Larry, Bruce and friends,

The main enemy of fermented wine shipped in bulk is bacteria. Certain common bacteria turns wine into vinegar. Bruce is probably right about stray yeast dying in the alcohol, although all wine has at least some residual sugar which hardy yeasts can ferment. Contamination by yeast might start a secondary fermentation, which would result in a crude sparkling wine. Intentional secondary fermentation usually requires special yeasts with high alcohol tolerance (i.e. "champagne yeast"). Wild yeast would not be desired, but would also be less likely to do much damage to finished and stabalized bulk wine.

The favored treatment in modern wineries against both wild yeasts and bacteria is sulfites. Any railroad wine tanks would be sterilized with suflite compounds before filling, and such compounds would probably be added to the wine to prevent refermentation or contamination before shipping. When I was a home winemaker I used Camden tablets or similar powders (IIRC it was potassium or sodium metabisulfite). I believe other sulfite compounds are used commercially today.

Some of the multi-compartment wine tanks lasted a long time in service (I remember a Roma car near Fresno in the late 1960s). This led to several being preserved in museums. The Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, California, has/had two, one with six compartments, and another with four. IIRC, both were jacketed, insulated tanks. Sadly, they were marked only with the museum's reporting marks.

Kind regards,


Garth G. Groff

ljack70117@... wrote: