[Sca-cooks] Blueberry/ Gooseberry Wine Documentation?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach "Christine Breakstone" <breakstone_christine at hotmail.com>:

>Good day!
>  I am new to the list. I am looking for documentation for gooseberry 
>wine and blueberry wine. Are these adaptable to period recipes? I 
>believe I found something on the gooseberry wine, but I have never 
>documented anything for A&S entry. Also, I have found "bilberry" 
>juice, so it seems to stand to reason that wine would have been a 
>result of the fermentation of juice. Thanks for your help!
>                                                      ~Christine of 
>Hunter's Home

The first thing that comes to [my] mind is to wonder whether either 
of these berry juices have enough sugars on their own to make a 
palatable and stable fermented product. I don't know about bilberry 
juice (you might also look under blaeberry, but the blueberries we 
tend to get commercially, anyway, are native to the Americas, I 
thought), but gooseberry wine today is made with a considerable 
amount of added sugar, sugar that would have been quite expensive 
prior to the 15th century in Europe and not cheap even after that.

There's a reason why the standard non-imported drinks of the 
countries that didn't grow grapes in period Europe tended to be ales 
and meads. Grape wines only are mentioned in John Lyly's Elizabethan 
poem beginning, "Oh, for a bowl of fat Canary, rich Palermo, 
sparkling sherry..." -- not conclusive evidence, but something of an 
indicator...

While Sir Kenelm Digby does make the occasional foray into non-grape 
wines (and he's writing, or rather published posthumously, in 1669 
CE) with things like cherry wine, also with sugar added in at least 
the first recipe I can think of, the one that I use, I think you're 
probably going to find that the majority of non-grape "country" wines 
are later than the SCA period.

On the other hand, since these fruits are ideal for fermentation with 
added sugar sources, it seems to me that meads, metheglins, pyments 
and fruited ales would be the thing to look for.

I'm cc'ing this reply to a lady I know who has done a great deal more 
research into vintning than I have; let's see if she can suggest 
anything.

Adamantius