APPARATUS FOR TESTING CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES AND CORKS.


Mr. J. Salleron has devised several apparatus which are destined to
render valuable service in the champagne industry. The apparently
simple operation of confining the carbonic acid due to fermentation in
a bottle in order to blow the cork from the latter with force at a
given moment is not always successful, notwithstanding the skill and
experience of the manipulator. How could it be otherwise?

Everything connected with the production of champagne wine was but
recently unknown and unexplained. The proportioning of the sugar
accurately dates, as it were, from but yesterday, and the measurement
of the absorbing power of wine for carbonic acid has but just entered
into practice, thanks to Mr. Salleron's absorptiometer. The real
strength of the bottles, and the laws of the elasticity of glass and
its variation with the temperature, are but little known. Finally, the
physical constitution of cork, its chemical composition, its
resistance to compression and the dissolving action of the wine, must
be taken into consideration. In fact, all the elements of the
difficult problem of the manufacture of sparkling wine show that there
is an urgent necessity of introducing scientific methods into this
industry, as without them work can now no longer be done.

No one has had a better opportunity to show how easy it is to convert
the juice of the grape into sparkling wine through a series of simple
operations whose details are known and accurately determined, so we