WINE.
Be sure to get perfectly ripe fruit for making wine, but do not gather it immediately after rain, as it is watery then and less sweet than usual.
Be very careful to stop the wine securely as soon as fermentation ceases, as otherwise it will lose its strength and flavor. Watch carefully to see when fermentation ceases.
Strawberry wine makes a delicious flavoring for syllabub, cake, jelly, etc., and so does gooseberry wine. Dewberries make a prettier and better wine than blackberries, and have all the medicinal virtues of the latter.
The clearest wine is made without straining, by the following process: Take a tub or barrel (a flour-barrel for instance), and make a little pen of sticks of wood at the bottom. On top of this pen lay an armful of clean straw. Bore a hole in the side of the tub or barrel as near the bottom as possible, and set it on a stool or box so as to admit of setting a vessel underneath it. After mashing the berries intended for wine, put them on top the straw, and let the juice drain through it and run through the hole at the side of the tub or barrel into the vessel set beneath to catch it. Be careful to have this vessel large enough to avoid its being overrun. Any open stone vessel not used before for pickle will answer, or a bucket or other wooden vessel may be used. Let the berries remain on the straw and drain from evening till the next morning. Some persons make a slight variation on the process above described, by pouring hot water over the berries after putting them on the straw. After the draining is over, an inferior sort of wine may be made by squeezing the berries.
The following process will make wine perfectly clear: To a half-gallon of wine put two wine-glasses of sweet milk. Stir it into the wine and pour it all in a transparent half-gallon bottle. Stop it and set it by for twenty-four hours, at the end of which time the wine will be beautifully clear, the sediment settling with the milk at the bottom. Pour off the wine carefully into another bottle, not allowing any of the sediment or milk to get into the fresh bottle. The same directions apply to vinegar.
Blackberry Wine.
Fill large stone jars with ripe black or dewberries. Cover them with water, mash them, and let them stand several hours, or, if freshly gathered, let them stand all night. Then strain through a thick cloth and add three pounds white sugar to each gallon of juice. Let the wine stand a few days in the jars, stirring and skimming each day. Put it in a demijohn, but do not cork it up for some time.—Mrs. M. D.
Blackberry Wine.