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For thousands of years, winemakers have been trying to solve the same problems: wines that were too acidic, cloudy, unstable, oxidized, or simply didn't taste very good. The solutions, however, could get interesting.
Ancient wines were treated with seawater, pine resin, herbs, honey, cedar oil, powdered marble, gypsum, ashes and, in some cases, dangerously, lead. Later winemakers clarified wine with egg whites, fish swim bladders, milk proteins and even bullock's blood.
In this episode of The Wine Lab, we travel through roughly 8,000 years of people trying to “fix” wine. Along the way, we look at what these strange additions were supposed to accomplish, the chemistry that sometimes made them surprisingly effective, and the practices that survived into modern winemaking.
From ancient aromatized wines to modern vermouth and from powdered marble to today's calcium carbonate, some historical ideas are much less bizarre than they first appear.
Others involve bullock's blood.
Those are harder to defend.
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