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To Remedy Sour Wine
it up well, leaving out the bung one day; then bung it up, and in ten days it will be fit to bottle. If the weather be warm, mix up one pint of silver sand and add to the finings.
To fine Wine, Cider, Ale, or Porter.
Take of finely shredded isinglass, 1 pound, and macerate it in wine, sour beer, cider, or vinegar, add more of the liquid as the isinglass swells until about a gallon has been used, agitation with a whisk being occasionally had recourse to, for the purpose of promoting the solution. As soon as the whole of the isinglass is dissolved, the mixture is reduced to the consistence of thin syrup, with wine or any liquid that the finings are intended for. The whole is next strained through a cloth or hair sieve, and at once reduced to a proper state of dilution, by the addition of more liquor. A pound of good isinglass will make 10 to 12 gallons of finings. 1 to 1½ pints is the usual dose for a barrel of ale or porter; and a quart for a hogshead of wine or cider.
To remedy Sour Wine.
The souring of wine is produced by various circumstances, sometimes from its having been kept in a warm cellar where it has been exposed to draughts of air, often by the vibration occasioned by the rolling of heavy bodies over the cellar; but most frequently it originates from the wine having been imperfectly fermented. The only safe remedy for the solving of wine is the cautious addition of a little neutral tartrate of potash; it may also be mixed with a larger quantity of rich wine of its kind, at the same time adding a little good brandy. Wine doctored in this way should be fined after having stood 2 or
Two linked cellar procedures: making isinglass finings, and treating a wine that has begun to turn. The text is a fragment, opening and closing mid-sentence, so treat the quantities as reference rather than a complete method.
- The hinge: sour wine cannot be un-souredSouring is acetic acid produced by Acetobacter working on the alcohol in the presence of air, and the reaction does not run backwards. Everything described here either masks the acidity (blending with a richer wine, adding brandy) or precipitates tartrates; the vinegar character stays. A barrel far gone is vinegar, and better used as such.
- Neutral tartrate of potashThis is dipotassium tartrate, not the cream of tartar on the spice shelf, which is the acid salt and would make matters worse. Modern winemakers reach for potassium bicarbonate or calcium carbonate instead, dosed against a measured titratable acidity rather than "a little."
- IsinglassDried collagen from the swim bladder of sturgeon and related fish, sold in sheets or shreds. It is still made, at considerable expense, and modern brewers and winemakers generally substitute gelatin, bentonite clay, kieselsol or Irish moss. Isinglass and gelatin are animal products; the mineral and seaweed finings are not.
- Cask measuresA hogshead of wine is about 63 US gallons; an ale barrel in Britain is 36 imperial gallons, a US beer barrel 31 US gallons. So the doses work out to roughly a pint of finings per 30-odd gallons of beer and a quart per 60-odd gallons of wine, which is why a pound of isinglass goes so far.
- Silver sandA clean, fine, iron-free quartz sand, used to weight the fining and drag the haze down faster in warm weather. Modern practice would chill the vessel instead; sand from a garden centre is not food-grade.
- Maceration takes days, not minutesMaceration is slow -- Isinglass swells and dissolves gradually in dilute acid. The instruction to keep adding liquid as it swells, whisking occasionally, implies a process of hours rather than minutes at cellar temperature; the text gives no timing. Isinglass is heat-sensitive, and hurrying the solution with heat costs it fining power.
- Bung out, then bung inLeaving the bung out for a day vents the last of the fermentation gas so the cask does not blow; bunging tight afterwards excludes air. Note that this sentence is the tail of the preceding recipe, not part of the sour-wine remedy.
This reads like the nineteenth-century genre of trade manuals for wine and spirit merchants, though the source itself is unidentified; in such writing "doctoring" carried none of its later sinister ring: it simply meant the cellarman's routine work of fining, blending, colouring and correcting casks that had travelled badly. Isinglass finings were the standard tool, imported in quantity from Russian sturgeon fisheries before cheaper gelatin and mineral finings displaced them. The diagnosis of souring is more interesting than the cure: the writer blames warm cellars, draughts, vibration from carts overhead, and incomplete fermentation, all of which were understood empirically well before Pasteur's work in the 1860s identified the bacteria responsible. The frank advice to blend a sour cask into a larger quantity of sound wine tells you how the trade actually operated, and why the same decades produced a steady stream of adulteration scandals and, eventually, food and drink purity legislation.