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To Improve Claret Wine
or two of yeast, or a few bruised vine leaves are also mixed in, the cask being placed in a moderately warm situation until the new fermentation is established, when it is removed to the wine-cellar, and, after a few days, fined down.
To Remove Mustiness from Wine.
The disagreeable taste in wine, generally known as mustiness, is occasioned by the presence of an essential oil. This may be removed by adding a little sweet or almond oil, and then violently stirring the wine for some time. The fixed oil attracts and seizes on the essential oil and rises with it to the surface, when it is easily skimmed off, or the liquid under it drawn off. A few slices of burnt or toasted bread, or a little bruised mustard seed, or coarsely powdered charcoal, will often have the same effect.
To Remove the Taste of the Cask from Wine or Beer.
The remedies for this malady are the same as those for mustiness. In the case of a large and valuable vat of beer thus affected, on which we were consulted, we recommended agitation with three 4 lb. loaves of bread, cut into thin slices, highly toasted (scorched), and then crumbled in the hands. The effect was most satisfactory, and almost immediate; the beer was sold within a fort night, and highly approved of.
To Improve Claret Wine.
To 54 gallons Bordeaux wine, add six gallons Cata lonia wine. You will then have a first quality wine.
The titled recipe here is a blending formula, not a cooking process: a tenth part of a strong southern red stirred into a barrel of Bordeaux. The surrounding entries on the page are cellar remedies rather than recipes, but a few of their terms need decoding too.
- The whole recipe is a ratio54 gallons to 6 gallons is 9:1, or 10 percent by volume. At bottle scale that is roughly 675 ml of Bordeaux to 75 ml of the darker wine — worth trying in a glass before committing anything larger.
- "Catalonia wine"Not a grape but a trade category: deep, high-alcohol red shipped from northeastern Spain as blending stock. The nearest things on a modern shelf are Garnacha or Cariñena from Priorat, Montsant or Terra Alta — pick the ripest, darkest bottle you can, since colour and body are the point.
- "First quality" is a market claimThe blend adds alcohol, colour and glycerine weight to a thin vintage. It does not add structure or length, and a good modern Bordeaux will only be muddied by it.
- Sweet oil, in the mustiness entry"Sweet oil" is plain olive oil; "almond oil" here means the bland expressed oil of sweet almonds, not bitter almond flavouring, which contains cyanogenic compounds and is not interchangeable.
- Fining downTo fine is to clarify with an agent that drags haze to the bottom — egg white, isinglass or gelatine in this period, bentonite today. "A moderately warm situation" is the author's only guide for restarting fermentation; no temperature is specified.
- Charcoal and toastBoth entries rely on adsorption, and both still work: activated carbon is a standard winery treatment for off-odours. It also strips fruit and colour indiscriminately, which is why it is used in grams per hectolitre rather than by the handful.
- Legality, if you sell itBlending wine from two countries and calling it Bordeaux is now prohibited under EU appellation rules. As a private experiment it is harmless; as a label claim it is fraud.
Nineteenth-century wine merchants treated blending as a normal part of the trade, and manuals like this one were written for the cellarman rather than the drinker. Bordeaux in poor years produced pale, sharp wine, and the standard fix was coupage with something stronger from the south — Spanish reds from Catalonia and Alicante, Rhône wine from Hermitage (the practice of "Hermitaging" claret is well documented in the English wine literature of the period), and later vast quantities of Algerian red. The phylloxera crisis of the 1870s and 1880s, which gutted French production, made such imports indispensable and the doctoring manuals correspondingly frank. Such doctoring was discussed openly before appellation law: France's controlled-origin system dates only from the 1930s, and until then a cask of "Bordeaux" was whatever the shipper had decided to make it.