Home › Wines, Champagne and Doctoring › To Charge Champagne with Gas
To Charge Champagne with Gas
wine to be fined, take 1 wine-glassful of dissolved isinglass, add a little wine and a pinch of salt, and beat to a froth with a whisk, adding by degrees sufficient wine to make the mixture up to 1/2 gallon. When foaming, pour it slowly into the wine, stirring till all the fining is incorporated with the wine. Isinglass thus prepared and used will precipitate completely; and, after a few days, the wine will be bright. Too much care cannot be taken in the preparation of fining, as even the finest isinglass contains fibrous matter which dissolves with difficulty; this is very apt to remain suspended in the wine, and is not visible until developed, after bottling, by the gas with which the wine is afterwards charged.
To Prepare Champagne Wine for Charging.
Put the wine used to make the champagne into a cask, add the brandy spirit, the aroma or flavoring, and the syrup, and stir for 10 minutes. Every day for 4 days draw off 15 or 20 gallons of the mixture and pour it in again; let it rest 4 days more, then add the fining, stir for 10 minutes, and bung up the cask. In 3 or 4 days, if bright, draw off slowly, so as not to disturb the lees. Filter (see champagne filter, already described), and it is ready for the fountain of the gassing apparatus. To Charge Champagne with Gas.
Matthews' apparatus is the one usually adopted in the United States for generating the gas and charging champagne wine. The fountains, tubes, and valves are silver-lined, and the machines are adapted for pint and quart bottles. The following is a proper charge for a No. 2 apparatus with 2 fountains: Charge the generator with 9 gallons water, 6 gallons ground mar-
This is not a kitchen recipe but a page from a commercial imitation-champagne shop: fine the base wine, sweeten and flavour it, then force carbon dioxide into it under pressure from an acid-and-carbonate gas generator. The text breaks off mid-sentence, and what it describes cannot be reproduced safely at home.
- The gas generator is the problemA Matthews-type apparatus made carbon dioxide by dripping sulphuric acid onto ground marble or whiting; the truncated line "6 gallons ground mar-" is almost certainly marble. The text breaks off before the acid is specified, but handling sulphuric acid on this scale, and the acid mist and spent sludge it leaves, is industrial chemistry, not cookery.
- Pressure without measurementNo pressure is stated anywhere, no gauge, no relief valve, no bottle-testing regime. Nineteenth-century sparkling-wine cellars lost a real fraction of their stock to bursting bottles, and workers wore wire masks for the reason you would expect. Modern bottles, closures and cages are matched to a known pressure; nothing here is.
- Silver lining was not decorationThe fountains, tubes and valves are specified as silver-lined, though the text does not say why. Carbonating apparatus of the period was commonly lined with silver or tin because carbonated water attacks base metal and lead and copper salts can leach into the drink. Improvised tubing and fittings would risk putting dissolved metal straight into the finished bottle.
- "Doctoring" means what it saysA built wine -- The wine is being made from a base wine plus brandy spirit, syrup and a purchased "aroma or flavoring" whose composition is unstated and unknowable. Period flavouring compounds could include materials no longer permitted in food.
- Isinglass, for referenceIsinglass is a collagen fining agent from fish swim bladders, still used in some breweries and wineries. The warning about fibrous matter is sound: undissolved fibres stay invisible in still wine and show up as haze once the wine is carbonated.
- The measurements do not resolveA "wine-glassful" in this period is roughly 2 fl oz, but "sufficient wine to make the mixture up to gallon" is missing a number in the original and cannot be reconstructed. Fining rates are normally set by trial on a sample rather than by a fixed volume.
- If you want sparkling wineUse a current, tested method: bottle conditioning with weighed sugar and pressure-rated bottles, or a food-grade CO2 cylinder with a regulator. Follow a modern source that gives pressures and quantities.
This page belongs to the late nineteenth-century American trade in manufactured "champagne", in which cheap still wine was fined, sweetened, flavoured and then artificially carbonated rather than fermented a second time in the bottle. The apparatus named is generally credited to John Matthews, the New York maker whose carbonating fountains built the American soda-water industry from the 1830s onward; the same acid-and-marble generators that charged drugstore seltzer were turned to wine. Books like this one were written for the men running such shops, and their frankness is striking: the instructions set out plainly how to prepare champagne wine for charging and how to charge it with gas, with no pretence that the result had ever seen Reims. The trade fed a market that wanted the bottle, the wire and the foam at a domestic price, and it was one of the practices that pushed American and European regulators toward labelling and adulteration laws in the decades either side of 1900.