Various expedients are resorted to for the purpose of communicating particular flavours to insipid wines. Thus a _nutty_ flavour is produced by bitter almonds; factitious Port wine is flavoured with a tincture drawn from the seeds of raisins; and the ingredients employed to form the _bouquet_ of high-flavoured wines, are sweet-brier, oris-root, clary, cherry laurel water, and elder-flowers. The flavouring ingredients used by manufacturers, may all be purchased by those dealers in wine who are initiated in the mysteries of the trade; and even a manuscript recipe book for preparing them, and the whole mystery of managing all sorts of wines, may be obtained on payment of a considerable fee. The sophistication of wine with substances not absolutely noxious to health, is carried to an enormous extent in this metropolis. Many thousand pipes of spoiled cyder are annually brought hither from the country, for the purpose of being converted into factitious Port wine. The art of manufacturing spurious wine is a regular trade of great extent in this metropolis. "There is, in this city, a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors; and by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bourdeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. Virgil, in that remarkable prophecy, _Incultisque ruhens pendebit sentibus uva._ Virg. Ecl. iv. 29. The ripening grape shall hang on every thorn. seems to have hinted at this art, which can turn a plantation of northern hedges into a vineyard. These adepts are known among one another by the name of _Wine-brewers_; and, I am afraid, do great injury, not only to her Majesty's customs, but to the bodies of many of her good subjects."[30] The following are a few of the recipes employed in the manufacture of spurious wine: To make _British Port Wine_.[31]--"Take of British grape wine, or good cyder, 4 gallons; of the juice of red beet root two quarts; brandy, two quarts; logwood 4 ounces; rhatany root, bruised, half a pound: first infuse the logwood and rhatany root in brandy, and a gallon of grape wine or cyder for one week; then strain off the liquor, and mix it with the other ingredients; keep it in a cask for a month, when it will be fit to bottle." _British Champagne._--"Take of white sugar, 8 pounds; the whitest brown sugar, 7 pounds, crystalline lemon acid, or tartaric acid, 1 ounce and a quarter, pure water, 8 gallons; white grape wine, two quarts, or perry, 4 quarts; of French brandy, 3 pints."