312 PHENOMENA OF PUTREFACTION. 



inoculating it with a small portion of a wine already infected. A 

 closer study of the organism could not at that time be made, 

 owing to the lack of methods of pure culture, a defect that, in 

 this connection, was first overcome by E. KRAMER (I.) with the 

 organisms from a number of samples of Stvrian and Croatian 

 wines affected with loss of colour. This malady, as is well known, 

 is exceedingly prevalent in southern countries, and causes great 

 loss to the agricultural interest every year. Kramer examined 

 nine various species, all aerobic and liquefying gelatin. The first 

 seven of them he named Bacillus saprogenes vini I.- VII., and the 

 other two Micrococcus saprogenes vini I. and II. Details and ex- 

 periments to prove whether these species are capable of producing 

 loss of colour in sound wines are still wanting, and consequently 

 the Schizomycetes in question possess a merely morphological 

 interest. The actively motile Bacillus saprogenes vini /., which 

 is found in nearly every sample examined, is probably identical 

 with Pasteur's " Bacillus du vin tourne." It attains a breadth of 

 i p and a length of 2.5-6 p; and bands composed of two or three 

 cells are not rare. Bacillus sapr. v. III. and VI. form endospores, 

 and the cells of Micrococcus saprogenes vini II. have a diameter of 

 1-1.4 P* A P ure culture of a bacillus, which, however, was recog- 

 nised as innocuous, was obtained, from Italian wine suffering from 

 loss of colour, by J. GALEAZZI (I.) in 1894. 



These remarks sum up all that has hitherto been discovered 

 by fermentation physiologists respecting the loss of colour in wines. 

 Consequently, knowledge of the subject is still only in a very early 

 stage, and we can only hope that future researches will succeed 

 in affording us further enlightenment. This wine malady is so 

 diversified in its mode of development and so changeable in its 

 course, that M r e are obliged to ascribe it to a very fine example of 

 metabiosis, i.e. that a single bacterial species is insufficient to 

 occasion the complaint, the successive action of a number of 

 species being essential. In fact, the number of decomposable 

 constituents in unaltered sound wine is so great as to preclude the 

 possibility of a single species effecting all the changes involved. 

 Consequently, investigations on this point will need to be carried 

 out on a somewhat comprehensive scale. Several purely chemical 

 researches into the changes produced were made by J. Konig, and 

 abstracts of them are given in BABO and MACH'S (I.) "Handbuch 

 des Weinbaues" (Handbook of Viticulture). Similar researches 

 should now be made with pure cultures of bacteria isolated from 

 wines that have lost their colour, and such researches should also 

 include the examination of the changes produced by the different 

 species of these organisms, in each of the most important con- 

 stituents of wine. 



This malady is also known as the putrefactive fermentation 

 or " decaying " of wine, from the final condition attained by the 

 liquid. Wines rich in albumin, e.g. even the Hungarian red 



