Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/693

Rh successive infusion occupying a rather longer time. It will be easily understood that wine thus prepared costs less than very small Leer, though its retail selling price may be regulated by the "étiquette" or label (from which I suppose our word ticket is derived) that is finally pasted on the bottles.

The special bouquets and curious flavors demanded by connoisseurs can be more easily added to mixtures largely composed of these second and third runnings than to simple grape-juice having its own grape-flavor, just as the juniper-flavor is more easily added to "silent spirit" than to whisky or cognac. We may thus obtain a clew to the mysterious fact that the market is well supplied with wines bearing the names of celebrated vineyards, of which the whole produce is bought by special contract by certain Continental potentates. Many of these chateau vineyards are so small that they can not actually produce one tenth of the wine that is commercially derived from them.

Some years ago, while resident in Birmingham, an enterprising manufacturing druggist consulted me on a practical difficulty which he was unable to solve. lie had succeeded in producing a very tine claret (Château Digbeth, let us call it) by duly fortifying with silent spirit a solution of cream of tartar, and flavoring this with a small quantity of orris-root. Tasted in the dark, it was all that could be desired for introducing a new industry to Birmingham; but the wine was white, and every coloring material that he had tried, producing the required tint, marred the flavor and bouquet of the pure Château Digbeth. He might have used one of the magenta dyes, but as these were prepared by boiling aniline over dry arsenic acid, and my Birmingham friend was burdened with a conscience, he refrained from thus applying one of the recent triumphs of chemical science.

This was previouspervious [sic] to the invasion of France by the phylloxera. During the early period of that visitation, French enterprise being more powerfully stimulated and less scrupulous than that of Birmingham, made use of the aniline dyes for coloring spurious claret to such an extent that the French Government interfered, and a special test paper, named Œnokrine, was invented by MM. Lainville and Roy, and sold in Paris, for the purpose of detecting falsely-colored wines. The mode of using the Œnokrine was as follows: "A slip of the paper is steeped in pure wine for about five seconds, briskly shaken, in order to remove excess of liquid, and then placed on a sheet of white paper, to serve as a standard. A second slip of the test-paper is then steeped in the suspected wine in the same manner, and laid beside the former. It is asserted that magenta is sufficient to give the paper a violet shade, while a larger quantity produces a carmine red. "With genuine red wine the color produced is a grayish blue, which becomes lead-colored on drying. I copy the above from the "Quarterly