- Vintage
- Drink History
- Kitchen Equipment
- 1810s
The Bottle Scrubber Left Inside the Madeira
An anonymous 1819 warning traced illness to shot left in a wine bottle, revealing the hidden work behind a cookbook's instruction to bottle a drink.
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Diagram text alternative
The raised center of a bottle base leaves a low annular pocket around the inside wall. Small shot can remain in this pocket. The drawing is a generic enlarged cross section, not the actual bottle, an exact pellet count or size, or a contamination measurement. No cleaning procedure is illustrated.
The apothecary asked for the bottle the wine had come from. The Madeira had already been decanted, but the original container might still hold the clue. According to an unsigned notice published in September 1819, it did: a row of cleaning shot was lodged around the bottle’s raised base.
The notice blamed lead and arsenic from the shot for two bouts of illness. It named neither the patient nor the apothecary and described no chemical assay. What survives is a contemporary explanation of a suspected contamination route, with an unusually revealing detail. Cleaning the vessel, the very operation meant to prepare it for another drink, could leave something unwanted inside. “Danger of cleaning Wine-bottles by means of Shot,” Philosophical Magazine, vol. 54, pp. 229–230.
The investigation went back past the decanter
The gentleman in the report habitually drank Madeira after dinner. On one occasion he developed severe stomach pain and colic several hours later. Treatment reportedly eased the symptoms. The following day he drank the wine remaining from the same bottle, and pain returned, this time with headache, shivering and pain throughout his body.
That repetition gives the story its direction. The apothecary suspected the wine and wanted to inspect the dregs in the original bottle. The notice says it slipped from a servant’s hand, disclosing shot caught in an angle around its bent-up bottom. The pellets reportedly crumbled, leaving an outer crust; the writer concluded that material from them had dissolved into the wine.
The notice gives no later clinical outcome. September 1819 dates publication, while the meals themselves remain undated.
The repeated symptoms and the discovery make a persuasive sequence, but they don’t give us the concentration of either metal or exclude other causes of illness. The writer’s explanation belongs in the story as an attributed conclusion. Calling it a confirmed modern diagnosis would go beyond the record.
A useful abrasive could become an unwanted ingredient
The warning described shot as a means of scouring deposits from bottle walls. It called the method usual among wine merchants, a contemporary assertion rather than a survey we can count. The intended result was a cleaned vessel with the scouring material removed. The proposed failure was that some of it stayed behind.
A raised bottle base helps explain the possibility. Its interior joins the wall at an angle where small objects can lodge. In her archaeological study of English wine and beer bottles, Olive R. Jones discusses shot caught in such spaces and notes examples retained in archaeological bottles. Those objects make the mechanism intelligible; they are not the anonymous gentleman’s bottle. Jones, Cylindrical English Wine and Beer Bottles 1735–1850, pp. 21–22.
One period expression also needs care. The notice refers to an outer coating of “black lead.” The Museum of Fine Arts conservation database identifies that historical name with graphite. It should not automatically be rewritten as another layer of metallic lead. The notice’s account of the shot’s composition and its description of a surface coating are separate claims. MFA CAMEO, “Black lead”.
This isn’t a cleaning method to revive. Current FDA information identifies lead as toxic and assesses potential exposure using contamination levels and consumption. The measurements needed to assess this particular wine do not survive in the notice. Recognizing a plausible hazard does not supply the missing assay. FDA, Lead in Food and Foodwares.
Accum kept the accident in the account
Fredrick Accum carried the warning into his 1820 Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons. He explicitly cited the periodical and reproduced the distinctive sequence: Madeira, recurring illness, the original bottle and shot around its base. This is the same report reaching another readership, rather than independent confirmation from a second patient. Accum, Philadelphia edition, pp. 85–86.
The book’s subject can tempt a retelling toward deliberate fraud. Accum, however, introduced the incident as accidental contamination. Neither source identifies the person who cleaned this bottle or says that a seller knowingly left shot inside. The problem described was preparation of a container, not a demonstrated attempt to falsify the wine.
That difference matters to the reader of an old cookbook. A drink can have the stated ingredients and still raise a question about what touched it before serving. The bottle is part of the preparation, even when the recipe devotes only a few words to it.
What “bottle it” left for the household
Mary Randolph’s 1838 Virginia Housewife gives two revealing examples on neighboring pages. Her direction for keeping lemon juice asks for bottles that are perfectly clean and dry, followed by careful closure and cellar keeping. She wants to preserve the juice’s flavor without heating it. She does not explain how those bottles were cleaned. The passage is “To Keep Lemon-Juice,” p. 176 of the Baltimore edition published by Plaskitt, Fite & Co.
Her “Syrup of Vinegar,” on p. 177, takes another route. Heat concentrates the preparation before bottling; dilution belongs to serving. The book leaves the final concentration and dilution open. One recipe avoids heat to protect a valued flavor, while the other uses it deliberately. Both hand their result over to a receiving vessel.
These are later household comparisons, not evidence of what happened to the Madeira. Their keeping instructions are historical evidence, not validated advice for storing a homemade drink today. Their contribution is to show how much work a brief bottling instruction could assume: washing, drying, filling, closure and choosing a place to keep the result.
A still later Acton cookbook, revised for American households by Sarah Josepha Hale, makes bottle preparation explicit. The inspected Philadelphia edition is dated 1858. Its method relies on heat and subsequent rinsing and drying instead of shot, while acknowledging possible bottle breakage. It presents a practical tradeoff for handling many bottles, rather than a modern sterilization protocol or evidence that the 1819 bottle cleaner changed methods. The passage is “To Clean Bottles in Large Numbers,” p. 380 of Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches, published by Blanchard and Lea.
The important return in the Madeira story is from the serving vessel to the earlier container. Decanting had moved the drink, but it hadn’t erased its history of contact. The apothecary’s request made that history worth examining.
Source note
The anonymous notice appeared in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal, vol. 54, no. 257, September 1819, pp. 229–230. Accum’s 1820 Philadelphia edition repeats it on pp. 85–86. Neither supplies a measured metal concentration or confirmed diagnosis. Jones’s 1986 study explains bottle geometry through other evidence. Randolph’s cited edition is Baltimore, 1838. The Acton/Hale passage comes from the inspected 1858 edition of Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches, p. 380; its exact source edition is distinct from the book’s earlier publication history.