Home › Wines, Champagne and Doctoring › The Cause of Muddy Champagne

The Cause of Muddy Champagne

The Cause of Thick Muddy Champagne.

The Germans, to give strength to their common wine, add a little potato sugar, which is speedily converted into alcohol. When this second fermentation has been care lessly conducted, and the wine afterwards used for making champagne, it is evident that when more sugar is added, a slow fermentation will ensue in the bottled wine, which will become thick or muddy.

PART XII.

How to make the Best Cordials.

THE materials employed in the preparation of liquors or cordials, are rain or distilled water, white sugar, and clean, perfectly flavorless spirit. To these may be added the substances from which the flavor and aroma are extracted which distinguish and give character to the particular cordial to be made, and also the articles employed as "finings" when artificial clarification is had recourse to. In the preparation or compounding of cordials, one of the first objects which engages the operator's attention is the production of an alcoholic solution of the aromatic principles which are to give them their peculiar aroma and flavor. This is done, either by simple infusion or maceration (see "Infusion," etc., page 28), or by maceration and subsequent distillation (see " Distillation," page 18), or by flavoring the spirit with essential oils. When essential oils are employed to convey the flavor, they are first dissolved in a little of the strongest rectified spirit of wine, and when added to the spirit, they are mixed up with the whole mass as rapidly and as perfectly as possible by laborious and long continued agitation. The stronger spirit may be reduced to the desired strength by means of clear soft water, or the clarified syrup used for sweetening. The sugar employed should be of the finest quality, and is preferably made into syrup before adding it to the aromatized spirit; and this should not be added until the latter has been ren- (189)