Benjamin Maund’s 1824 Recipe for ‘Bilberry Wine’

“Guiseppe Mannetti, in a communication to the late Mr. Loudon, says that the mountaineers in a district of Italy, when grapes are scarce, make wine for their own use of Bilberries. They gather them, and put them in vessels to ferment, with about four pints of water to each pound of fruit : thus a wine is prepared, equal to that commonly drank in the country from grapes. Further, he states, that wine made of the juice only, of the Bilberry, cannot be distinguished from the best of that obtained from grapes.

An admirable wine from this fruit is said to be made by the following recipe. To five gallons of the fruit add five of cider, and five of water ; boil this with fifteen pounds of sugar. Ferment in the usual way, and add two ounces of red tartar, two quarts of spirit of wine, an ounce of bruised ginger, and a quarter of a pound of bruised bitter almonds. The addition of red tartar accords with the recommendation of M. Chaptal, the celebrated French chemist, who was employed to investigate the methods of wine-making in France ; and the practice would we believe be advantageous to many, if not all, of our British wines.”

Benjamin Maund, The Botanic Garden Vol XI (1824)

Continuing the recent Vaccinium (blueberry etc.) theme, here’s another related recipe, this time for making a wine from the blueberry’s close cousin Vaccinium myrtilus, a.k.a. bilberry, whinberry or blaeberry.

The recipe appeared in an edition of Benjamin Maund’s The Botanic Garden magazine, a publication which detailed the characteristics, uses and histories of ornamental flowering plants grown in British gardens at the time of its publication, in the early nineteenth century. A sub-section of the magazine, ‘The Fruitist’ did the same for popular orchard and soft fruit varieties.

The bilberry – illustrated with the rather lovely quarter-page colour drawing to the right – was featured alongside other ornamental plants, rather than as a fruit in its own right. I mentioned in my discussion of Mary Hooker’s 1846 Recipe for ‘Berry Pudding’ that I hadn’t been able to find many blueberry / bilberry recipes in any pre-nineteenth century cookbooks, and had wondered whether they were more commonly used for medicinal purposes. Clearly I could have added wine-making as well, as the anecdote above suggests.

Looking at the method, it seems that whilst the original Italian version was based on pure fermented juice, or rather, diluted juice, the one suggested by Mr Maund seems to be closer to a hedgerow spirit than a wine per se¹Although I’m no wine-maker, hedgerow or otherwise, so the technicalities of classification are beyond me.? Does adding the fruit to a mixture of cider, water and sugar, then adding in red tartar (cream of tartar?), spirit of wine (distilled wine spirit?), ginger and almonds, mean it’s still a wine per se, or is it more of a concoction? I did once try to make home-made “port” by using a homebrew wine kit, then chucking in half a bottle of brandy at the end²Yep, tasted about as good as it sounds… so maybe it is a method that’s widely practised? I’d be more than happy to be educated as to the correct technical term, if a passing wine-maker can set me straight, via the comments.

Maund wasn’t the only correspondent to discuss the concept of bilberry wine to the wine-makers of Great Britain. In 1841 The Magazine of Science, reported on Spirit from the Bilberry:

“In the province of Luxemburg, in Belgium, wine, brandy, and vinegar have been made exclusively from the fruit of the bilberry (vaccinium myrtillus) a shrub not hitherto turned to any use. This discovery promises to prove of good account in those northern regions in which the bilberry grows abundantly.”

Something tells me that the good folks of the “northern regions” would already have been well aware of a number of highly practical, and potentially alcohol-based, uses for the fruit of this “shrub not hitherto turned to any use”, but I suspect the author hadn’t actually asked any of those folks for their opinion.

In 1848 William Joseph Simmonite – mathematician, astrologer, herbalist, and the manufacturer and sole proprietor of the “Jupiter Pill”; extrapolate the depth and quality of his medical knowledge from that as you will – mentioned several uses of “billberry” in his volume Medical Botany or Herbal Guide to Health, saying:

“…the preserved berries are a useful domestic sweetmeat, and a wine made from the fruit a little before it is ripe, bears a resemblance to port.”

In 1855 the following tale of making a distinctly sticky-sounding, syrupy form of “whortleberry wine” appeared in The Vine, by R. H. Phelps:

“These berries [whortleberries] were very abundant in the year 1854, and a grocer in Hartford, having accumulated a large quantity on hand, filled a barrel full of them to the bung, and then poured molasses in upon them until it was full. A powerful fermentation followed, and in two or three months, a clear, pleasant wine, or syrup, was drawn from the cask. He then turned the barrel on the end — took out the head, and readily sold the berries for making pies and dessert. The liquid was much esteemed, and was found, like the berries, to be an active diuretic, and very efficient in urinary obstructions. It is very probable that the like process with the blackberry and other fruit would produce a pleasant beverage and with very little trouble.”

Another full recipe for bilberry wine was printed in Home-made Wines: how to Make and Keep Them by G. Vine³Go on with you, that’s a pseudonym, surely? in 1870.

“Put four gallons of bilberries, three gallons of rather sharp cider, three gallons of water, and ten pounds of sugar in the tub to ferment, and when the liquor is still, add two ounces of powdered tartar, two ounces of powdered ginger, a half handful each of lavender and rosemary leaves, and two quarts of rum or other British spirit. Let them remain in the tub for two days, then strain the whole through a hair sieve or bag into a cask ; put on the bung lightly until all hissing has ceased ; then bung it up tightly, and in two months bottle it. In six months more it will be a delightful dry wine.

Tartar is added to some juices in order to produce the requisite degree of fermentation, as all English fruit, except grapes is more or less deficient in this property.”

G. Vine’s recipe is a bit more fruit-forward and has less sugar-by-volume. He also takes a more jingoistic line, with the substitution of “two quarts of rum or other British spirit” for “wine spirit”, and adds in a couple of herbal notes, with lavender and rosemary to pep the mixture up, instead of ginger. Those variants aside, the method is essentially the same as that reported by Maund, including the addition of powdered tartar.

All of the above sounds rather intriguing, but, lacking a wine-cellar, anywhere else to leave a fermenting cask of bilberries, I think I’ll stick to harvesting my backyard blueberries and enjoying them with ice cream, or on top of my morning porridge.

How about you though? Are you a hedgerow wine-maker? Do you live near a source of wild bilberries? Have you made wine from them, or flavoured a vodka, or do you just use them for strictly medicinal purposes? Do let me know, via the comments.

Footnotes

• 1
  Although I’m no wine-maker, hedgerow or otherwise, so the technicalities of classification are beyond me. ↩︎
• 2
  Yep, tasted about as good as it sounds… ↩︎
• 3
  Go on with you, that’s a pseudonym, surely? ↩︎