The Chemistry of Cookery

bends down, and dips to the bottom of the barrel. The apparatus is bulky and expensive. If heated with exposure to air, the wine acquires a flavour easily recognised as the ‘_goût de cuit_,’ or flavour of cooking. When Pasteur’s method is properly conducted the only changes effected are those which would be otherwise produced by age. I have heard of many failures made by English wine-merchants in their attempts at Pasteuring, and am not at all surprised, seeing how secretly and clumsily these attempts have been made. The changes thus produced are somewhat obscure. One effect is probably that which more decidedly occurs in the maturing of whisky and other spirits distilled from grain, viz. the reduction of the proportion of amylic alcohol or fusel oil, which, although less abundantly produced in the fermentation of grape juice than in grain or potato spirit, is formed in varying quantities. Caproic alcohol and caprylic alcohol are also produced by the fermentation of grape juice or the ‘marc’ of grapes—_i.e._ the mixture of the whole juice and the skins. These are acrid, ill-flavoured spirits, more conducive to headache than the ethylic alcohol, which is proper spirit of good wine. Every wine-drinker knows that the amount of headache obtainable from a given quantity of wine, or a given outlay of cash, varies with the sample, and this variation appears to be due to these supplementary alcohols or ethers. Another change appears to be the formation of ethers having choice flavours and bouquets; _œnanthic ether_, or the ether of wine, is the most important of these, and it is probably formed by the action of the natural acid salts of the wine upon its alcohol. Johnston says: ‘So powerful is the odour of this substance, however, that few wines contain more than one forty-thousandth part of their bulk of it. Yet it is always present, can always be recognised by its smell, and is one of the general characteristics of all grape wines.’ This ether is stated to be the basis of _Hungarian wine oil_, which, according to the same authority, has been sold