Important: Safety Warning
This page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This page describes additives or treatments for food or drink that are now known to be toxic and are prohibited in food today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Wines, Champagne and Doctoring › To Restore Sour Wine with Potash
To Restore Sour Wine with Potash
3 weeks, and then immediately bottled, and consumed as soon as possible, for it will never prove a good keeping wine.
To restore Pricked or Decaying Wine.
If the wine is only thick, add 2 pints of milk to every 30 gals. of wine and stir 10 minutes. But if the wine has an inferior taste, or is partly or entirely spoiled, treat it as follows:
Put the 30 gals. wine into a clean cask, then take 2 pints spirit of wine, 95 per cent, 3 oz. common salt, 1 lb. white sugar.
Dissolve the salt and sugar in ½ gal. of the wine, and add the spirit. Then pour the whole gradually into the wine, being careful to stir it continually with a stick during the operation. After the mixture is all poured in the wine, stir the whole for 10 minutes longer. Then add 2 pints of milk and continue stirring 10 minutes more. After some days the wine will be completely clarified and restored. "Pricked" wine signifies wine which has been slightly soured.
To remedy Excessive Acidity in German Wine.
You simply add a little chalk. This mode of correcting the sourness of wine is perfectly harmless, whereas the pernicious practice of using white and vitrified lead for this purpose cannot be too much condemned. Lead in any form is a poison.
To restore Sour Wine with Potash.
To 25 gals. wine, add 4 oz. of potash dissolved in a little water, and stir well with a stick for 10 minutes. 172 "SWEATING IN " AND "FRETTING IN" WINES.
How to treat Wines beginning to Decompose Many persons are unaware of the difference between a wine that is beginning to decompose (called in French the Poux), and that in which the acetous fermentation has commenced.
The Poux appears at the bottom of the barrel while acetification begins at the top.
For the first stage of the Poux the wine becomes thick and has a peculiar taste termed flat.
For the second stage the wine becomes still more troubled, and has the taste of stagnant water.
Finally in the last stage, when the decomposition has reached its maximum, the wine becomes greyish and appears like muddy water. If some of the wine is put into a champagne glass and a pinch of tartaric acid is added, a red color will be produced which will not be the case if the wine is in the state of acetous fermentation.
THE BEST REMEDY FOR THE POUX IS AS FOLLOWS:
As soon as discovered add tartaric acid in the proportion of 14 ounces to every 20 gals. of the wine and let it rest for a few days, when if the wine has not regained its natural color a little more tartaric acid must be added. "Sweating In" and "Fretting In" Wine.
The technical terms "sweating in" and "fretting in," are applied to the partial production of a second fermentation, for the purpose of mellowing down the flavor of foreign ingredients (chiefly brandy) added to wine. For this purpose 4 or 5 lbs. of sugar or honey, with a little crude tartar (dissolved), are commonly added per hogs head; and when the wine is wanted in haste, a spoonfu
This is a cellar-doctoring instruction rather than a drink you make from scratch, and it cannot be followed today. The points below explain what the terms mean and why the procedure fails on its own terms.
- What "potash" meant hereIn nineteenth-century trade usage potash usually meant crude potassium carbonate leached from wood ash, though the word was sometimes applied loosely to caustic potash, potassium hydroxide. Neither is a food ingredient, the strength of any given lot was unknown, and the crude article often carried metal and sulphate impurities.
- The dose is blindFour ounces to 25 gallons is offered without any measurement of the wine's actual acidity. Deacidification is a stoichiometric operation: the correct addition depends on titratable acid and pH, both of which this book has no way to determine, so the result is as likely to be a badly overshot wine as a corrected one.
- Raising pH invites spoilageNeutralising acid pushes the pH up, and above roughly 3.8 a wine loses much of its protection against lactic acid bacteria and other spoilage organisms. The treatment that is supposed to rescue the cask can make it more vulnerable than before.
- Souring is not a fault you can subtractA pricked wine has already been worked on by acetic acid bacteria. Neutralising the acetic acid leaves the acetate salts, the ethyl acetate and the bacterial population in place; the sharpness is masked, not removed.
- The surrounding advice is worseThe surrounding advice is no better -- the same passage prescribes 95 per cent spirit of wine, common salt, sugar and milk for wine "partly or entirely spoiled", and tartaric acid for wine said to be decomposing; salicylic acid, borax and formaldehyde also appear here as preservatives. None of the latter is permitted in food or drink today.
- The lead aside is genuineThe author's condemnation of "white and vitrified lead" for sweetening sour wine was warranted; lead acetate sweetening had a long and lethal history. That a trade manual still needed to argue the point suggests the practice was not yet forgotten.
- If you have sour wineTreat it as vinegar or discard it, and take any correction of a finished wine from a current winemaking text with measured additions and pH readings.
Before refrigeration, sterile filtration and reliable sulphur dioxide management, a merchant's stock was in constant slow decay, and a manual of this kind had its value in telling him how to hold a cask together long enough to sell it. Some of the vocabulary is French cellar practice carried into English: the text itself says that a wine beginning to decompose is "called in French the Poux", the flat, cloudy, greyish state that begins at the bottom of the barrel rather than at the surface. "Pricked" is the English trade term for slightly soured wine, as the page explains, and "sweating in" or "fretting in" is given as the partial second fermentation used to mellow down added brandy. The tartaric-acid colour test described for distinguishing poux from acetous fermentation is in effect a rough acidification check of the anthocyanin pigments, the same chemistry that makes red wine brighter in more acid solution. Potash deacidification itself survives in modern winemaking, but as potassium bicarbonate or calcium carbonate added against a measured titratable acidity, which is precisely the control this era lacked.