Old World Sanitation Methods

[Rodolfo Cava Zos]

I've heard that if you read a book on diagnosing sickness, you'll be convinced you have every disease in the book. It makes you obsess in the details. THAT, is how I thought of sanitation. In that, I was somewhat obsessed with making sure there is no spoilage.

I started my first wine batch (ever) last year. It's been aging for 8 months now and I feel I may have used a tad too much of the sanitation agent. My wine (it's a little over a gallon) now smells and tastes like licorice.

What I am curious about is, before the modern sanitation agents and methods, what did the old world wine makers do to ensure that there was no bacterial damage?

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Rodolfo Caba Zos - and welcome. Interesting question. Before there was knowledge of bacteria? Nothing meaningful or intentional and wine that was not high enough in alcohol likely did not keep long. Wine that was high in alcohol would not likely have had bacterial "damage" but very likely, they were not fermenting with only S. cerevisiae yeast but Brett and Ped and the other yeasts and bacteria : whatever was on the fruit and or whatever was on and in their containers and equipment. You likely baked bread using either sourdough or the barm from beer brewing and you likely brewed beer from dough you filched from bread baking and you likely made wine from the indigenous yeast that was on the grapes or in your press.
In some cultures , in the historical past, fermentation was viewed as akin to magic. In other cultures we know that a good fermenting container was used to "teach" new containers how to ferment through the storage of the new vessels in close proximity to the older ones. It was only in the late 19th C that Pasteur understood how fermentation worked. Before Pasteur, city and well water was often so polluted with disease- ridden animal parts that the only way to avoid plague was to drink tea (boiled water) or alcohol. Did they understand why in the east that tea was not disease causing or in the west why cider and beer was less disease ridden than water? Of course not. They believed that disease was caused by miasma and that certain tiny life forms (maggots, for example) were spontaneously generated. Sanitation is modern. (Heck! In Semmelweis' day (and he was born 1816 and died 1865*) doctors might perform autopsies and surgeries and then help deliver babies while still dressed in their blood stained aprons). They knew nothing about the bacteria and other microbes and understood their impact even less. .
* Semmelweis was among the very first doctors who advocated the need to wash their hands in disinfectant to help reduce the incidence of child birth fever - a disease he thought was caused by doctors (those women who delivered by midwife rarely suffered from this disease. ).

 

[Rice_Guy]

What I am curious about is, before the modern sanitation agents and methods, what did the old world wine makers do to ensure that there was no bacterial damage?

we have several layers of preservative in wine. The first is that alcohol above 5% acts as a bacteriostat. A typical wine is 10% or more so it is actively killing bacteria. Next, If I am looking at grape wine it should be less than pH 3.65 for reds and less than pH 3.5 for whites. A pH less than 4.0 will eliminate a lot of families. Third at least for the last 2000 years is that we store wine in containers which have low oxygen transmission. Clay amphora were the first to be used and for a few hundred years glass with a cap/ cork of some sort. Several of the spoilage with storage issues are related to oxygen so we try to minimize oxygen. With 200 year old technology Italians would store daily wine in a straight sided crock with a board floating on the surface and olive oil as additional oxygen barrier. Another layer of protection is how much sugar is left in the liquid. Many bacterial families require a sugar source for growth, and a dry wine is very low on metabolizable sugar so it is stable. The final preservative would be sulphur. Yeast in it’s metabolism will produce some free SO2 , more so if sulfur was used for mildew control or sulfur wicks were burned in a barrel.

On freshly harvested grape every family that can cause deterioration is there in the must, some of the products as balsamic vinegar are useful and actively made as an intended end point. In the last hundred years we have gotten much better at producing long term storage. Before this the young wine was more likely to have good quality.

by the way welcome to wine making talk!

 

[sour_grapes]

I've heard that if you read a book on diagnosing sickness, you'll be convinced you have every disease in the book. It makes you obsess in the details. THAT, is how I thought of sanitation. In that, I was somewhat obsessed with making sure there is no spoilage.

I started my first wine batch (ever) last year. It's been aging for 8 months now and I feel I may have used a tad too much of the sanitation agent. My wine (it's a little over a gallon) now smells and tastes like licorice.

What I am curious about is, before the modern sanitation agents and methods, what did the old world wine makers do to ensure that there was no bacterial damage?

Time to re-post an old WMT favorite:

 

[Rodolfo Cava Zos]

Hi Rodolfo Caba Zos - and welcome. Interesting question. Before there was knowledge of bacteria? Nothing meaningful or intentional and wine that was not high enough in alcohol likely did not keep long. Wine that was high in alcohol would not likely have had bacterial "damage" but very likely, they were not fermenting with only S. cerevisiae yeast but Brett and Ped and the other yeasts and bacteria : whatever was on the fruit and or whatever was on and in their containers and equipment. You likely baked bread using either sourdough or the barm from beer brewing and you likely brewed beer from dough you filched from bread baking and you likely made wine from the indigenous yeast that was on the grapes or in your press.
In some cultures , in the historical past, fermentation was viewed as akin to magic. In other cultures we know that a good fermenting container was used to "teach" new containers how to ferment through the storage of the new vessels in close proximity to the older ones. It was only in the late 19th C that Pasteur understood how fermentation worked. Before Pasteur, city and well water was often so polluted with disease- ridden animal parts that the only way to avoid plague was to drink tea (boiled water) or alcohol. Did they understand why in the east that tea was not disease causing or in the west why cider and beer was less disease ridden than water? Of course not. They believed that disease was caused by miasma and that certain tiny life forms (maggots, for example) were spontaneously generated. Sanitation is modern. (Heck! In Semmelweis' day (and he was born 1816 and died 1865*) doctors might perform autopsies and surgeries and then help deliver babies while still dressed in their blood stained aprons). They knew nothing about the bacteria and other microbes and understood their impact even less. .
* Semmelweis was among the very first doctors who advocated the need to wash their hands in disinfectant to help reduce the incidence of child birth fever - a disease he thought was caused by doctors (those women who delivered by midwife rarely suffered from this disease. ).

.. not before there "was knowledge of bacteria". Before we had the use of modern sanitation agents.

 

[Rodolfo Cava Zos]

Time to re-post an old WMT favorite:

OH MY GOD. LOL geez..

Thanks for responding folks. I appreciate the information.

 

[BernardSmith]

Wine making... not surgery and even surgery didn't use sterilization. In the UK barbers were surgeons which is why surgeons are not referred to as Dr but as Mr