The Chemistry of Cookery

industry to Birmingham; but the wine was white, and every colouring material that he had tried producing the required tint marred the flavour 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 previous 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 colouring 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-coloured wines. The mode of using the Œnokrine is 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 1/100,000 of magenta is sufficient to give the paper a violet shade, whilst a larger quantity produces a carmine red. With genuine red wine the colour produced is a greyish blue, which becomes lead-coloured on drying.’ I copy the above from the ‘Quarterly Journal of Science’ of April 1877. The editor adds that the inventors of this paper have discovered a method of removing the magenta from wines without injuring their quality, ‘a fact of some importance, if it be true that several hundred thousand hectolitres of wine sophisticated with magenta are in the hands of the wine-merchants’ (a hectolitre is = 22 gallons). Another simple test that was recommended at the time was to immerse a small wisp of raw silk[19] in the suspected wine, keeping it there at