Inside the book

The argument is arranged in four parts, opening with a preliminary leaf bearing an epigraph from Helvetius in French - "To attain certain ideas one must meditate: is everyone capable of it? Yes, when a powerful interest animates the soul" - ahead of Fabbroni's own preface, in which he recounts working against the Academy's deadline, seizing a late vintage to redo his trials. Parte Prima develops Fabbroni's physical theory of vinous fermentation. It opens with a notomia of the grape, conceived as a conglobate gland whose separate tissues contain gummy juice, sugar-bearing pulp, acid, coloring matter, and a flour-like materia vegeto-animale. Fermentation begins when these compartments rupture and sugar and acid meet, requiring heat but not free contact with air; Fabbroni expresses the process through a Bergman-style table of elective affinities. Comparative tables analyze some two dozen wines, from Alicante and Champagne to Tokay, Jerez, and the Rhine, alongside Priestley's observations on the air contained in Madeira, Port, Hock, Claret, Tokay, Champagne, and cider. Further tables compare must with finished wine and calibrate Fabbroni's areometer for sugar concentration. Finally, he tests his theory by constructing an artificial must from its supposed constituent parts and, after six days' fermentation, obtains a passable cider-like drink. Parte Seconda turns this chemistry into a practical method for judging must, expressly adapted to the limited technical knowledge of country people. Fabbroni considers the soil and situation of the vineyard and the character of the grape, then proposes simple tests of the must itself: an areometer measures the proportion of sugar to water; evaporation reveals tartar through the crystals deposited; spontaneous settling indicates the quantity of feculent matter; and the alkali required to neutralize the must measures its free acid. Taken together, these observations provide a practical criterion for deciding the good or bad qualities of the fermentable liquor. Parte Terza turns diagnosis into practice. Discussing concentrated must, Fabbroni recounts a rabbinic legend in which Noah bargains with the Devil over the stolen vine, eventually conceding him two thirds - hence, Fabbroni suggests, the ancient practice of boiling must down by two thirds. On excess tartar, a second table of elective affinities explains the action of gypsum on tartar, placing the plastering of wines on a chemical rather than merely empirical footing. Parte Quarta treats winemaking, drawing wine from the vat, its alterations, keeping, and the qualities of good wine. It opens with a lively argument for the relativity of taste, moving from Strabo, Pliny, Juvenal, and Livia to Florentine Verdea and contrasting French and Italian preferences: taste varies with age, nation, and even sex, while generosity and keeping remain essential qualities. Fabbroni finally challenges Rozier's claim that every wine contains the causes of its own destruction: "with this estimable author's good leave, I cannot share his view, if he means it generally." The apparatus is dense and cosmopolitan: Crescenzio, Baccio, Alstedio, Prefetti, Soderini, Davanzati, Bertoli, Trinci, Villifranchi, Paoletti, and la Valle among the older and Tuscan authorities; among the moderns Rozier - whose Bordeaux dissertation Fabbroni anticipates being accused of plagiarizing, and rebuts, alongside a similar charge touching Villifranchi - Bertholon, the Marchese di Bouillon, Meunier of Limoges, and Padre Landi, crowned at Mantua; Ecclesiastes quoted in Latin, and a Greek gloss on cider and perry in the footnotes. A closing leaf carries the printer's own address to the reader, praising Fabbroni's geometric method, his refusal to advance anything unconfirmed by experiment, and his plain style; an errata leaf follows, in which Fabbroni apologizes for the haste of composition and adds one further recollected experiment, a fermentation trial carried out in a near-perfect vacuum. The folding plate gives thirteen figures: the anatomy of the berry, an areometer of thin metal foil surmounted by a small thermometer, a graduated cylindrical vessel, sectioned furnaces for warming the must, an oenometer, and two casks fitted with bellows and a leather conduit so wine may be racked without splashing.