root vegetable wine

SEASON All year

ORIGINAL GRAVITY 1095

It is impossible to make a palatable wine from anything in the cabbage family; you seldom hear of swede wine or turnip wine and for good reason – they taste of swede or turnip. For root vegetable wines we must turn our attention to members of the Apiaceae (carrot family) and the Chenopodiaceae (beet family), specifically carrots, parsnips and beetroot.

Carrot wine is highly thought of and parsnip wine is up there with elderberry as a bright star in the country wine firmament. The unpromisingly entitled Cyclopaedia of Commerce, Mercantile Law, Finance, Commercial Geography and Navigation of 1844 tells us that it ‘is said to possess a finer flavour than that obtained from any other British produce’.

Most of the early recipes are little different from the one below, though some insist on such things as ‘argol of wine’ and (real) isinglass – ingredients you will be hard pushed to find at your local home-brewing shop. And, of course, they invariably involve brewing industrial quantities of the stuff. One 1846 ‘receipt’ makes it in quantities of a kilderkin (which, as Sid James would have told you, is two firkins).

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