OUT, DAMNED SPOT!

Research into the vital issue of wine-stain removal is making progress, reports Tim James

Splashes of wine on clothes, carpets or tablecloths are unlikely to move many of us to anything more poetic than a muttered curse. But Peter Dickinson once found something to celebrate:

   This purplish spot

   Upon my shirt

That otherwise appears so neat–

   This mark is not,

   As you think, dirt:

No, it is ‘63 Lafite.

   One couldn't swallow

   This shrivelling brew,

Smelling of sawdust, harsh as brine.

   The years that follow

    Will turn it to

The fabled, violet-hinting wine.

    Its price will rise

    With every year

Far from my pocket as star from star;

     And so I prize

     The shirt I wear,

Stained with this honourable scar.*

Some research has recently been carried out in the USA which should benefit those with shirts sporting less honourable and expensive scars than First Growth Bordeaux. The study, at the University of California, Davis, brought together research intern Natalie Ramirez and some high-tech equipment to measure the effectiveness of various cleaning agents on different types of fabric.

Perhaps the most useful result was the demonstration that brands of specialist wine-stain removers (with names both unoriginal and misleading, like ‘Wine Out’ and ‘Wine Away’) tended to be generally less effective than other methods.

The research involved eight different treatments being applied to cotton, a polyester-cotton blend, nylon and silk. The wine-soaked fabric swatches were treated after either two minutes or 24 hours, and then laundered. After drying, a Minolta Colorimeter was used to make precise measurements of any residual stain.

One popular, folkloric treatment that lost lustre in the tests was splashing the red wine-stain with white wine. It didn’t work, and sometimes made things worse. The best overall remover, for both two-minute and 24-hour stains, proved to be a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and standard dishwashing liquid (‘Dawn’ was the brand used in the tests). A laboratory cleaning solution, Erado-sol, was the other effective treatment – but is not easily commercially available.

So, general advice would be to avoid the specialist wine-stain removers, and get hold of some peroxide (but be careful with coloured fabrics, and test an inconspicuous area first for bleaching). Furthermore, clumsy drinkers, or those who swirl their glasses too energetically when tasting Château Lafite, should wear something other than silk – the fabric most resistant to the Davis stain treatments.

A full report on the project is available at: http://waterhouse.ucdavis.edu/rwstain/. Another web site with much information about stain removal (peroxide and detergent are favourites here too) is at: www.stratsplace.com/how-_stains.html.

 *  ‘On the evidences of having spat too close in the tasting-room of a first-growth château’ first appeared in The Compleat Imbiber 7, ed Cyril Ray, 1964, and is reproduced here with the generous permission of the author.

• Return to Grape 14 contents page
• Return to home page