Booze

I was rather taken this morning with this diagram of a wine factory which turned up in Larousse in the course of looking for something or other, I forget now what.

My point being that it is not at all artisanale. No peasants stamping up and down in vats in barns. More like a chemical plant than anything else, which, I suppose, is what it really is.

Plus, I had not realised that making red and white wine was as different as it appears here, with the red process being a lot more complicated and involving two fermentation phases rather than one. From which we deduce that the naval uncle's practice of converting home made white wine into red wine by adding a few drops of cochineal was not really good enough at all. At the time he told us about it, maybe forty years ago now, it did not seem such a bad wheeze. Perhaps I would be a bit more snooty about it now.

I continue to be impressed with this petit Larousse illustré (turned up in Tooting Oxfam for £2 or so), although I tend to make a lot more use of the larger first part, common nouns, than the second part, proper nouns, that is to say places and people. Just about small enough to be able to manage it while reading in bed, but packing in a lot more information than our own Pears' Cyclopaedia, which is about as near as we get over here. Which last is much better known to BH and her family than to me and mine. We went in for the rather more expensive Chambers, which had its points, but would not do in bed at all. Far too big and clumsy.