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Foreign Wines (To Restore Pricked British)
To Restore Pricked British Wines.
Rack the wines down to the lees into another cask, where the lees of good wines are fresh; then put a pint of strong aqua vitæ, and scrape 1/2 lb. of yellow beeswax into it, which, by heating the spirit over a gentle fire, will melt; after which dip a piece of cloth into it, and when a little dry set it on fire with a brimstone match, put it into the bunghole, and stop it up close. Another Method.
First prepare a fresh empty cask that has had the same kind of wine in which it is about to be racked; then match it, and rack off the wine, putting to every 10 galls. 2 oz. of oyster powder and 1/2 oz. of bay-salt; then get the staff and stir it well about, letting it stand till it is fine, which will be in a few days; after which rack it off into another cask previously matched, and if the lees of some wine of the same kind can be got, it will improve it much. Put likewise a quart of brandy to every 10 galls., and, if the cask has been emptied a long time, it will match better on that account; but, even if a new cask, the matching must not be omitted. A fresh empty cask is to be preferred.
This method will answer for all made wines.
This is a cellar-repair procedure rather than a recipe for making something, and it belongs to a period when a cask of spoiled wine represented weeks of work and real money. Several of its steps are unworkable, and one of them is genuinely dangerous, so the notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the whole is best left on the page.
- What "pricked" meansA pricked wine is one that has begun to turn to vinegar: Acetobacter bacteria, feeding on alcohol in the presence of air, producing acetic acid and ethyl acetate. It is a one-way reaction. Nothing added to the cask reverses it, and the fining and racking described here only mask a fault that will keep advancing.
- "Matching" and the burning clothTo "match" a cask is to burn a sulphur-dipped strip inside it, filling the empty barrel with sulphur dioxide to kill spoilage organisms. The version here goes further, soaking a cloth in spirit and beeswax and setting it alight inside a sealed bunghole. Burning sulphur in an unventilated space releases enough SO2 to cause severe respiratory injury, and the dose reaching the wine is entirely uncontrolled: sulphite levels in finished wine are regulated for good reason, and this method measures nothing.
- Aqua vitae and the fire hazardAqua vitae here is any strong distilled spirit, roughly brandy strength or above. A pint of it heated over a flame with wax, then ignited and pushed into a confined wooden vessel, is a fire risk before it is anything else.
- Oyster powderGround oyster shell, chiefly calcium carbonate, used to reduce acidity. The two ounces per ten gallons given here is a fixed dose for a correction that would need measured titration to mean anything.
- Bay-saltCoarse sea salt made by evaporation in pans and bays, nothing to do with bay leaves. The fraction before 'oz. of bay-salt' is missing from the text as given here, as is the weight of beeswax in the first method.
- Racking and leesRacking is siphoning clear wine off the sediment into a clean vessel; the lees are that sediment, mostly dead yeast. Racking onto the fresh lees of a sound wine was a real practice, and it does add yeast character, but transferring lees between casks also transfers whatever spoilage organisms the donor was carrying.
- If the wine is sourThere is no safe home fix. Sound wine is not a pathogen risk, but a cask that has gone acetic should be written off or left to become vinegar deliberately. For sulphite handling in home winemaking, follow a current winemaking guide with measured additions in parts per million.
"British wines" in Mackenzie's day did not mean wine grown in Britain from grapes; the term covered the whole class of domestic country wines fermented from currants, gooseberries, elderberries, cowslips, parsnips, ginger and raisins, made in households that could not afford duty-paid imports from France, Spain and Portugal. Such wines were fermented with wild yeasts and stored in reused casks, so acetification was the standard failure and remedies for it were a routine part of a general household compendium. Sulphur matching of casks is old, and it was regulated in central European winemaking by the late Middle Ages; it survives today in the far more controlled form of measured potassium metabisulphite additions. The rest of the entry -- oyster powder, bay-salt, and lees borrowed from a neighbouring cask -- reflects a trade in which a spoiling barrel was worth almost any intervention that might make it saleable.