Treatment of Flat and Turbid Wine
The cause of this is generally a want of Tannin. If the wine has a peculiar, flat, soft taste, and looks cloudy, this is generally the case. Draw the wine into another cask, which has been well sulphured, and add some pulverized tannin, which can be had in every drug store. The tannin may be dissolved in water—about an ounce to every two hundred gallons of wine—and the wine well stirred, by inserting a stick at the bung. Should it not have become clear after about three weeks, it should be fined. This can be done, by adding about an ounce of powdered gum-arabic to each forty gallons, and stirring the wine well when it has been poured in. Or, take some wine out of the casks—add to each forty gallons which it contains the whites of ten eggs, whipped to foam with the wine taken out—pour in the mixture again—stir up well, and bung up tight. After a week the wine will generally be clear, and should then be drawn off.