The French Wine and Liquor Manufacturer

The liquor trade's own 1868 handbook — stills, cordials, imitation brandies and how wines were doctored, preserved as printed.

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To Stop a Fermentation

To Mix Water with Catalonia Wine.

Twelve or fifteen gallons of water may be added to 60 gallons of good Catalonia wine, providing you also add one gallon alcohol, 95 per cent. For white wine rain water is the best; for all others use distilled water, and if that is not obtainable, boil the water you use.

To Strengthen Light Wine.

When you have a light wine not strong enough, mix in a little sugar of potatoes. This will soon change into alcohol, and of course make the wine stronger.

To Stop a Fermentation.

The Transfer your wine into other casks which have been sulphured, or, in other words impregnated with sulphurous gas, by burning sulphur tapes or matches inside them. These consist of a roll of linen or cotton an inch broad and seven inches long, dipped in melted sulphur, to which aromatic seeds are sometimes added. match is suspended from the bung-hole by a wire, and being lighted, the bung is loosely closed. The air within dilates and escapes through the smallest openings. The action of the sulphurous gas deoxydizes the ferment and therefore arrests fermentation. For a sixty gallon cask one tape is sufficient. The tape should remain in the cask one hour, then remove it and put in the wine. Red wine should never be sulphured as it loses its color by the process. If the tape be extinguished on plunging it into the cask, it is a proof of the cask being unsound, and unfit for receiving the wine; in which case it should be well cleansed, first with lime-water, then with very dilute sulphuric acid, and lastly with boiling water. Fermentation may also be readily checked by the addition

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