Name: Gooseberry Wine
Ingredients: 24 quarts ripe gooseberries; 12 quarts water (boiled for 2 hours); 1.5 pounds loaf sugar; 2-3 tablespoons good ale yeast

Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

24 quarts ripe gooseberries
12 quarts water (boiled for 2 hours)
1.5 pounds loaf sugar
2-3 tablespoons good ale yeast

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Pick and bruise the gooseberries in a platter with a rolling pin until small.
Cool the boiled water and pour it over the bruised gooseberries; let it stand for 12 hours.
Drain off the clear liquor and measure it.

Make the wine

Add ¾ pound of loaf sugar for every quart of liquor, and stir until dissolved, about 6-8 hours.
Transfer the mixture to a cask and add 2-3 tablespoons of ale yeast.
Lightly bung the cask to allow fermentation.

Bottle

Once fermentation stops, seal it well and bottle in frosty weather.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries: Provide the fruit flavour and the juice that becomes the wine.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the liquor and feeds the yeast during fermentation.
Ale yeast: Ferments the sugars into alcohol, driving the wine's fermentation.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.