Most wine-wise people know that modern, commercial wines are made through many corrections and with the use of countless additives in order to shape a product that fit with a particular taste and targeted market. These corrections and additives (about which the consumer is kept in the dark by the wineries) are the main difference between a mainstream wine and a natural wine,
the latter being just the result of fermenting grapes (that are organic in general) with nothing added except a little bit of SO2
(and sometimes not even any SO2).
Well, that's modernity you would say, and the price to pay in a world where economic efficiency encourages to allow oneself a few profitable shortcuts and abdications in terms of ethical considerations... It's always difficult to set a date in the past about when wine began to get corrected and doctored, we all know that the Romans added lots of stuff (without hiding it, though) in order certainly to preserve it, but somehow i was itching at believing that until somewhere in the mid/late 20th century, our wine was pretty immune to the correction frenzy thanks to the fact that the chemical industry that creates these oenological products didn't exist. Well, that's the way I tought until I discovered this 250-year-old book...
The title of this book is Dissertation sur les Vins, it dates from 1772, which was 2 years after Louis XVI began to reign and 17 years before the country would embark on the rough and uncharted waters of the French revolution. On the opening words below the title (pic on top) it says it all : Ouvrage dans lequel on donne la meilleure manière de les préparer, celle de les conserver, les moyens de les amériorer, de prévenir & de remédier aux
altérations auxquelles ils sont sujets, & où l'on fait connoître les pratiques de
ceux qui les frelatent. or in my quick English translation "This book recounts the best ways to
prepare them [the wines], to preserve them, to better them, to prevent and cure the alterations they're subjected to, and this book unveils the practices of those who adulterate the wines". The last sentence being probably the equivalent of a clickbait intended to attract potential counterfeiters looking for doctoring recipes...
Then the preamble states that this book is anonymous [on the title page the author is named as M.***] but suggests that the author spent time working with wine dealers in France, England and Holland where he learnt the trade, and we owe all this trove of informations to the experience and insight he collected during that time. It then praises the usefulness of this book in the matters of economy & commerce of wine and for the useful tips for the advancement of oenotechcnie [the term back then in 1772 for oenology I guess]. You'll notice that the word Oenologistes was also in use already at the time (page 124 for example), and the English-speaking nations still use this term, while in France it has for some reason turned into Oenologues.
I can't but think that the author may have prefered to remain anonymous because he may have had a high ranking in the society of his time and that a book on the pleasures of wine, on oenological issues (and on its doctoring by various tricks) would have tarnished his reputation for dealing with such mundane topics, and pretending to have worked in the wine merchant and négoce milieu might be a deceiving trick not to be discovered...
The introduction to begin with is an ode to pleasure and wine which perspires a long experience in the matter, and we'd be pleased by the way to find more often such lyrical prose nowadays, where wine is intellectualized and reduced to a cold description through its organoleptic characteristics. Read this quick translation of mine, and remember, these words were written somewhere before 1772...
[...] It is the unique
priviledge of wine to be able to bring everywhere vividness and joy, it loosens the tongue, opens
the mind and makes the heart burst with songs, while the other drinks, either natural or artificial, like beer, cider, poiré, tea, coffee, chocolate and many others are for most of them serious & taciturn drinks which leave the man prisonner of melancholy. There's no lavish food where wine is absent : it alone can go with exquisite dishes, nothing can replace it. Nothing else can console for his absence : it does another good, by chasing away sadness and dark thoughts; it spreads serenity on foreheads; it softens the most embittered hearts; Wine thus becomes the the mediator of reconciliations, the most graceful, the most insinuating & the most easy to find. We can say tha it is one of the most engaging links in society; it is yet one of the most powerful supports of the man at work, either because it helps him begin to work with joy, or by making him find new strength when fatigue occurs. Bread puts man in a position to act; but wine gives him courage and makes his work pleasant. The soul which was until then buried in deep melancholy seems to come back to life thanks to its help, turning outward; wine it gives agility in the feet and puts expressions of joy in the mouth : all the miseries are forgotten, the soul gets feelings of vigor, no more gripped by timidity which made it see only sorrows, it opens to hope & resolution.
Wine is such a friend of man that it varies its taste depending of his mood. Are we in good health ? wine delights the nose, the tongue and the stomach, it seems to give us advice of his proportion to all our needs. Are we sick ? it will then change the enchanting fairy into an unbearable bitterness, as if to warn us obligingly that it will increase in us the alteration and disorders.
Chapter I begins with informations on the Roman Empire's wine regions, which implied they understood the notion of terroir, they had among the most delicate wine from Italy the Selinum, the Coecubum, the Falernum, the Albanum, the Surrentinum and the Massicum, plus foreign ones coming from Greece & Lebanon, very interesting also but I'll pass. But further down I saw it says in a curious way why certain wines have a better preservation, pointing to parameters (on page 13-14) like the higher concentration of Phlegme crud which it says are the oily parts of the must and other alchemy-sounding notions, but beyond the unchartered vocabulary there may have been something close to an oenological approach to these observations.
We read also that Pline the Elder observed (this was in the year 633 after the foundation of Rome __Rome was founded 753 B.C.) that the Romans kept their wines in open cellars (celliers) exposed north, but we read at page 14-15 that for the strong & high-alcohol (vigoureux & spiritueux) Polyphorom wines they kept the barrels outside under any weather including sun and rain, the weaker wines being kept underground (dans une fosse). It is said that the high quality wines like the Polyphorum had a 3-year élevage in cool places but keeping them longer was turning them sour. The Greeks and the Asians Asiatiques, [a word meaning Lebanon or the wider Middle East at the time] were experts in keeping and preserving their wines a long time, and Pliny the Elder says he kept wines until they were more than 100 years old, adding that they had thickened and turned into a creamy texture like honey's, so that you has to add water to be able to drink them.
Then the news, back then in the Roman times the wine was also stuffed with all kind of junk in order to "preserve" it (hard to guess if it still tasted anything close to wine after that...) :
The Romans prepared their wines this way : when stomping their grapes they'd poure the flowing juice and must into a wooden, circled fermenter, then after it had fermented the right time [obviously on wild yeast] they'd put the juice in barrels where it would keep fermenting, adding then [take a seat] sulfur, plaster, lime, or chalk, or dessicated sand (?!), or marble dust, or dry salt, or resin, ot new-wine lees, or raisins, or sea water, or myrrh, or aromatic herbs or other similar substances of the same kind, in volumes they judged fit, every country having its own recipe which Romans called conditura vinorum.
It further says that these additives had two goals, the epuration of the wines (the fining I guess) and the preservation. Chalk, marble powder and sand would clear (fine) the wine, bringing thicker particles down while the other (plaster, sulfur, lime, salt & sea water) had in surplus attenuating properties (for preservation I presume).
César Constantin an ancien Greek agronomist whose Books on Agriculture were printed in France in 1550 is said to advise winemakers to add a finger of salt water at the top of the barrel when almost full. The same Greek agronomist says that for the same purpose of conservation it is wise to add crushed almonds, also some soft olive oil. Elsewhere the same author tells to add clay along crushed almonds, apparently to speed the fining, and he also advises to use egg whites which (these are the words of this 1772 book] proves that the use of this means is very ancient.
The wines were kept in their barrels until the following spring at least, and for the stronger wines it could last 2 more years, then the wines were racked into clay vessels (vases de terre) which were coated inside with melted pitch. The name of origin of the wine would be marked on the outside, with as well the name of the Consul under which it was made. The Ancients chose very carefully the time to do this racking (named in Roman diffusio vinorum or vina diffundere), choosing the season depending of the strength of the wine and they'd do it only when the wind was coming from the north, never when it came from the south, and they'd never do it under a full moon.
[...] Page 22 : After having filled these clay vessels (named Amphora or Cadus depending of the shape & volume) they'd store it in the highest room in the house, exposed south, this room being named Apotheca, the goal being to let the humidity in the wine evaporate, and the wine being exposed to heat, fire and smoke these rooms were also named Fumarium because the room was exposed to the smokes coming up from the rooms downstairs. These wine could keep for 200 years, acquiring along the years a texture similar to honey
Then comes a couple of pages (24-25) dealing about the issue of choosing the picking time in a French region in the 1770s', and it's so stunning because all our familiar debates are already there, about the right maturity and challenges if you pick earlier or later. The author says that nowhere is the issue more debated than in Champagne [the bubbly had been invented a few years earlier but I guess the majority of wines then were still wines]
The barrels and fermenter being ready, it's up to determine the precise time to pick the grapes in order to make a good wine. Nowhere else is the attention more focused on the issue than in Champagne, this is a capital matter for them, at least when they want to make a white wine from a red grape, if the grapes are too ripe and they get thus an inferior wine, or if the grapes dodn't reach a sufficient maturity.
When you pick up too early you get green wines, and too late you get wines that are lacking strength, two faults you try to prevent. Several agronmists think we should never leave the grapes ripe too much. Mr Bourgeois thinks differently, noticing that there is a precise maturity point when you need to pick the grapes in order to get softer the first year but it will lack the firmness it woulmd have had if the grapes had been picked a bit earlier. This clever oenologists advises to do 2 pickings if you want to get an appreciated wine. He admits that this method is longer but it's less exhausting than picking all at once and being obliged on generous vintages to pick night and day; it would be cheaper also for the vigneron because with 2 pickings he could rely on smaller teams, almost without expenses using his family and only a few day laborers. Plus pickers would work faster because there'd be much fewer rotten grapes that slow the picking.
There are several signs that tell when grapes reach the right maturity and are ready to be picked :
A few pages further down (31-32) you find a few unorthodox explainations on how Champagne wines get their bubbles (at least this is the way a specialized wine writer understood the process in 1770), it's not very scientific in the modern sense of the term (the morning dew on the grapes is behind all these bubbles...) but it's beautiful and very poetic, so I print the old-French text here (pretty close to modern French except that "s" are replaced by"f") :
On doit choifir pour vendanger, un jour où le Ciel foit fans nuage, le foleil ardent, la chaleur vive & forte, afin de donner le tems au foleil de diffiper la rofée & le brouillard. Le froid que tous deux impriment à la vendange, retarde les premiers mouvemens de la fermentation. On fuit exactement cette méthode pour tous les vins rouges dans tous les cantons de Bourgogne, du Maconois, du Beaujolois, de Côte-rotie, &c. La méthode oppofée eft suivie en Champagne feulement pour les vins blancs, afin de les obtenir parfaitement clairs & tranfparents; on vendange avant le foleil levé, ou au moins avant qu'il ait diffipé la rofée & le brouillard. On regarde cette rofée comme une des causes qui rendent ces vins fi mouffeux, parce qu'elle contient un nombre de fois très-confidérable fon volume d'air. Le Champenois ne met pas ce vin blanc fermenter dans des cuves, comme cela fe pratique à Poilly, à la Charité fur Loire, &c. Il perdroit une partie de fon air furabondant dans cette fermentation. Les tonneaux font bouchés avec des feuilles au moment qu'ils font pleins; quelques-uns les rempliffent feulement aux trois quarts & les bouchent exactement, il ne s'échappe donc fur-tout de ces derniers, qu'une légère partie de l'air furabondant, & l'autre refte combinée dans la liqueur; d'ailleurs on met ce vin en bouteilles en Mars ou en Août, temps auquel la fermentation infenfible fe renouvelle. (Le vin mis en bouteilles en Mars, eft plus mouffeux que celui qui eft mis au mois d'Août, & fi l'on attend le mois d'Octobre ou de Décembre fuivant il ne mouffe plus). Il arrive de-là que la fermentation infenfible fe continue vivement dans les bouteilles, dont il en éclate beaucoup; que par la fermentation l'air fe dilate; quau moment qu'on débouche une bouteille, l'air qui étoit comprimé, & qui trouve un efpace pour fe débander, fort avec force, en chaffant au loin le bouchon & avec explofion, foulève la liqueur, s'élance du fond de la bouteille en un million de globules, qui éclatant dispersent de toute part la liqueur qui les contenoit.
Translation :
This book opens, at Chapter III a window on the understanding of this time regarding the alcoholic fermentation (fermentation spiritueuse), and it's pretty interesting although Pasteur hadn't put the spotlight on these issues yet. This writer was certainly sounding very scientific in his prose in 1770, borrowing from the specialists and also from the medical lexicon of this era, but there's poetry in there too, sounding almost like alchemy. when read nowadays this all seems very fuzzy and approximate, but we have to remain humble, our modern scientists and our modern understanding on medical issues for example may certainly follow the same fate if compared to the future developments of knowledge...
La fermentation est un mouvement intestin, qui s'exite de lui-même à l'aide d'un degré de chaleur & de fluidité convenables, entre les parties intégrantes et constituantes de certains corps composés, d'où il résulte de nouvelles combinaisons de principes de ces mêmes corps.
Here below the author speaks about several substanes in the fermenting must, named corps muqueux, and one of them (corps muqueux doux) is sugar I think, and the corps muqueux âpre may be tannins, and the other ones seem related to acidity and volatile. It's all reported in a strange way for us and through the understanding of winemakers had in 1770 but you feel the empirical experience of the author.
Le corps muqueux ou mucilage, qui est la seule substance fermentiscible, comme est la seule qui soit nourrissante dans les végétaux; car la substance appellée extrait, & les sels nommés esstentiels avec lesquels ce corps muqueux est uni, ne fermentent point parmi les corps muqueux végétaux. On en distingue quatre sortes principales; le corps muqueux fade ou insipide, l'a&cide ou l'aigre; l'austère ou l'âpre, le doux ou sucré.
Then we'll speed down to Chap^ter IV (page 82) on "the ways to preserve wines, to better them , remedy to the different diseases or alterations they may come through". Let's be frank, I fear the worse, at this point I still beleived the 18th century was still immune to our correction frenzy and perfectionist pursuit of fault-les wines. Time to awake...
We're first told that in order to preserve the vins de Canarie and among them one that is cold the rapé which has trouble to be kept for a long time, they alternate a layer of plaster and a layer of grapes which preserves its taste and its white color, something the English (les Anglois) appreciate a lot. This wine is named this way because it's always mixed with marc and grapes that are often renewed.
With this passage on the clarification of wines (page 86) we learn that the practice used by the Germans & the English [les Allemans & les Anglois] to get rid of sediments in suspension in the wine is very useful as well for the French & Spanish wines.[Recipe :] Take half a pound of fish glue, put it a mug of French wine, the most austere you can find, so that the wine floats above the glue. Let the whole thing macerate for 24 hours, then torn the fish glue into pieces, beat it and add more wine; & after four days we get some sort of jelly; as the jelly is still thick you add some more wine and when it gets the needed fluidity you take a pint volume [about a quart according to this old French measures' page] the practice used by the Germans & the English for 252 pints of wine, and so on in proportion. You take 12 or 16 pints with which you mix the aforementioned volume of jelly; then you put the mix in the vessel & you beat it thoroughly with a stick until the liquor reaches the closure of the barrel, which will not fail to happen if the wine is good. Note that for French wines the vessel must be sealed tightly, which you have to avoid for Spanish wines. Fish glue pushes the sediments at the surface on strong wines, but i a matter of a week it precipitates it to the bottom.
[...]This clarification with fish glue suits better to white wines than red wines, so for the latter the wine merchants prefer to use beaten egg white, mixing it progessively with the wine as previously described with the fish glue. the main disadvantage of this method is its slowness as it needs a week at least to take effect, sometimes 15 days depending of the weather conditions which may be cloudy or clear, windy or quiet. But the wine merchants would be in need of a process that would allow their wines to be ready in a matter of hours. It's been said that the prudent use of a tartarized wine spirit added to the usual clarification substances would make the job as efficiently as plaster or calcined alabaster. But tartarized spirit give bitterness to the wine & is too expensive. Gypsum or plaster alone could make the job with a certain volume added in the barrel with a long stirring, making sure not to fill the barrel to the top.
Here you see that the issue of commerce is to gain time and shorten the process, the wine merchant needs to possibly get his wine reasdy for consumption in a matter of hours vs weeks. Here we are, nothing new, like nowadays for commercial wineries, these merchants were innovative in devising techniques to ship thir wines as quickly as possible.
Here's a piece (page 91) about correcting a wine's color, namely the claret which is as far as I know a pale red. Enhancing and correcting color has certainly been important for winemakers and merchants, already back then you'd gauge your wine by its color. you stil find in the Loire for example varieties that were used to darken the color of pale wines, like Gamay Teinturier. We learn in this book that there were already cellar tricks to enhance the color, something akin to Megapurple (which is engineered using Alicante by the way)...
We correct the color of Claret when it is otherwise in good conditions, in adding red wine, wine from Alicante, or with an infusion of sunflowers, using 8 or 12 pints of wine and putting it in a tightly-sealed vessel which you roll over between a quarter of hour and an hour; we repeat this infusion two or three times depending of the intensity of red you want to give to the wine. About three hours suffice for this sunflower tincture, but you need to and wring it out, the inconvenience of this process being it gives an unpleasant taste to the wine. We correct this problem by letting the sunflower infuse it hot water because the water will take the excess tincture that could harm the wine. When a Claret wine is too dark it is corrected through an addition of white wine.
When white wines become very good, but with a brownish color, we remedy to the problem with the following process : take alabaster powder, take out 8 or 12 pints of wine, put the alabaster into the barrel, stir energeticly the wine with a stick and pour the wine back.
Take powdered Iris Florentina & saltpetre, four ounces from each; egg whites, 8 of them, add enough salt to make some sort of pickle mix; add the whole thing to the wine & stir with a stick.
We take four pounds of almonds of the best quality and make an emulsion of it in a sufficient quantity of wine. We take the whites & the yolks of twelve eggs, beating them together with a handful of salt. You mix the whole and pour it in the barrel, stirring it like said before.
For a barrel of wine take a pound of honey, a handful of edelflowers, an ounce of Iris Florentina root powder, a nutmeg, a few cloves (1 : all these drugs having volatile elements it's better not to boil them or at least only very shortly). Have this boiled in a sufficient volume of good quality wine until the volume is halved. When the mix gets cold, press it and pour it in the barrel, making sure to stir the liquid. Some people add a bit of salt as well. In case this wine is sweet enough, we can add a pound of wine spirit; this volume is enough for a barrel of 252 pints of wine, this gives a nice scent to the barrel, the wine spirit giving strength to the wine, making it perly and clarifying it. The ashes from vine canes, when added to the wine, corrects its impurities, the proportion being one pint for a muid & a half of wine . You can get the same effect using oak ashes
I found that interesting chapter on page 96 which hints at the fact that Rhine wines (and from the northern latitudes in general I guess) tended to referment in june, their fermentation stalling during the cold winter I guess. These chapters on foreign wines tells also a lot about the exchange & commerce of wines throughout Europe in the mid 1700s.
Fill the vessel, or rack the wine in another barrel, or also just aerate it with taking away the bung and covering the hole with a slate; clean the slate and the opening each time they're covered with impurities; when fermentation is over,
which we can know by putting the ear near the opening, leave the wine quiet for ten to twelve days, in order to leave time for the lees to deposit. After that time, rack the wine in another, newly-perfumed barrel.
And a few pages down (page 102), I found these things about heating the German wines :
Here there's one of the correcting recipes below that uses things you place in a small bag and which you then hang in the barrel, floating in the wine in order to infuse it with its medicine; that's the very technique used for oak chips nowadays in commercial wineries, this proves small bags holding a variety of correcting agents have been used for a long time centuries ago, possibly since humans began making wine...
Take a barrel of 126 pints, ten eggs; make a tiny hole in the eggs at both ends &
put them in the wine and this will suffice.
Take a sufficient quantity of grains of paradise, grind them & just put them in the vessel, or put them in a small bag which you'll hang in the vessel. Some people use lavender heads instead.
Fill a barrel with oak chips (oak makes the best chips), fill then the barrel with as much wine it can contain; in 24 hours your wine will be clarified. The Dutch call the vessel intended for this purpose "een spaen", which means barrel for wood chips. It has to be done with a lot od care, otherwise it's rare it succeeds.
Some put a pint of vinegar for 250 pints of wine, this way the clarification takes three days.
I stumbled (page 109) on a recipe for Hypocras, this wine-based mixture commonly found centuries ago and about which I wrote a bit in my last story. Interesting to find a direct source from 1772 for Hypocras, makes you want to reproduce it and gauge the result.
Here is an Hypocras made my way and the best I ever tasted. Take half an ounce of Cardamon and Carpobalsamum, then prepared coriander seeds, nutmeg, ginger (two ounces of each), grind them & have them infuse for eight hours in Spanish wine & white wine, four pints of each, stir the whole & add a pint and a mug of milk; heat the resulting liquor & sweeten it with a pound of candi sugar.
Here (page 110) as it's told pretty frankly, this is a recipe to make "artificial wine" (we would say fake wne today), with all the details... And I guess this wasn't a prohibition era but people had big needs in terms of booze, needs that the local production couldn't cope with, and the original versions were certainly expensive as well. I found out a pot (old French volume unit) makes 2 liters.
here on page 118 comes another sub-chapter devoted to the clarifying (fining) of the wines, reading these lines is eye opening, they did really manipulate their wines with all kind of additives & substances back then, fish glue, crushed tartar, egg whites, plaster, mortar, sawdust, sand, gum arabic. Note that the author repeats now and then that it doesn't harm the wine, as if eager to convince a skeptical reader...
We have different methods to clarify turbid wines; some use ann array of means and employ diverse things, but those who do it the best follow for white wines the Champenoise method & for red wines the Burgundian method. They use fish glue to clarify white wines, two ounces for four hundreds pots & a bit of crushed tartar. For the reds they use egg whites & a bit of prepared tartar. We understand that none of these ingredients can harm the wine, especially if we are careful to rack the wine as soon as it is clarified & not take the lees with the wine, or use mason plaster or mortar [as filter I guess]It resists best than anything to the agression from the air, especially if it's mixed with sawddust or thin sand. I will just warn not to consider clarifying a dull or ladle wine after hot weather and also in apin the case the cellar is extremely cold or the wine very old.
The wine merchants who have wines that turn sour are in a great embarrassment, because the fermentation that caused this sourness cann't be demoted. They add diverse drugs to hide and soak up this sourness. The alkalis & absorbent clays can do this job but these substances have the disadvantage to give the wine a dark, greenish color and a taste which, if not sour anymore isn't enjoyable. By the way the limestone earths accelerate the total wasting & bring the wine in some sort of putrefaction. However the latter disadvantage would be of little consequence, giving that it is a maxim known by all oenologists that corrected wines have to be drunk quickly. Some of them propose to use tartar salt in small quantity, others use the rob made with the must, these latter means appearing to better than the others.
When you'll have emptied them, let them drip for two days, then burn two or three sheets of sulfur paper; a few days later burn again the same amount of sulfur paper. If you fear that the barrel isn't entirely dry, repeat the operation.
This way, a barrel can be kept healthy very long, & to use it without running the risk of giving a bad taste to the wine, just rinse it with clear water to get rid of the old sulfur. If you fear leaks, use boiling water, or after using clear water, burn strong brandy inside which will inflate the vessel and put the barel staves back in their natural place. I think yopu know this has to be done carefully so as to avoid any unfortunate accident.
Here I found this chapter very funny, the author explains how to doctor & correct a wine that is already artificial but has a bad taste or smell. In short, the idea here is to give another layer of additives and dubious mixtures in the wine in order to make the wine more drinkable. That sounds very similar to what many wineries do today, with wines that are faulty largely because of an unbalanced viticulture and which are thus re-corrected through the large paraphernalia of oenological products....
From page 135 to 179 make sure you read (if you understand some French) the lengthy explanation about how Champagne wine is made, it's a mine of information on the winemaking for Champagne in 1770, no room (and time) here for more translation alas...
Read Dissertation sur les Vins directly on Google Books
it brings closer step by step people in conflict
who become charmed to see each other with an open mood and without confusion : no more anger in their eyes, they find each other likeable & hate gives way to the reborn friendship.
If we consider the sum of all the benefits we get from wine, we'll not be surprised to learn that its use began with the beginning of this world and that the Ancients made so much effort to make this drink.[...]
We learn that Dioscoride writes about the adding of sea water that sometimes it would be added with the grapes as soon as picked [reminding the modus-operandi observed nowadays to add sulfur on picked grapes before pressing]. Sometimes the grapes would be first put to dry under the sun, stomped and then the sea water would be added. Others would first dry the grapes under the sun, then put them in a barrel to macerate with sea water [early carbonic maceration ?] and would stomp/crush them later, these sort of wines were called vina marina (Roman translated from Greek). In regions far from the sea they'd use brine instead of sea water and do the same.
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__ When the vines lost much of their leaves
__ If the stem lost its green color and turned brown
__ When berries are easy to detach from the stem
As long as the stem is green it means that plentiful and unripe sap is still flowing to the berries, making it too watery, not sweet enough and it begins to turn into a sweet mucus when the sap flow is slowed by the dryness of the stem, leaving only a tiny amount of it to the grapes. With the dwindling sap, heat clears up the excessive foliage on the vine, accelerating the sweet mucus concentration and by consequence the quality for the wine.
Whe have to choose for the harvest a day without clouds, with bright sun and vibrant heat, in order to leave time to dissipate the dew and the fog. The cold impact they give on the harvest slows the first movements of fermentation. We follow this method for all the red wines in the cantons of Burgundy, Maconnais, Beaujolais, Côte-Rôtie etc... The opposite method is applied in Champagne for the white wines only, in order to keep them clear and transparent; we pick before the sun goes up, or at least before it dissipates the morning dew and the fog. We look at this dew as one of the causes making these wines so bubbly, because it contains a multiple number of its air volume. The Champenois doesn't put this white wine to ferment in vats, like it is done in Pouilly-sur-Loire or La Charité-sur-Loire, etc. He would lose a part of its compressed air [air furabondant, hidden in the dew] in this fermentation. Instead the barrels are sealed with leaves when they're full; some only fill the barrels only at three quarter and seal them tightly so that only a smal part of the compressed air gets away, the reste remaining combined with the liquor : beside, we bottle this wine in march or august, during which the secondary fermentation (fermentation insensible) takes place. The wine bottled in march is more bubbly than the one bottled in august & if we wait the following october or december it doesn't fizz anymore. It happens that the secondary fermentation continues strongly in the bottles, many of them exploding; because of the fermentation, the air expands; when we open a bottle, the air that was compressed find room to expand, strongly and with force, chasing away the cork & with an explosion, stirring up the liquor which jumps from the bottom of the bottle in a million globules which in exploding disperse all arouund the liquor that contained them...
I'll just look here at a fraction of this chapter but I'm sure that those of you that are into winemaking and have a basic understanding of French will love browse through this chapter, it's a mine of information on how winemakers handled their fermentations. I'll reprint here the "scientific" description of the fermentation process without translating it, many of you will still understand, and if weird it's at least very poetic (I'll just type s instead of f to make the old-French text more understandable):
Toutes les matières végétales & même animales qui contiennent un corps muqueux ou mucilage; c'est à dire, une quantité d'huile & de terre subtile, rendue parfaitement soluble dans l'eau par l'intermède d'une matière saline, lorsqu'elles sont étendues dans une certaine quantité d'eau pour avoir de la liquidité ou au moins de la molesse, qu'elles sont exposées à une chaleur depuis quelques degrés au-dessus de lma glace jusqu'au 25 & au delà, & que la communication avec l'air ne leur est pas absolument interdite, éprouvent d'elles mêmes un mouvement de fermentation.
Mais cette fermentation générale & les nouveaux composés qu'elle produit diffèrent beaucoup, tant par leurs propriétés que par leurs proportions, suivant l'espèce particulière de substance dans laquelle la fermentation a eu lieu, & suivant les circonstances qui ont accompagné cette fermentation.
En effet, on distingue trois espèces de fermentation ou trois degrés dans la fermentation, relativement aux trois principaux produits qui en résultent, par où certaines substances végétales peuvent assez promptement passer.
La première s'appelle la fermentation vineuse ou spirituelle, parce qu'elle change en vin les liqueurs qui l'éprouvent, & qu'on retire de ce vin un esprit inflammable & miscible, & dont la nature & les principes mixtifs ne sont pas encore bien connus.
La seconde, appellée acide, est une continuation ou un renouvellement de la fermentation spiritueuse, qui en change & dénature les principes & donne une liqueur acide. Elle differe de la fermentation spirituelle du vin. 1° En ce qu'lle ne dépose point de tartre. 2 °. Elle recombine dans le vin le tartre qui s'y étoit formé auparavant, & qu'il avoit précipité dans la lie ou contre les parois du tonneau. 3 °. En ce qu'elle ne contient point d'esprit ardent. 4 °. Ses vapeurs ne sont pas meurtrières comme celle de la spiritueuse. le vin qui a subi ce degré de fermentation se nomme vinaigre.
La troisième appellée putride, est celle qu'éprouvent les liqueurs qui ont passé par la fermentation spiritueuse & par la fermentation acéteuse. On ne reconnoit plus le goût, la couleur qu'elles avoient dans les premières. Leur produit est tout différent, elles donnent un sel alkali volatil. Il faut observer qu'il y a des moûts de si mauvaise qualité que souvent ils passent à la fermentation acéteuse, sans avoir presqu'éprouvé la fermentation spiritueuse; qu'il y a également des vins si peu riches e"n principes, qu'ils éprouvent la fermentation putride sans que l'on se soit apperçu qu'ils aient subi la fermentation acéteuse.
Le muqueux fade (comme les gommes), soumis à la fermentation devient légèrement acide & bientôt après pourrit. Un vin où pareil muqueux domine est très sujet à pousser, ou pour mieux dire, à pourrir. Le premier produit mobile qui s'élève dans la distillation d'un pareil vin est de l'alkali volatil & ne donne pas d'eau de vie.
Le muqueux acide (comme le suc de groseilles; de citron etc.) à qui ont fait éprouver la fermentation se soutient quelque temps dans cette acidité & passe plus lentement à la putridité que le muqueux fade, parce que toutes les substances végétales acides contiennent plus ou moins en même-temps du muqueux doux, qui est le réservoir d'où la nature tire les esprits ardens. Après que le muqueux a fermenté il en donne; après que le muqueux acide a fermenté il en donne peu; & et il est démontré que plus une liqueur (qui est parvenue à l'acidité par le second degré de fermentation) a contenu d'esprit ardent dans le premier, plus elle le soutient longtemps dans le second état & tourne moins promptement à la putréfaction. Par exemple le vinaigre se conserve plus longtemps que le jus de citron; mais pour s'astreindre aux substances déja citées, le jus de groseilles fermenté se soutient plus longtemps aigre que le jus de citron, parce qu'il contenoit plus de muqueux doux, & qu'après la fermentation dans le premier degré, il donne plus d'esprit ardent.
Le muqueux âpre, lorsqu'il a subi la fermentation, produit un vin parce qu'il contient beaucoup du corps muqueux doux; mais ce vin est dur, austère, astringent, en un mot, il conserve toutes les nuances du corps muqueux qu'il a produit. Le genre d'altération auquel ce vin est sujet est l'acidité & la pousse. Si le corps muqueux y domine, l'acidité s'y formera, mais assez lentement & il restera longtemps dans cet état sans se pourrir. Lorqu'au contraire le muqueux âpre y surabonde, il passe promptement à l'état de vin poussé ou tourné, sans passer à celui de l'acide. C'est pourquoi l'on retire de l'esprit ardent des vins poussés & l'on en obtient point des vins aigris, à moins qu'on ne décompose l'aggrégation mixtive du vinaigre. C'est cette existence de l'esprit ardent dans les vins poussés qui les distingue des vins pourris, qui au lieu d'esprit ardent donne de l'alkali volatil.
Here we learn by the way that the English were having a say, certainly because they were important buyers, the vignerons and winemakers already then adapting to the taste of foreign amateurs and to their expertise in terms of preservation for the long distance to the end market overseas.
The 18th century wasn't fair for vegans either (were there any back then ?), using fish glue and also egg white for fining wines, and again for this objectionable trend to want to clarify the wines and get rid of its hazy sediments. This was obviously older that we thought.
Fish-glue sticks must be clear & translucent. To use them, beat them with a wooden mallet, in order to crumble them and ease their dissolution. We put them in a small volume of wine, adding more as the glue gets soaked with the wine. When it is properly diluted you put it in a cloth, you need two pounds of wine on sixty grains of glue. Before putting this mix in the barrel, take two or three bottles & pour delicately, stirring in circles with a curved or split stick that you make go down in the middle of the barrel only. Close the barrel but make a small opening in the wood so that air can come in. Clarification will occur more or less quickly depending of the weather.
Others, in order to accelerate the dilution of the glue, add brandy.Some have the glue soak in water for a day, then after having it melt in a pan, make balls of it which they throw in the barrel.
To clarify with eggs, do like follows : We break around twenty eggs for a muid &
a half of wine, mixing together everything, the shells, whites and yolk,
beating them thoroughly, addig a bit of water if you like. Then put all of in through the opening of the barrel.
Although fish glue can't harm the wine when it's taken out as soon as the proper result is obtaines, I prefer however by far using gum arabic. Here is how I use it : I take, for four hundred pots of wine, two ounces of a nice & clear gum arabic, I reduce it to a powder thin like flour, then I pass it through a sieve; I take four or five pots of wine from the barrel so that there's enough empty space at the top of the barrel. While pouring the gum I stir gently in circles so that the gum spreads all over the surface on the right & left : I put the bung back in place, but with the hand only, not the hammer so as to not accelerate the fall of the gum. We'll not touch it before fifteen days and we'll pour the missing wine over it without need to rack the barrel. What is good with gum arabic is that it doesn't spoil in the wine, it preserves itself and it is is very friendly to the human body & doesn't give the wine any flavor or smell.
[...]
Lead limes having the property to combine with vinegar acid into a salt with a rather pleasant sweet taste which doesnt affect the color of the wine & also has the property to stop the fermentation and the putrefaction, it would make a good remedy against the wine sourness if lead & all its by-products weren't pernicious drugs that cause occasionally colics of the worst kind & death to those who have the misfortune to ingest it & if a publican dared to use such drugs we couldn't but consider him like a poisoner.
Other means are proposed, like what follows, but they can only hide a little & make the wine sourness bearable. these means are sugar, honey or other sweet foodstuffs. And they can work only if the wine is still lightly acidic & if we put a very small quantity, otherwise the wine will get a bittersweet character which wouldn't be enjoyable at all. Mr Bidet pretends it's possible to correct the nascent acidity with mixing a pot of skimmed milk with fifty pots of wine in a barrel and racking it after five days
And for the barrels that got afflicted by mold, stench and musty smells, bring them outside, open them to aerate them, wash them including with hot water if necessary, scrub them strongly with an old broom & expose them to the heat of the sun before closing them back.
The barrels that will have been considered healthy with a nice smell will be cleaned with boiling water in which you'll have dropped some must taken from te press & two generous handfuls of peach leaves, plus half a pound of common salt. Then roll the barrel and shake it strongly, & after having emptied it and drained it, rinse it with fresh water, drain it again and burn two or three sheets of sulfur paper. Only then is barrel ready to receive wine, I mean new wine, because for old wine you don't need the sulfur part, or very little.
The suspicious barrels will get the boiling water treatment liike explained above, with the difference that to the common salt you'll add a quarter of a pound of rock alum or even twice that volume depending of the feared condition of the barrel.
If you suspect that those means will not suffice, you need to use more efficient medicines. Make a fire with vine canes inside the barrel before sanding it down, so that it becomes well perfumed and roasted without being burned; then you'll wash it with hot water in which you'll have put new mustard & crushed fennel. Fill the spoiled barrel with freshly-pressed pomace & leave it there for 15 days; drop in the barrel a bucket of strong & boiling laundry detergent,
close it & roll it until it gets cold. We'll then fill the vessel with clean water and leave it quiet for seven or eight days, or we'll use quicklime,
or boiling new lees coming out an alembic. But as these hot lees stick to the inside when you roll the barrel, you'll have to detach them with a broom or an iron chain. After that you'll give the barrel a nice smell with rinsing them with a couple of hot water in which you'll have infused crushed seeds of coriander, anise & fennel, one ounce of each, etc.
We can use these latter methods for new barrels, but often I just washed them twice with hot water & and another time with this infusuion and it was just fine.
Lexicon for translation of old French into modern equivalents
Old French measures & units metric conversions
This is fascinating! You put some time into the explanations and translations. I love seeing photos of the actual pages.
One thing I have learned living in France is that there's no place whose wines are as strictly regulated. Occasionally someone will try to get away with cheating (such as using grapes from another region, or adding sugar to increase the alcohol content) but there are lots of inspections and it's a big scandal when someone is caught.
By contrast, I went to a tasting in Iowa where one grower proudly spoke of aging his wine for six months in oak. I was impressed that he had invested in oak barrels, but no, he smirked, he used oak chips--"like everybody. Otherwise it wouldn't be profitable." That kind of thing would get you shut down in France.
His wine was abominable, BTW.
Posted by: Taste of France | February 13, 2018 at 09:08 AM