Manufacture of Wines in the South, Part II [pp. 251-279]

MANUFACTRURE OF WINES IN THE SOUTH.
the principle of Denkelzoon in the selection of a more appropriate article than salt, and have every expectation that the use
of alcohol, in preserving the juices of fruit for transportation
and distribution, will effect the same beneficial ends in these
Southern states that the preservation of herrings has effected
in Holland. By its use, we conquer the disability of climate
and the fraility of the fruit. If nature has designed the grape
to grow, and come to its highest perfection in a warm climate,
and has also ordained that vinous fernientation can only be
safely conducted in a cool one, we have the power, by the aid
of the antiseptic properties of alcohol, safely to transport the
preserved juice to a more northern region for fermentation, or to
retain it at home until the genial winter comes to us and brings
with it a temperature suitable to our necessities. Until we can
alter the course of nature, it is wise to alter our plans to suit
the course of nature. If the high temperature of August prohibits the manufacture of wine in Aiken, and the use of alcohol
enables us to preserve the juice for transportation to New York
or Cincinnati, where it can be immediately sold; or, still better,
to keep it in our fiame houses until winter, when it can be fermrented, we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to alcohol, and
must acknowledge that it possesses one virtue, even if that
one be linked with ten thousand vices. That alcohol possesses
this property is now no longer a question. I have in my possession grape and pineapple juices which are now more than
one year old, and are still perfect. The original sugar still
remains unchanged in these juices, and the added alcohlol has
played the same preservative part that the alcohol produced by
the fermentation of the sugar would have done, had the fer mentation been allowed under favorable circumstances. It is
truly an extemporaneous wine, in which the alcohol of starch
sugar has been substituted for the alcohol of grape su,gar, and
the grape sugar remains unimpaired for any future use to
which it may be directed, either to continue to sweeten the
compound, or to strengthen it by its subsequent conversion
into alcohol. If the preservative power of all wine is derived
from the alcohol it contains, it was certainly not an exercise of
extraordinary genius to predict that the atdditioni of alcohol to
grape juice would preserve it, for it was nothing more tthan the
conversion of grape juice into wine, by supplying the deficiency
that the absence of fermentation had left vacant. That the
principle was not before applied to grape juice is probably
owing to the comnimon impression that wine is produced, not
made by human hands or human skill; that it would be sacri lege to mnix the base alcohol-the devil's own hliandiwork-as
an ingredient of the Lord's anointed wine; that the mysteri ous process of fermentation is dispensed with, and the comipound
thus made cannot be wine, forit does not accord with the de finition as set down in the dictionaries.
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