The Chemistry of Cookery

for flavouring brandy at the rate of sixty-nine dollars per pound. I am surprised that up to the present time it has not been cheaply produced in large quantities. Chemical problems that appear far more difficult have been practically solved. The paternal tenderness with which wine is regarded, both by its producers and consumers, is amusing. They speak of it as being ‘sick,’ describe its ‘diseases,’ and their remedies as though it were a sentient being; and these diseases, like our own, are now attributed to bacilli, bacteria, or other microbia. Pasteur, who has worked out this question of the origin of diseases in wine as he is so well known to have done in animals, recommends (in papers read before the French Academy in May and August 1865), that these microbia be ‘killed’ by filling the bottles close up to the cork, which is thrust in just with sufficient firmness to allow the wine on expanding to force it out a little, but not entirely, thus preventing any air from entering the bottle. The bottles are then placed in a chamber heated to temperatures ranging from 45° to 100° C. (113° to 212° Fahr.), where they remain for an hour or two. They are then set aside, allowed to cool, and the cork driven in. It is said that this treatment kills the microbia, gives to the wine an increased bouquet and improved colour—in fact, ages it considerably. Both old and new wines may be thus treated. I simply state this on the authority of Pasteur, having made no direct experiments or observations on these diseases, which he describes as resulting in acetification, ropiness, bitterness, and decay or decomposition. There is, however, another kind of sickness which I have studied, both experimentally and theoretically. I refer to the temporary sickness which sometimes occurs to rich wines when they are moved from one cellar to another, and to light wines when newly exported from their native climate to our own. Genuine wines are the most subject to such sickness;—the natural, unsophisticated wines, those that have not been subjected to ‘fortification,’