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How to Fine and Preserve Wine
THE following recipes for the treatment and fining of wine we feel confident will prove generally useful to the merchant and manufacturer.
If there is one species of knowledge more essential to a wine merchant than another, it is a perfect acquaint ance with the most wholesome, safe, and efficient treat ment of his wines.
These recipes are not the product of mere theory, or founded on other books on the subject, but are the result of above twenty years' extensive and uninterrupted experience in the management of wines, aided by the instruction of which the author had the advantage in early life from celebrated wine growers in Europe.
To fine Wine difficult to clarify, or thick in consequence of an Imperfect Fermentation. To clarify 60 gallons. Take 1 oz. of the species of Dock or Rumex plant, called patience root, which boil in 1/4 gal. water. When cold, filter, and add 1 oz. common salt, then 1 glass of sheep's blood. Beat all the ingredients well together with a broom until the mixture foams up well, then add it gradually to the wine, stirring continually while pouring it in, and for 15 minutes afterwards. In a few days the wine will be clear. (168) • •
This is a cellar procedure rather than a kitchen one: a fining, meant to drop haze and suspended solids out of a barrel of cloudy wine. It cannot be carried out as written, chiefly because of the blood.
- Raw blood is the disqualifying ingredientA glass of fresh sheep's blood is stirred into wine that is never heated and never pasteurised. Raw ruminant blood can carry Salmonella, shiga-toxin E. coli, Campylobacter and Coxiella burnetii, and wine at 11-13% alcohol does not reliably kill them on the timescale described.
- Blood fining is no longer permittedDried blood as a fining agent was prohibited in the European Union in the wake of the BSE crisis of the 1990s and is not among the fining agents authorised in the United States. It also rules out any vegetarian claim.
- Patience rootRumex patientia, patience dock, a garden sorrel relative grown in Europe as a pot-herb. Like other docks it is high in oxalic acid and contains tannin; the tannin may be what was doing the work here, helping the protein in the blood to flocculate.
- The quantities are unusable"1 glass" of blood is not a measurement, and the water quantity has been mangled in printing to "+ gal." — probably a half gallon. A fining is dosed by trial in a graduated sample before it goes near the bulk; a recipe that specifies neither dose nor a bench trial is not one to scale up to 60 gallons.
- What the process was actually doingProtein finings generally work the same way: a positively charged protein binds negatively charged phenolic and colloidal material and settles it out. Blood, egg white, gelatine, casein and isinglass are all variations on this. The vigorous beating with a broom was there to disperse the protein evenly before it hit the wine.
- If you have cloudy wineConsult current winemaking practice and an approved agent — bentonite, isinglass, casein, egg white or PVPP — with a bench trial to set the dose. Do not adapt what is written above.
Blood fining is one of the oldest clarifying methods in European cellars, and the author's "twenty years' experience" and his training under "celebrated wine growers in Europe" are a fair signal of how ordinary it was: sang de boeuf, bullock's blood fresh or dried to a powder, was a standard article of the Bordeaux and Burgundy trade well into the twentieth century. Books of this sort — manuals aimed at the merchant and the "manufacturer" rather than the grower — sat in an uneasy place between legitimate cellar craft and frank adulteration. Fining itself is legitimate work, and always was. What ended the blood era was not taste but epidemiology: bovine spongiform encephalopathy led the European Union to strike blood products from the list of permitted oenological agents in the 1990s.