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How to Make Cheap Wines
sentative of every constituent or component of the purest and best wines made from the grape, and cannot be improved. The inferior wines that pass through our custom houses, as the trade well know, are not, in nine cases out of ten, what they are represented to be, but are adulterated and "doctored" before they are shipped here. Wines of an inferior are mixed with those of a superior grade, and in many instances the inferior kinds of foreign wine are flavored and substituted for the more expensive ones. Those who ship such beverages know how to drug and "fix" them for the American market and have them pass off as genuine; and those who buy them to sell again pay great percentages to foreigners for pernicious mixtures, when, by a little application of industry, they could produce pure, healthy, and agreeable imitations of the juice of the grape at less cost, and to the benefit of themselves and their customers.
The wines most subject to foreign drugging and adulteration are the various kinds of Rhenish and Clarets. Much of these which are imported are made by processes similar to that disclosed in these pages.
It is very seldom that one bottle of what could be honestly called "the real article" ever reaches these shores. The question arises whether it is better to do our own work at first cost, or let others do it for us and pay them a profit of at least two hundred per centum for their unnecessary labor.
By the process of wine-making herein described, nothing but a pure and genuine wine is produced, nothing, in fact (cheap as it will be), that will not embrace every excellence said to concentrate in the real foreign grape wine.
Port, Sherry, Madeira, and other wines, may be made by using the above wine for a basis, and adding flavoring and coloring ingredients as will hereafter be described. Apparatus for Making Cheap Wines.
No very expensive apparatus is required for making wine by this process. We will give a description of what is necessary. Fig. 1 is a fermenting cask (a gin pipe), containing from 135 to 140 gallons; A is a tin pipe or siphon, which is inserted in the bung of the cask, air tight, the other end of which dips in the vessel B, which latter should contain water fully four inches deep so as to exclude the air from the wine; CC are holes + inch in diameter to draw off the wine; they should be stopped with wooden spikes four inches long; * D is a door made for the convenience of washing the pipe and letting out the marc. Fig. 2 is the mixing cask, which should be capable of containing 1,000 gallons; E is a tap to draw off the wine; F is a filter, made of felt, placed around the tap; G is another tap to draw off the lees or residue of the wine; H is a hole stopped with a bung. Fig. 3 is a clarifying cask, with a capacity of about 7 or 800 gallons. Fig. 4 (L) represents a tin gutter or trough resting in an upright wooden stand made to receive and support it. This gutter should be slightly inclined to render it more solid, and sufficiently long to serve for five or six fermenting casks if necessary; it would also be much stronger, and therefore less liable to be broken, if it had a light wooden border around it. * The wine may also be decanted with a siphon, which is a good plan.