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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
This is a cellar procedure from the wine-doctoring trade rather than a kitchen recipe, and several parts of it fall outside what a home winemaker can safely or legally reproduce. The notes below explain what the operations were, and where they break down.
- What a sulphur tape isA strip of linen or cotton about an inch by seven, stiffened with melted sulphur, lit and hung inside an empty cask so the burning sulphur fills it with sulphur dioxide. Modern equivalents are pressed sulphur discs or potassium metabisulphite solution, and both are dosed by measurement rather than by burning an unweighed rag.
- The dose is unmeasuredOne tape per sixty-gallon cask says nothing about how much sulphur the tape carried or how much dissolved into the wine. Sulphur dioxide in wine is now regulated in parts per million and measured by titration; a burn of unknown weight can leave a level that is both wildly variable and, for sulphite-sensitive drinkers, dangerous.
- Burning sulphur in a confined spaceThe gas produced is a severe respiratory irritant. In a garage or basement the concentration coming back out of the bung-hole is a real hazard.
- The acid rinseCleaning a suspect cask with lime-water, then dilute sulphuric acid, then boiling water is a chemical procedure, not a food one. Sulphuric acid is not a domestic cleaning agent, and a cask that fails the burning-tape test is simply a cask to retire.
- Watering and fortifyingThe neighbouring instruction to stretch sixty gallons of wine with twelve to fifteen of water plus a gallon of 95 per cent alcohol is adulteration for sale, and adding neutral spirit to wine is a regulated operation in many jurisdictions. Rain water collected from a roof should not be assumed potable without treatment.
- "Sugar of potatoes"Glucose syrup made by acid hydrolysis of potato starch, sold in the period as a cheap fermentable. The modern analogue is chaptalisation with cane or beet sugar, done to measured Brix before fermentation rather than tipped into finished wine.
- Deoxidising the fermentThe chemistry as stated is period reasoning. Sulphur dioxide does not "deoxydize the ferment" so much as bind free oxygen and acetaldehyde and inhibit the yeast and bacteria directly. The observed effect — arrested fermentation — is real, but the explanation is not.
- Red wine and colourThe warning holds. Sulphur dioxide bleaches anthocyanins, so a heavily sulphured red goes pale, usually recovering some colour on aeration. This is why the trade reserved heavy sulphuring for whites.
- If you want to stop a fermentUse a current winemaking text with measured sulphite and sorbate additions, or chill and rack. The procedure above should be read rather than followed.
Manuals like this one sat on the shelf of the wholesale wine dealer rather than the vigneron, and the book is admirably frank about its purpose. "Doctoring" covered everything from legitimate cellar corrections to outright stretching of a cask with water, sugar and spirit, and the boundary between the two was largely a matter of who was buying. Sulphuring casks is far older than the book: burning brimstone wicks in barrels is documented in European cellars from at least the fifteenth century, and the Catalonia wine mentioned here was, it is generally said, one of the strong, cheap southern reds and whites shipped north in bulk, probably because it travelled well and could be blended down on arrival. The volume dates from the era before pure-culture yeast and reliable analysis, when a merchant's control over fermentation was largely a matter of sulphur, cold and racking, and the tape test was a practical piece of cellar wisdom that survived long into the twentieth century.