The ancients used to practise the heating of wines. In the house of St. John and St. Paul, discovered in Rome in 1887, beneath the church dedicated to the two martyrs, who were both officers of the Emperor Constantine, the excavators found beside the cellar and the amphoræ of wine, the little room with a fireplace known as the furnarium, which was used for heating wine and drying fruit.
The heating of wines was practised also at Mèze, near Cette, before Pasteur’s discovery.
But the ancient method of heating had nothing in common with pasteurisation. The merchants of Hérault, like the ancients, used to heat wine in order to modify its flavour, to mature it more quickly. Pasteur, on the other hand, heats it to keep it unchanged. To mature wine it is heated slowly in contact with the air. To preserve it, the wine must be rapidly heated to 122° F. in a vacuum. The object and the method are altogether different. [↑]
[2] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 329–30. [↑]
[3] St. Roch (1295–1327) is represented in his statues with the dog that saved his life by discovering him in the solitude where after curing the plague-stricken Italians, he hid himself lest he should communicate the pestilence to others.—A. T. de M. [↑]
[4] The old, partly-demolished bridge at Avignon which figures in the well-known French catch:
“Sur le pont d’Avignon,
Tout le monde y danse en rond.”
(A. T. de M.) [↑]
[5] Souvenirs, X., pp. 343 et seq. The Life of the Fly, chap xx., “Industrial Chemistry.” [↑]