250 AMERICAN GRAPE GROWING 



CHAPTER LIL 



CLARIFICATION, FILTERING AND FINING. 



If wine has been well fermented, and carefully racked 

 twice, this process will rarely be necessary, and it is 

 never desirable. Bat it happens with our pure juice 

 wines, that they will not become bright. This is be- 

 cause they contain more tannin and albumen than the 

 wines made at the East. When wine is turbid it must 

 be made bright by some process, as cloudy wine is un- 

 salable, however good it may be otherwise. Filtering is 

 a purely mechanical process, which takes out all the im- 

 purities suspended in the wine, without imparting any 

 other foreign matter to it. Paper and paper pulp are 

 very common materials for filtering, and a paper filter 

 invented by Mr. A. Beck, San Francisco, possesses the 

 advantages of low cost, and self-action, by gravity alone, 

 which saves much labor. The wine to be filtered is con- 

 tained in a cask, v hich is elevated on a platform a few 

 feet above the niter. The wine flows through a faucet 

 and hose to the bottom of the filter, which contains a 

 number of flannel bags, drawn over spiral springs to 

 keep them suspended. The wine is forced upward in 

 the filter by the pressure of the fluid in the cask above, 

 is pressed through the bags and a false bottom which 

 holds them in position, and flows thence through a 

 hose, into a cask below. It takes about twelve hours, 

 with a filter of ten-gallon capacity, to filter a puncheon 

 of 160 gallons. The apparatus, when once started, needs 

 no looking after until the next morning, when the most 

 turbid wine will have come out bright and clear. The 

 sacks, when they become clotted, can readily be taken 

 out and washed, or rinsed by forcing water through 

 them. 



