Note 1 — Chapter XII · THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (CONTINUED)
Bernard Miall translation
Everybody knows to-day that heat kills, or so far enfeebles as to render inoffensive, the microbes that infect liquids and make it impossible to preserve them.
This again is one of Pasteur’s happy discoveries, as is conveyed by the very verb to pasteurise, which means “to protect against microbes by the action of heat.” We pasteurise milk, beer, wine, etc.
The ancients used to practise the heating of wines. In the house of St. John and St. Paul, discovered in Rome in 1887, beneath the church dedicated to the two martyrs, who were both officers of the Emperor Constantine, the excavators found beside the cellar and the amphoræ of wine, the little room with a fireplace known as the furnarium, which was used for heating wine and drying fruit.
The heating of wines was practised also at Mèze, near Cette, before Pasteur’s discovery.
But the ancient method of heating had nothing in common with pasteurisation. The merchants of Hérault, like the ancients, used to heat wine in order to modify its flavour, to mature it more quickly. Pasteur, on the other hand, heats it to keep it unchanged. To mature wine it is heated slowly in contact with the air. To preserve it, the wine must be rapidly heated to 122° F. in a vacuum. The object and the method are altogether different. ↑