No. 3707

Clarifying Wines

Collage des Vins

Clarifying is not only for the purpose of rendering wines clear, but also to free them of any dissoluble matter which might precipitate later.

To Clarify Red Wines.—To clarify a cask of wine containing two hundred and twenty-five quarts, beat up partly five egg-whites with half a bottleful of wine; take out eight quarts of wine from the cask, pour in the clarifying matter and insert a stick split in four; move this about in every direction for two minutes so as to mix in the whites well, then refill the cask with the eight quarts previously extracted, and finish filling with wine or water; put back the bung. Five or six days after the wine should be clear, but in case it is not sufficiently so draw all the wine off into another very clean cask and reclarify once more the same as before, leaving it five or six days; it can then be drawn.

To Clarify White Wines.—White wines are clarified with fish isinglass. Beat with a hammer a quarter of an ounce of the isinglass, tear it to pieces, cutting it apart with a pair of scissors, then soak it for eight hours in sufficient wine to cover; when swollen, and it has absorbed all the liquid, pour over as much as before and leave it for twenty-four hours; then add half a pint of hot water; stir this about to crush, then press forcibly through a towel. Beat it with a whip, pouring a little white wine slowly over until the entire solution makes one quart of liquid. Before pouring it into the cask beat it up with three pints of white wine and finish the same as the red. The egg-whites or isinglass can be replaced by prepared powders.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is cellar work rather than cooking: collage is fining, the addition of a protein that binds to tannins and haze-forming particles and drags them to the bottom of the cask. Almost everything here still holds; the quantities are the part that needs translating.

The cask size is almost certainly litresThe cask size may well be meant as litres -- Ranhofer wrote out of a French tradition in which the standard Bordeaux barrique holds 225 litres, about 59 US gallons -- though "two hundred and twenty-five quarts" is itself about 213 litres, so the dose works out much the same either way. Five egg whites for a barrique sits inside the traditional Bordeaux rate of roughly four to six whites.
Scaling downFive whites per 225 L works out to about one white per 45 L, so a little over a third and closer to half a white for a 5-gallon (19 L) carboy. Beating one white with a little water and a pinch of salt and then measuring out the fraction needed is the usual way round the problem of dividing an egg.
A quarter ounce of isinglassThat is about 7 g for the same 225 L, or 0.03 g/L. Modern isinglass is sold as a pre-hydrated liquid or fine powder, so the eight-hour soak, the twenty-four-hour swell and the pressing through a towel are no longer needed; follow the supplier's rate, which will be in the same ballpark.
Do not top up with waterThe instruction to "finish filling with wine or water" is a nineteenth-century cellarman's convenience. Water dilutes the wine and lowers its alcohol and acid, both of which protect it. Top up with the same wine, or with an inert gas headspace.
The hinge: dispersion, then stillnessThe two minutes of vigorous stirring with the split stick exists to distribute the protein through the whole volume before it starts to coagulate. Once it is in, the cask must not be disturbed at all, or the flocculated matter breaks up and stays in suspension.
Racking is the point"It can then be drawn" means racked off the sediment, not left sitting on it. Fining lees left in contact for weeks can redissolve or give off-flavours; move the clear wine to a clean vessel once the deposit is firm.
Temperature and timeFive or six days is realistic in a cool cellar around 50-55F. Egg-white fining is slower and less complete in a warm room, and warmth also raises the spoilage risk in an unsulphured cask.
What isinglass and "prepared powders" are nowIsinglass is dried fish swim bladder, historically sturgeon; it is still sold for beer and white wine. The "prepared powders" of 1894 have been largely replaced by bentonite clay, gelatin, casein and PVPP. Egg-derived finings must be declared as allergens in the EU and UK if residues remain, though isinglass is exempted from that labelling; neither is vegan.
Fining is not filteringThis will drop haze and harsh tannin; it will not remove live yeast or bacteria. A wine that is cloudy because it is refermenting will not be fixed by egg white.

A Little History

Collage — literally "gluing" — is the French cellar term for fining, and the egg-white method Ranhofer describes was the standard treatment for red Bordeaux through the nineteenth century, when a working château had both barriques and a steady supply of eggs. The whites' albumen binds preferentially to the harshest tannins, which is why the practice was valued as much for softening a young red as for clearing it; the leftover yolks are traditionally credited with the popularity of canelés in Bordeaux, a story usually told without documentation. Isinglass, from sturgeon bladders and long imported from Russia, was preferred for whites because it clears without the tannin-stripping that egg white causes. That The Epicurean carries the instruction at all says something about Delmonico's: Charles Ranhofer expected the house to buy wine in cask and manage it in its own cellar, bottling, fining and decanting on the premises rather than taking delivery of finished bottles.