The complete servant / Being a practical guide to the peculiar duties and business of all descriptions of servants, from the housekeeper to the servant of all-work, and from the land steward to the foot-boy. With useful receipts and tables

by servant Samuel Adams; Sarah Adams

Put a small quantity of powdered charcoal in the wine: shake it, and after it has remained still for forty-eight hours, decant steadily.

To Concentrate Wines by Cold.

If any kind of wine be exposed to a sufficient degree of cold in frosty weather, or be put into any place where ice continues all the year, as in ice-houses, and there suffered to freeze, the superfluous water contained in the wine will be frozen into ice, and will leave the proper and truly essential part of the wine unfrozen, unless the degree of cold should be very intense, or the wine but weak and poor. When the frost is moderate, the experiment has no difficulty, because not above a third or fourth part of the superfluous water will be frozen in a whole night; but if the cold be very intense, the best way is, at the end of a few hours, when a tolerable quantity of ice is formed, to pour out the remaining fluid liquor, and set it in another vessel to freeze again by itself.

The frozen part, or ice, consists only of the watery part of the wine, and may be thrown away, and the liquid part retains all the strength, and is to be preserved. This will never grow sour, musty, or mouldy, and may at any time be reduced to wine of the common strength, by adding to it as much water as will make it up to the former quantity.

TO FINE WHITE WINES.

Take an ounce of isinglass, beat it into thin shreds with a hammer, and dissolve it, by boiling in a pint of water; this, when cold, becomes a stiff jelly. Whisk up some of this jelly into a froth with a little of the wine intended to be fined, then stir it well among the rest in the cask, and bung it down tight; by this means it will become bright in eight or ten days.

TO FINE RED WINES.

Take whites of eggs beat up to a froth, and mix in the same manner as in white wines.

Another Method.

Put the shavings of green beech into the vessel, having first taken off all the rind, and boil them for an hour in water to extract their rankness, and afterwards dry them in the sun, or in an oven. A bushel serves for a tun of wine; and being mashed, they serve again and again.