Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Clean Champagne Baskets
Imitation French Champagne. 40 gallons white Bordeaux wine; 1 gallon muscat wine; gallon old cognac brandy; and 4 gallons syrup made of 25 pounds sugar and 2 gallons water. (as directed on page 184). In this receipt a little tincture of vanilla, or a small bottle of enanthic bouquet, may be used instead of the muscat wine. They may be omitted altogether if aroma is not desired.
Cheap Champagne. 13 gallons California wine; 13 gallons white Bordeaux wine; 13 gallons water; 1 gallon 95 per cent. French spirit; 1 quart raspberry syrup, and 4 gallons syrup made of 25 pounds sugar and 2 gallons water (as directed on page 184). Or, 20 gallons Catawba wine; 20 gallons water; 2 gallons Angelica wine; 2 gallons 95 per cent. French spirit, and 4 gallons syrup as before.
The Bottling Machine and Safety Guard.
MATTHEWS' BOTTLING MACHINES, for filling bottles with champagne and other liquids under pressure, are now made with the patent safety screen, which prevents accidents so frequently caused by the explosion of the bottle, and are unequaled for durability and rapidity of operation.
To Strengthen Champagne for Bottling.
To strengthen the wine, rinse each bottle with a little cognac brandy when bottling. If desired, a bouquet may be added at the same time.
To Clean Champagne Baskets.
When the baskets are dirty, wash them with muriatic acid, and water, by means of a brush.
This page is a cluster of trade formulas for faking champagne, plus two workshop notes — one on bottling under pressure, one on scrubbing the shipping baskets with acid. Several elements of it are simply outside what a modern kitchen or home cellar can or should do.
- Muriatic acid is not a cleaning productMuriatic acid is hydrochloric acid, sold in the period at roughly 30 per cent strength for masonry and metal work. Brushing it onto baskets that will hold bottles of something people drink puts a corrosive mineral acid in contact with drink packaging, and the fumes attack the eyes and airway in an enclosed room. The receipt says only "muriatic acid, and water" -- no proportion is given.
- 95 per cent spirit"French spirit" at 95 per cent means near-azeotropic neutral alcohol — about 190 proof. It is a trade ingredient, restricted or unavailable to individuals in most jurisdictions, and dosing it by the gallon into wine is blending on a commercial scale rather than cooking.
- Bottling under pressureThe advertisement for the safety screen is the tell: charged bottles burst, and the shards travel. Champagne bottles and wired closures exist for this reason, and ordinary glass will not hold it.
- VolumesThese are not household quantities. The imitation formula runs to about 45 gallons including syrup; the two cheap versions to roughly 44 and 48 gallons. There is no useful way to scale a wine blend down and still be doing what the book intends.
- Ingredients that have vanished or changed"Enanthic bouquet" is oenanthic ether, a distilled wine-aroma concentrate once sold to blenders. Angelica is a fortified sweet California wine, still made but rare. Catawba is an American labrusca grape, once the backbone of Ohio and Finger Lakes sparkling wine and now a minor variety. "White Bordeaux" here most likely means cheap bulk wine rather than anything finer.
- What the book is actually doingThese formulas make a low-value base wine pass as something else. Selling the result as champagne would today be a labelling offence in the EU and the UK, and is tightly restricted in the US. If sparkling wine at home is the goal, use a current winemaking text with measured sugar additions and pressure-rated bottles.
Manuals like this one belong to a distinct nineteenth-century genre: trade handbooks written for wholesalers, saloon-keepers and rectifiers, telling them how to build a saleable product out of cheap bulk wine, sugar syrup, neutral spirit and a few drops of aroma. They circulated freely in the decades before food and drink labelling law had any teeth — in the United States, before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 — and the frankness of the language shows how ordinary the practice was thought to be. The paid notice for Matthews' bottling machine with its patent safety screen is a reminder that the real hazard of the business was mechanical: bottles charged with sugar and sealed by hand exploded often enough to justify a guard and an advertisement for one. The final line about the baskets is a warehouse instruction that drifted into a book of formulas.