Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
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Scuppernong Champagne
ble, and 3 gallons sulphuric acid; put 2 gallons water in the gas washer, and 20 gallons wine in each of the fountains. For a warm climate, a pressure of 70 pounds to the square inch is sufficient. When the wine is made in winter for immediate sale, the pressure may be increased to 80 pounds. Genuine champagne has an average pressure of 50 pounds.
Catawba Champagne.
Take 40 gallons Catawba wine ; 1/2 gallon old cognac brandy; and 4 gallons syrup made of 30 pounds sugar and 2 gallons water (as directed on page 184). Or, 38 gallons Catawba wine; 2 gallons Angelica wine, and 4 gallons syrup as above. A very little tincture vanilla added to either of these makes a fine bouquet.
Delaware Champagne.
The wine made from the Delaware grape, is the best that can be employed for making champagne. It may be used as directed in the foregoing recipe for making Catawba champagne.
California Champagne. 40 gallons California wine ; one quart raspberry syrup; 4 gallons syrup made of 25 pounds sugar and 2 gallons water (as directed on page 184); and 4 gallons water. Or, 20 gallons California wine; 20 gallons Sauterne or white Bordeaux wine ; 1/2 gallon old cognac brandy; with 4 gallons syrup as before. Add to these 10 per cent. of water.
Scuppernong Champagne. 40 gallons Scuppernong wine ; 1/2 gallon old cognac brandy; and 3 gallons syrup made of 20 pounds sugar (as directed on page 184) and 2 gallons water. *
This is a trade formula from the era of "doctored" wine: a base wine sweetened, fortified and then force-charged with carbon dioxide to imitate bottle-fermented champagne. The blending instructions are legible enough to follow, but the process they feed into is not one to reproduce.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenThe sparkle does not come from fermentation. It comes from the apparatus described in the surrounding text — carbon dioxide generated by pouring sulphuric acid onto carbonate, passed through a water washer, and driven into wine held in sealed fountains at 70 to 80 pounds per square inch. Concentrated sulphuric acid gas generation and pressure vessels at that range belong to industrial plant with relief valves and testing, not to a kitchen or home cellar.
- Acid carry-overThe single "gas washer" charged with two gallons of water is the only thing standing between the acid generator and the drink. A saturated or bypassed washer carries acid mist straight into the bottled wine.
- Pressure figuresThe text's own comparison is worth reading: it puts genuine champagne at 50 pounds and recommends 70 to 80 for the imitation. Real champagne runs closer to 70-90 psi, and bottles and closures for it are made to a standard. Charging ordinary bottles to those pressures is how they burst.
- ScaleForty gallons is roughly 200 standard bottles. Every formula on the page is written for a bottling house, not a household.
- Missing quantityThe brandy is given as "gallon old cognac brandy" with no fraction. The figure is simply absent and cannot be recovered from the page.
- The syrupTwenty pounds of sugar to two gallons of water is a heavy syrup; the cross-reference to "page 184" would have covered clarifying and cooling it. At three gallons of syrup in a 43-gallon batch this is a distinctly sweet style, in line with 19th-century American taste for sweet sparkling wine.
- Scuppernong wineScuppernong is a white-fruited muscadine, Vitis rotundifolia, grown in the American Southeast. It is musky and high in pectin, and commercial scuppernong wine today is usually sold sweet — a modern bottle is not the dry base the formula assumes.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a winemaking source, which will specify tested bottles, food-grade CO2 or a secondary fermentation, and measured pressures.
This book belongs to a large 19th-century genre of "manufacturer" manuals written for wine and spirit dealers rather than cooks. American growers could not sell native-grape wine against French labels, so they blended, sweetened, fortified and artificially carbonated it, and the sequence of formulas here reads as a tour of the native vineyards: Catawba from the Ohio valley, Delaware, California, and Scuppernong from the Carolinas. Scuppernong is a muscadine, generally traced to the Scuppernong River in eastern North Carolina, and it was among the earliest grapes cultivated for wine in the English colonies. The frankness about pressure is telling: the author's aim is not to make champagne but to make something that behaves like it when the cork comes out.