Colonial America Recipes: Homemade Wines

By 1861, ingredients for homemade wines were considered to be so inexpensive that households generously added them to the stock of canned preserves. This is a fun activity for festivals and Living history events.

Based on recipes from Godey’s, April 1861.

Apple Wine

Add to a barrel of cider the herb scurlea, the quintessence of wine, a little nitre, and a pound of syrup of honey. Let it work in the cask till clear and well-settled, then draw it off, and it will be little inferior to Rhenish [Rhine wine - dry white wines], either in clearness, color, or flavor.

Cherry Wine

To make five pints of this wine, take fifteen pounds of cherries, and two of currants; bruise them together, mix with them two-thirds of the kernels; and put the whole of the cherries, currants, and kernels into a barrel, with a quarter of a pound of sugar to every pint of juice. The barrel must be quite full; cover the barrel with vine leaves, and sand above them, and let it stand until it has done working, which will be in about three weeks; then stop it with a bung [a stopper for the hole in a keg or barrel], and in two months’ time it may be bottled.

Currant Wine

Take sixteen pounds of currants, three gallons of water: break the currants with your hands in the water, strain it off; put to it fourteen pounds of sugar, strain it into a vessel, add a pint of brandy, and a pint of raspberries, stop it down, and let it stand three months.

Elder Wine

Pour a gallon of boiling water over every gallon of berries, let it stand twelve hours; then draw it off, and boil it up with three pounds and a half of sugar; when boiling, beat up some whites of eggs, and clarify it; skim it clear, then add half an ounce of pounded ginger to every gallon of the wine; boil it a little longer, before you put it in the tub; when cool, put in a toast rubbed in yeast; let it ferment a day or two, after which put it into a barrel previously rinsed with brandy. All wines should be lukewarm when the yeast is added to it.

Ginger Wine

To every gallon of water add three pounds of sugar and one pound of ginger, the paring of one lemon, half a pound of raisins, stoned; boil all half an hour, let it stand until it is lukewarm, then put it into the cask with the juice of a lemon; add one spoonful of yeast to every gallon, stir it every day for ten days, then add half a pint of brandy to every two gallons, half an ounce of isinglass [gelatin] to every six gallons; stop it close down, and in about eight weeks it will be fit to bottle.

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