Далее - TARTAR, Tartarus, or Tartarum



TARTAR, Tartarus, or Tartarum, in Chemistry, an acid concrete salt which rises from wines, after complete fermentation, and sticking to the top and sides of the casks, forms a crust, which hardens to the consistence of a stone.
It is in this state a hard, brittle, brown-red mass, interspersed with imperfectly crystallized particles; and called crude or rough tartar, or argol, by way of distinction from that which is purified.
Its goodness rather depends on the number of repeated fermentations, which a succession of new wines in the same casks for several years makes, than on the soil or climate where the wine is produced.
The sweet wines afford always less tartar than the sharp ones, and it is also Iess valuable. The tartar of Rhenish wine is better than that of any other; and in general those wines which have the most acid in them, and which are the most coloured and strongest-bodied, afford the greatest quantity of tartar, and that in the largest crystals.
The taste of tartar is vinous, and slightly acid. It is not entirely a product of fermentation, for it is contained in the “must,” or grape juice, and assists in the process of fermentation, and the production of alcohol. This salt has also been found native, under different combinations, in some other vegetable juices.
Besides the usual way in which tartar is produced, there is a very remarkable account in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, in 1737, of its having been found in a more than ordinary beautiful state on a found that there had been lees of wine in the vessel in which the skull had been laid ten days in soak.