446 
mentation, even of otherwse good wine, is due to this cause. At the 
beginning of vintage and before the crusher, vats, and other sur- 
faces have had time to get inoculated and to breed true wine yeast, 
the apiculatus yeast predominates. A spontaneous fermentation is 
therefore a defective method, and the use of a healthy “starter” is 
desirable. 
Amongst the other ferments which can be found in greater or 
in lesser quantity floating in new wine, the quality of which they 
tend to depreciate, are two kinds of micro-organisms, one the 
Mycoderma vini, or “wine flowers,” which, feeding on alcohol, robs 
the wine of its strength, and the second and more dangerous Myco- 
derma aceti, which is the bacterium of vinegar. Both of these thrive 
at a fairly high temperature ranging from 80 to 109 deg. 
Besides these, again, there are the bacteria of lactic or of mau- 
nitic fermentation, which are excited into life when the temperature 
in the vat or in the wine reaches 100deg. F. and over. There are 
also pseudo yeasts (torulae) and moulds, which not only waste 
sugar in the must and thus lower the strength of wine, but, what is 
much more serious, leave in the wine products they have eliminated 
which greatly lower its quality. Sulphiting of the must checks 
these robber organisms. 
J 
STaRTING FERMENTATION. 
Now that we are acquainted with alcoholic ferments and the con- 
ditions which are favourable or injurious to them, it will be readily 
understood that it is an advantage to start the fermentation as soon 
as ever the grapes are crushed and vatted, as the less the wine is 
exposed to the air the better are its chances of escaping contamina- 
tion by the injurious bacteria of diseases which are always lurking 
in the cellar a chance to invade the wine and taint it. For that 
veason it is a good practice to start, a few days before vintage 
proper, a small fermentation under the most favourable conditions 
possible. For that purpose some sound and ripe grapes are picked 
whilst eool—in the morning—cerushed, and set: fermenting in a clean 
tub, in which a temperature ranging between 75° and 90° is care- 
fully maintained. 
This first fermentation will take longer to start than will other- 
wise be the case, as the appliances for wine making have not then 
been leavened, and the spores or germs of the yeast, which during 
vintage float about in abundance in the atmosphere of the cellar, 
are still scarce at this early stage of wine making. 
When the fermentation has well set in, vintage is begun, and as 
the first vat is being filled a bucketful or two of that controlled 
ferment is thrown into it, with the result that a fermentation of the 
right sort speedily sets in. 
