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To Improve Wine by Electricity
140), and add 5 gallons of Grave's wine. This will make an excellent sauterne.
To make Hock.
To 55 gallons of wine by fermentation add 5 gallons harsh German wine. The addition of a little infusion of sage gives a very fine Rhine wine bouquet. This is prepared by infusing sage in 95 per cent. spirit. To Improve Wine by Electricity.
The process consists in plunging into the vat containing the wine, two plates of platinum or of silver, having attached to them two wires of the same metal, which are connected with the poles of an electric battery. The Bunsen and Daniell's batteries are much used in France for this purpose. The time necessary to transform a low grade wine to one of an agreeable and superior quality, is from two to three weeks, with the battery continually working. By this method, wines which were considered only fit for making vinegar, are changed to such an extent that they are used as good, and in some cases superior table wines. (See page 120.)
This page is two things at once: a pair of blending formulas for imitation Sauternes and Hock, and a bench process for running an electric current through bad wine. The blending notes are legible enough; the electrical process cannot be reproduced safely and is described here only so the text makes sense.
- Why the electrical process failsSilver electrodes in an acidic, chloride-bearing liquid can corrode, and some silver is liable to end up in the wine, much of it as insoluble silver chloride that racking will not reliably clear. There is no dosage, no current specified, no way to know what has been dissolved into the wine or what the electrolysis has produced at the electrode surfaces.
- The batteries themselvesA Bunsen cell is a carbon-and-zinc arrangement worked with nitric or chromic acid; a Daniell cell runs on copper sulphate and sulphuric acid. Both are open wet cells sitting beside an open vat of wine for two to three weeks. Spillage and creeping electrolyte were routine hazards of nineteenth-century battery work.
- Wine "only fit for vinegar"Wine that has turned is usually carrying acetic acid bacteria, and may carry other spoilage organisms besides. There is no reason to think passing a current through it removes the spoilage compounds. The premise of the process is cosmetic.
- Gallons and vatsThe 55:5 ratio is simply one part corrective wine to eleven parts base. A "vat" here would be a wooden cask or tun, not a lidded modern tank.
- Grave's wineA misspelling of Graves, the gravel-soiled district south of the city of Bordeaux, then as now a source of dry white made from sémillon and sauvignon blanc. The book is using a firm, mineral white to give backbone to a thin base wine sold as Sauternes.
- "Harsh German wine"The book does not define the term; it most likely means high-acid, low-ripeness Rhine or Mosel wine, cheap and used as a hardening agent. It is not a retail category you can order; the nearest equivalent is a very dry, high-acid riesling.
- 95 per cent spiritNear-neutral rectified alcohol, sold at the time as cologne spirit. Modern grain spirit at 190 proof is restricted or unavailable in many jurisdictions, and a sage tincture made in it is a flavour concentrate, not a drink.
- What the sage is doingSage carries thujone and other aromatic terpenes, which the author evidently thought would pass for a Rhine bouquet. This is flavour counterfeiting rather than winemaking, and it is the clearest sign of what kind of book this is.
The electrical treatment of wine belongs to an enthusiasm for applying the new galvanic batteries to almost every trade problem, food and drink included, on the theory that a current might accelerate the softening that time and cask normally provide. The context matters more than the process. The French Wine and Liquor Manufacturer, which first appeared in the 1850s and went through many later editions, was a working manual for merchants who bought thin, damaged or simply cheap wine in bulk and sold it under prestige names, and pages like this one sit unembarrassed between recipes for imitation Sauternes and Hock because there was as yet no law obliging a bottle to contain what the label said. In the United States that changed with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; in France, the phylloxera crisis of the 1870s and 1880s had already flooded the market with fabricated and stretched wine and provoked the first serious fraud statutes. Books of this kind were made obsolete by both.