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Port Wine Filter (Ton flannel to prevent)
ton flannel, to prevent the liquid being filtered from coming with too much force upon the cotton. When 15 or 20 barrels of wine have passed through the cotton, take the depth of two inches from the top of it. This should be done, to remove the impure matter lodged in it.
Fig. 2 represents another Port wine filter, and is similar in construction to Fig. 1. It, however, differs a little in arrangement.
A and B are double bottoms, fitting in tightly, and perforated with 4-inch holes, with a space of eight inches between each bottom. B should be fitted in and covered with canvas, and, above the canvas, with a layer of cotton batting one inch thick, and then with a bed of cleanly-washed sand, three inches deep. Above the sand, and covering it, place a piece of flannel, C, and, above all, powdered charcoal four inches deep. Then fit in A, and cover it with Canton flannel. PART XI.
ON THE QUICK METHOD OF MANUFACTURING CHAMPAGNE.
French Champagne.
IN France, Champagne is made of a light, dry, white wine. In the fermentation, the carbonic gas not being allowed to form sufficiently, or fully develop itself in the cask, it is quickly reproduced in the bottle: the saccharine principle renews its progress toward alcohol; and, if the latter be sufficient to prevent the decay of the wine, the quality is good. This wine does not effervesce in uniform times. Some kinds will do so in a week or two; others will be months before the signs appear. If a wine shows no sign the first year, it is mingled, the next year, with new wine, known to possess the effervescing principle. After some time, the manufacturer adds about five per cent of a liquor composed of equal parts of sugar candy and white wine. This insures the formation of the gas. The wine is disgorged (decanted), and, after the disgorgement, or cleansing out of the sediment, the bottle is filled up with fresh wine, or the above mentioned liquor. A little brandy is usually added to wine for exportation. French Champagne does not contain over 60 degrees of gas, and does not average more than 45 degrees.
American Champagne.
The process of making American and imitation French champagne is one requiring great care, especially in producing a not only clear, but bright wine. 184 TO PREPARE ISINGLASS FOR FINING WINES.
Full directions are given below for making the necessary syrup, mixing the ingredients, fining, filtering and gassing; including a number of receipts for different kinds of champagne. A careful attention to the instructions laid down will produce wines which will compare favorably with the best genuine importations. To make a Filter for Champagne Wines.
A filter for wines is usually made of felt, shaped like a cone or sugar loaf; those without any seam are the best. A lining of paper pulp is prepared in the following manner : Tear from 2 to 4 sheets filtering paper into small pieces and put it into a pail ; pour over it a little boiling water, sufficient, by thorough beating, to form a fine smooth paste; then add sufficient water to fill the filter. Pour this quickly into the filter, and, 5 minutes after the water has drained through, fill up with the wine to be filtered, taking care to keep the filter always full. To make Syrup for Champagne Wine.
To 25 pounds white sugar, add 2 gallons water and the whites of 4 eggs; stir until the sugar is dissolved. Let the whole simmer to the candy degree; then strain it through a bag made of fine flannel.
To prepare Isinglass for Fining Wines.
Cut up some isinglass (it must be of the very best quality), and put it in a jar, with just enough wine or water to cover it ; add daily as much of the wine or water as has been absorbed by the isinglass. In 6 or 8 days it should be completely dissolved, forming a thick fluid mass. Squeeze it through a linen cloth and put it into a bottle, adding 4 or 5 per cent. of 95 per cent. alcohol to make it keep. For 40 gallons
This page is really three things at once: the tail end of a filter-building diagram, a descriptive note on how Champagne was made in France, and two working preparations — a clarified sugar syrup and a dissolved isinglass fining. Only the last two are things you make; the rest is workshop reference.
- Canton flannelA stout cotton flannel napped on one side, standard in nineteenth-century filtering because the nap slows the flow. Any heavy unbleached cotton flannel, washed to remove sizing, does the same job.
- The perforated bottoms"Perforated with 4-inch holes" is almost certainly a typesetting loss of the fraction; a false bottom eight inches above another, carrying sand and charcoal, would be drilled with quarter-inch holes. Four-inch holes would hold nothing back.
- Cutting back the cottonThe instruction to skim two inches off the top of the cotton bed after fifteen or twenty barrels is the maintenance step for the apparatus. The text gives the reason simply as removing "the impure matter lodged in it": the surface of the bed is where the lees collect.
- The cone filterThe seamless felt cone is what earlier books call a Hippocrates' sleeve or chausse. The paper-pulp lining is a sacrificial pre-coat, an ancestor of modern precoat filtration; the instruction to keep the filter always full presumably guards against the pulp bed drying and channelling.
- "The candy degree"Genuinely ambiguous. In period confectionery it can mean anything from about 240F to the hard-crack stage near 310F, and a dosage syrup boiled to hard crack would set solid. Read it as reducing until the syrup is heavy and clear rather than as a specific thermometer reading.
- Syrup proportions and yieldTwenty-five pounds of sugar to two gallons of water is a very heavy syrup, well past simple syrup, and yields close to four gallons before reduction. The egg whites are a raft: they coagulate as the syrup heats and carry scum to the surface, and the flannel bag catches what is left.
- IsinglassCollagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and related fish, not gelatin and not agar. It is still sold to brewers and winemakers, though bentonite clay and vegetable proteins are now common alternatives. Six to eight days of daily topping-up is normal - isinglass swells rather than dissolves quickly, and heat ruins it.
- 95 per cent alcoholA preservative dose, about a twentieth of the volume, to keep the finings from spoiling on the shelf. Use a food-grade neutral spirit; laboratory or denatured alcohol is not interchangeable.
- "Degrees of gas"Not a temperature but a measure of the gas the wine carries; period trade texts read sparkling-wine pressure on an aphrometer. The scale behind the figures of 45 and 60 is not defined here, so they cannot be converted with confidence.
Manuals of this kind circulated widely in the United States from the 1850s onward, offering rectifiers and bottlers methods for producing wines that would pass as imported, and "doctoring" covered everything from legitimate fining and filtration to outright imitation. The description of French practice here is broadly accurate for the period: secondary fermentation in bottle, the long wait for a wine to show its effervescence, dégorgement to expel the sediment, and the topping-up dose of sugar-and-wine liqueur that the trade calls the dosage. What follows it is the American shortcut, aimed at producers who wanted the result without the years. Isinglass, meanwhile, was one of the oldest fining agents in the wine and beer trades, imported largely from Russian sturgeon fisheries and expensive enough that the insistence on "the very best quality" may plausibly be read as a caution against adulterated stock, though that is inference.