In the Old West, folks couldn’t just walk into a liquor store and pick up a bottle of their favorite hooch. Some saloons and general stores sold wine and spirits by the bottle or jug, but a goodly number of people — especially those who lived on remote homesteads — fermented or distilled their own. Homemade wine was common all over the South and West, where pulpy fruits and weeds like dandelions grew in profusion.
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| wild muscadine grapes (photo by Bob Peterson) |
Although the muscadines and scuppernongs used in contemporary artisanal wines are cultivated like any other crop, the wild foundation stock behaved — and still behaves — much like kudzu, overgrowing everything in its path. To say the grapes are aggressive and abundant would be an understatement. The landscaping around my home can attest to that.
In fact, according to local lore, the people who owned my house in the 1920s made good use of wild muscadine grapes. They had to be sneaky about their “hobby,” though, because during Prohibition revenuers were everywhere. Reportedly, the covert libation operation was discovered when a driver lost control of his car and collided with a hastily erected addition to the house, which dutifully collapsed. Vats and vats of muscadine wine spilled into the street. I’m not sure how that worked out for the brewers, but since they were prominent citizens, I doubt anyone got in too much trouble.
The homeowners rebuilt the addition with a good deal more attention to sturdiness. I use it as an honest-to-goodness living room (as opposed to the formal living room at the front of the house) and call it “the wine cellar.”
Muscadine wine comes to the rescue of the hero in “Making Peace,” one of three short novellas in The Dumont Way, a trilogy included in the five-book boxed set A Kiss to Remember (only 99 cents at Amazon). Heroine Maggie Fannin mixes quinine with her homemade wine to treat the malaria hero Bennett Collier picked up while tramping through swamps during the Civil War.
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She turned and caught his stare in eyes the color of warm cognac. A soldier’s eyes: resigned, yet defiant; determined to go down fighting.
Levering up onto stiff arms, he braced his palms on the floor.
The woman knelt and shoved a tin cup forward. “Drink.”
His gaze dropped to the vessel for only a moment before returning to those fascinating eyes.
Her lips and brows pinched. “Drink, or I’ll pour it down your throat. I didn’t nurse you through three days of the ague just to turn around and poison you.”
The rustic music he’d heard earlier underlay the sharp words. Holding her gaze, he shifted his weight, took the cup, and drew it to his lips. The sweet wine almost hid a familiar bitterness. “You found the quinine.”
Quinine—more precious than gold to any soldier who’d spent too much time in the swamps. He’d stolen the near-empty bottle. The righteous Bennett Collier, a common thief. “You went through my saddlebags.”
“I didn’t take nothin’ else. I swear it.”
He hadn’t meant the statement as an accusation. “Nothing in there worth taking.” Except the bundle of letters from his father. I miss you, son. Keep yourself alive and come home. Three years too late. He nearly choked trying to clear his throat.
He tossed back the rest of the wine. The bitter drug sharpened a pain in his chest; the sweet wine, a bitter memory. “Muscadine.”
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Today, most home-brewers use commercial yeast and add pectic enzyme. The latter clarifies the wine and draws more color from the grapes. Typically, those who ferment wine at home also add Campden tablets (potassium or sodium metabisulfite) to kill bacteria and inhibit the growth of wild yeast.
None of those ingredients would have been available in Maggie’s rundown shack on the the Texas mainland across the bay from Galveston, so her recipe might have looked something like the one below, which I found written in tidy cursive on a yellowed slip of paper tucked into one of my grandmother’s books. I have no idea how old the recipe is or from whence it came. The comments in parentheses are mine.
Muscadine Wine
(makes 5 gallons)
5-gallon bucket very ripe (soft and starting to shrivel) muscadine grapes12 lbs. white sugar
Spring water (or any water without chlorine)
2. Mash grapes in large (glazed ceramic) crock. (The vessel should be large enough to hold the mashed grapes and the sugar with a couple of inches of “head space” between the top of the liquid and the lip of the crock.)
3. Add sugar. Give mash a good stirring.
4. Cover crock with thick cheesecloth (or use a T-shirt). Tie string around lip (to hold the cheesecloth). Set in warm place.
5. Give mash good stirring every day until stops bubbling. (The amount of yeast in the environment will determine when the mixture starts bubbling and how long the activity lasts.)
6. Strain juice into clean (glazed ceramic) crock or churn. Add spring water to make five gallons. (Again, leave head space between liquid and rim.)
7. Cover crock. Set in cool cellar or barn. Let sit six weeks. Strain into jars. (Knowing my grandmother, “jars” meant Mason jars. That’s how my grandfather bottled his moonshine. I’d use wine bottles, but what do I know?) Screw on lids, loose, for a few days. Tighten lids, let sit six months in cellar or barn.
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| muscadine wine |
Home-brewing has become a bona fide trend over the past several years, so recipes and equipment for making beer, wine, and mead are everywhere. If you'd like to attempt a more modern approach to muscadine wine-making, you may want to visit this link (from Louisiana) or this one (from Kentucky).
Be aware: Unlike in 19th-century America, today’s federal government and all U.S. states have laws governing the production of alcoholic beverages for personal consumption. According to the federal Internal Revenue Code, home-brewers may produce 200 gallons of beer or wine per calendar year if there are two or more adults residing in the household; 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult residing in the household. If they produce more, they must pay federal taxes on the overage.
State regulations vary widely. In Texas, for example, the head of a household or an unmarried adult living alone may produce 200 gallons of wine, ale, malt liquor, or beer per year. Those who wish to produce more — or do so “accidentally” — not only owe state taxes in addition to federal tax, but also must acquire a license.
Her short story “The Second-Best Ranger in Texas” won the Peacemaker Award for Best Western Short Fiction. Her novel Prodigal Gun won the EPIC Award for Historical Romance and is the only western historical romance ever to final for a Peacemaker in a book-length category.
Visit her hideout on the web at KathleenRiceAdams.com.
Do I dare say it? I love muscadine wine. I'm passing this blog post to a friend who has started playing around with making various types of dessert wines.
ReplyDeleteI've never made wine but I have made sassafras soda. It was all right - not great, but today there are dire warnings about doing it because it can be poisonous. After that venture, we made root beer with a base purchased from Hires.
My husband wanted to try making the harder stuff. We went to the ATF to apply, but by the time we were done reading all the regulations and talking to an agent, we decided against it. At the time, the fee was modest and they did all the testing for you to be certain it was "safe". But the regulations were enough to make it almost impossible for the average person to attempt.
A fun post, Kathleen. Brought back memories. Muscadine grapes grew along the fence line in the country where our grandmother lived. Grandma caught the boys trying to smoke the grape vine and put a stop to that real quick. My brother and his friends while in high school, made a batch or two of wine. They put it under the house covered with one of Mama's good dish towels.
ReplyDeleteLoved the excerpt.
That's interesting about muscadine wine. My husband works in a winery, and I'm always curious about the process.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever had Muscadine Wine. Are these the same as Mustang Grapes--typically found along fence lines in North Texas. I'll have to look up the difference--I know more about Mustang Grapes than any other. Mother made grape jelly with theme, and she'd give me a gallon jar of juice, ready to make jam. Yum.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had at least tasted this wine.
I have wild plums in my yard, but I've never harvested them. The fruit is about the size of a nickel. The plums would probably make some tasty jam, but it would require a lot more effort than I'm willing to expend. The blossoms are so pungent with a sweet aroma that it makes you dizzy when all the trees (actually more like shrubs) are in full bloom.
ReplyDeleteIf they are Damson plums, they make great jam and jelly! Totally foolproof! That was my first foray into making jellies. I just didn't understand that everything else wouldn't thicken as they did because they are filled with pectin! Ah, the things we learn as we go.
DeleteEven more intriguing than the wine (which was mighty interesting) is the quinine in the excerpt. I did not know it was such a precious commodity during the Civil War.
ReplyDeletePop made several failed attempts at trying to make wine. We have a lot of wild Muscadine grapes here. Ours are not the dark kind though. Of course, I could have the type wrong. Anyway, I remember the skin of the grapes were so tough we used to pop the grapes out of their skins to eat them. Birds and bees loved them, too, so we had to get there as soon as they were ripe. Sheesh, nothing as sour as unripe grapes, except maybe unripe persimmons.
Thanks for the wine recipe, Kathleen. I can't imagine drinking up 200 gallons of wine in a year. Mercy!
I've been missing you, so I was doubly happy to see your blog.
Wow, too cool. I love this sort of info. I wish I could follow up on the wine making, but my circustances don't allow it. Yeah, a lot of people are also using that alcohol limit to produce alcohol as a fuel... a lot of cars can be tweaked to run on pure alcohol, for example.
ReplyDeleteIf every family was producing alcohol like this, commercial fuel consumption would be down quite a bit ... thus, saving the environment.
Thank you, for the old recipe. Fascinating. I wonder if you can use organic raw sugar instead?
WONDERFUL EXCERPT! I could feel and see the scene.
There isn't space to tell you about my husband's experiment with making wine. We'd had some excellent wine while visiting friends of friends in England and my husband thought that sounded like a great hobby. Let me just say that the result was less than he'd hoped. ;-)
ReplyDeleteNow I know where you've been, you rascal! You've been making moonshine! Oh, um, wine. Thanks for the history lesson!
ReplyDelete