Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/388

374 In the youthful days of chemistry the first of these methods of cookery was the only one available, and wine was kept by wine-merchants with purely commercial intent for a considerable number of years.

A little reflection will show that this simple and original cookery was very expensive, sufficiently so to legitimately explain the rise in market value from tenpence to five shillings or more per bottle.

Wine-merchants require a respectable profit on the capital they invest in their business—say ten per cent per annum on the prime cost of the wine laid down. Then there is the rental of cellars and offices, the establishment expenses—such as wages, sampling, sending out, advertising, losses by bad debts, etc.—to be added. The capital lying dead in the cellar demands compound interest. At ten per cent the principal doubles in about seven and one third years. Calling it seven years, to allow very meagerly for establishment expenses, we get the following result:

Here, then, we have a fair commercial explanation of the high prices of old-fashioned old wines; or of what I may now call the "traditional value" of wine.

Of course this is less when a man lays down his own wine in his own cellar in obedience to the maxim, "Lay down good port in the days of your youth, and when you are old your friends will not forsake you." He may be satisfied with a much smaller rate of interest than the man engaged in business fairly demands. Still, when wine thus aged was thrown into the market, it competed with commercially cellared wine, and obtained remarkable prices, especially as it has a special value for "blending" purposes, i. e., for mixing with newer wines and infecting them with its own senility.

But why do I say that now such values are traditional? Simply because the progress of chemistry has shown us how the changes resulting from years of cellarage may be effected by scientific cookery in a few hours or days. We are indebted to Pasteur for the most legitimate—I might say the only legitimate—method of doing this. The process is accordingly called "Pasteuring. It consists in simply heating the wine to the temperature of 60° C = 140° Fahr., the temperature at which, as will be remembered, the visible changes in the cookery of animal food commences. It is a process demanding considerable skill; no portion of the wine during its cookery must be raised above this temperature, yet all must reach it; nor must it be exposed to the air.

The apparatus designed by Rossignol is one of the best suited for