My Kitzinger Wine Book only holds together because I patched the spine with a strip of fabric tape years ago. The corners are rounded, on the chapter about elderberry wine there's a brown stain that was once must, and on the flyleaf it says, in my father's handwriting: “Sugar only after measuring.” I've owned this copy since the early eighties, and it has seen more fermentation cellars from the inside than many a cellar master. If you want to know why a book about fruit wine was printed more than 750,000 times, I first have to tell you about a pharmacist.
A pharmacist with a fondness for yeasts
Kitzingen am Main is an old wine town. As early as 1482 the oldest known German wine law was issued there, so the place had a good four hundred years of practice when, in 1897, the pharmacist Paul Arauner founded his business and attached a pure-yeast-culture institute to it. That sounds like a government office today, but it was a small revolution. Until then, fruit wine fermented spontaneously in the household: with the wild yeasts that happened to sit on the fruit and in the cellar. Sometimes that went well. Often enough the result tipped towards vinegar or stalled half way, sweet, cloudy and undefinable.
Cultured yeast means: a single, selected yeast strain, cleanly propagated, with known properties. It ferments reliably through, tolerates alcohol up to a known degree and forms a clean aroma. Arauner brought these yeasts into a form you could ship, and suddenly the technology of the wine estates was open to anyone who had a glass demijohn and an orchard. The pharmacist thought in dosages, purity and repeatability, and exactly this way of thinking sits in every little sachet of cultured yeast to this day.
1938: a book for people without a vineyard
From 1938 the company then issued the Kitzinger Wine Book. Not a thick textbook, but a guide for people who don't own a vineyard but a garden: over 40 recipes, from apple and blackcurrant to rosehip and dandelion wine, for which you have to pick a few litres of blossoms on a sunny morning and afterwards know why it has become rare. Plus tables for adding sugar, basic rules on hygiene and sulphuring, and again and again the same triad: work cleanly, measure instead of guessing, have patience.
Over 750,000 copies of it were printed over the decades. The book lay in drugstores next to the yeast sachets, travelled through families and was passed on like a good cooking pot. Mine came from my father. His generation learned to make wine with it, mine too, and when I write here on the blog about must weight, airlock and racking, behind every one of these terms stands, somewhere, a page from this book.
What it cost me not to read it
For honesty's sake: my two biggest cellar disasters happened not because the book kept something back, but because I thought I knew better.
The first was the demijohn. I was young, the must was set up, and instead of a fermentation tube I pressed a cork tight into the 10-litre demijohn. Anyone who has ever worked out that fermentation turns about half a kilo of carbon dioxide out of one kilo of sugar can guess the rest. It banged in the pantry, and for three evenings I picked glass shards out of the preserves. The airlock is of course in the wine book, with a reason given.
The second was the acetic spoilage of 1998. Thirty litres of elderberry, and I got sloppy after racking: didn't top the demijohn right up, too much air over the young wine, went weeks without checking. When I entered the cellar it smelled like a chip shop. Thirty litres down the drain. Since then I'm strict about hygiene and air exclusion. With others too, especially with others.
The end after 127 years
On 31 May 2024 the Arauner company in Kitzingen ceased operations. After 127 years, without a successor. No bang, no scandal, simply the quiet end of a traditional business, as is currently happening to many old houses.
For everyone who grew up with these products, that means something sober: what still exists of original Kitzinger goods are remaining stocks. Once the sachets and airlocks with the Arauner name are used up, none will follow. On that I'll say two things. First: these are consumables, not relics. Yeast too has a best-before date, and the best way to handle a piece of company history is to make wine with it. Second: mourning is only half appropriate, because what mattered about Arauner was never the label.
The knowledge lives on
What mattered was the method, and that doesn't die with a company. What the wine book taught generations still works unchanged today: process fruit cleanly, measure must weight in °Oechsle, add sugar deliberately instead of by feel, cultured yeast instead of chance, airlock on, let it ferment quietly at 15 to 20 °C, the first racking after the vigorous fermentation, then patience until it clears.
We at Maischewerk, by the way, don't sit in Kitzingen but ship from Aachen. But in our warehouse there are still remaining stocks of the original Kitzinger products, and the story goes on: Joenos, the successor from the Franconian wine country, carries on the range, and more importantly: we keep writing the knowledge onward in this blog, step by step, from the first apple wine to fining. You need no antiquarian wine book to start, you'll find everything essential here bit by bit. But should a well-read copy cross your path at a flea market: take it with you. Books with stains were used, and having been used is the greatest compliment for a guide.
Two notes at the end, on our own behalf and without sales prose. If you want to experience what pure-yeast culture means in practice, take the Arauner wine yeast trial set: six varieties of 5 g each, from Steinberg to Bordeaux. Split the same must across several small vessels and ferment each portion with a different yeast, then you'll taste the difference I've written two paragraphs about here. It's original Arauner from remaining stock; when it's gone, it's gone. And the plastic Arauner Kitzinger airlock for around three euros is exactly the part that would have saved my 10-litre demijohn back then. You don't need it if you already have a tight-fitting airlock — then leave the money in your wallet.
From the cellar, Magnus