THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 523 



insist upon having. This foolish demand of his customers merely 

 gives him a large amount of unnecessary ti'ouble. 



So far, the wine-merchant ; but how about the consumer ? Simply 

 that the substitution of a mineral acid — the sulphuric for a vegetable 

 acid (the tartaric) — supplies him with a precipitant of lithic acid in 

 his own body ; that is, provides him with the source of gout, rheuma- 

 tism, gravel, stone, etc., with which English wine-drinkera are pro- 

 verbially tortured. 



I am the more urgent in propounding this view of the subject be- 

 cause I see plainly that not only the patients, but too commonly their 

 medical advisers, do not understand it. When I was in the midst of 

 these experiments I called upon a clerical neighbor, and found him in 

 his study with his foot on a pillow, and groaning with gout. A de- 

 canter of pale, choice, very dry sherry was on the table. He poured 

 out a glass for me and another for himself. I tasted it, and then per- 

 petrated the unheard-of rudeness of denouncing the wine for which 

 my host had paid so high a price. He knew a little chemistry, and I 

 accordingly went home forthwith, brought back some chloride of bari- 

 um, added it to his choice sherry, and showed him a precipitate which 

 made him shudder. He drank no more dry sherry, and has had no 

 serious relapse of gout. 



In this case his medical adviser prohibited port and advised dry 

 sherry. 



The following from " The Brewer, Distiller, and Wine Manufact- 

 urer," by John Gardner (Churchill's " Technological Handbooks," 

 1883), supports my view of the position of the wine-maker and wine- 

 merchant : " Dupre and Thudicum have shown by experiment that 

 this practice of plastering, as it is called, also reduces the yield of the 

 liquid, as a considerable part of the wine mechanically combines with 

 the gypsum and is lost." When an adulteration — justly so called — is 

 practiced, the object is to enable the perpetrator to obtain an increased 

 profit on selling the commodity at a given price. In this case an op- 

 posite result is obtained. The gypsum, or Spanish earth, is used in 

 considerable quantity, and leaves a bulky residuum, which carries away 

 some of the wine with it, and thus increases the cost to the seller of 

 the salable result. 



Having referred so often to dry wines, I should explain the chem- 

 istry of this so-called dryness. The fermentation of wine is the re- 

 sult of a vegetable growth, that of the yeast, a microscopic fungus 

 (Pencilllian glaucwn). The must, or juice of the grape, obtains the 

 germ spontaneously — probably from the atmosphere. Two distinct 

 effects are produced by this fermentation or growth of fungus : first, 

 the sugar of the must is converted into alcohol ; second, more or less 

 of the albuminous or nitrogenous matter of the must is consumed as 

 food by the fungus. If uninterrupted, this fermentation goes on 

 either until the supply of suflScient sugar is stopped, or until the sup- 



