What most perturbs, not merely the doctors and scientific men of France, but the French government as well, is the deleterious character of the colouring matters employed in palming off mock or inferior wines on the unwary public. The syndicate of Narbonne have formally complained to the Minister of Agriculture that Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish wines, all coloured by elderberries, enter freely into France. But the growers of the Narbonne district have themselves learned to make liberal use of the elderberry and of other ingredients less innocuous. Fuchsine, which is extracted from coal-tar, and of which immense quantities are employed, is the agent in the worst repute; but it imparts a fine ruby-red, and is therefore in high favour. Fuchsine, which is prepared by adding arsenical acid to aniline, is admitted on all hands to be poisonous, although the authorities have as yet hesitated to take vigorous action with regard to its abuse.
There are other colouring principles less dangerous than fuchsine, but still injurious to health, which are in daily requisition for the manipulation of wines. There is caramel, an extract of mallow; pink althæa; Mexican cochineal; rosaline, derived from tar; colorine, and many a fantastically named essence, sometimes of vegetable, sometimes of mineral, or even animal origin. The ammoniacal cochineal which gives so brilliant a dye to the scarlet cloth of an officer's uniform, is decidedly inappropriate as an adjunct to wine. Each ounce of cochineal, it should be known, represents several thousands of cochineal insects boiled down to a pulp, and was once excessively dear. It is cheaper now; and in the July of last year a single grocer of Narbonne sold ten thousand francs' worth of this scarlet colour to wine-growers of the village of Odeillan alone, for the artificial tinting of poor and pale wines.
M. Paul Massot, who in the French Assembly represents the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, has taken the leading part in a sort of crusade for the repression of the new frauds in the wine-manufacture, and has been able to lay before the government a mass of authentic evidence on the subject. It was proved, for instance, by careful analysis that a quart of one especial kind of wine, reddened by elderberry juice, contained no less than half an ounce of alum. It was proved also that the red extract of coal-tar, known as grenate, and formerly flung away as refuse, now commands a high price as an ingredient in the composition of that fuchsine which is now tossed by the hundred-weight into wine-vats.