Herr Gustav Druer, wine merchant and important citizen of Brno, waited impatiently for the results. Withdrawing the ladle, the vintner, whose name was Hola Teplicka, poured the contents into a wine glass resting on the stool beside him. Unhurriedly, for wine cannot be hurried, he set down the ladle carefully across the barrel and picked up the beaker in his left hand. In his right hand he held up a candle, for it was dark in Gustav Druer's cellar, and peered through the wine at the flickering flame. What he saw was a cloudy red liquid, what Druer saw was his ruination.
Putting down the candle Hola Teplicka took up a small piece of expensive white chalk and dipped one end repeatedly into the wine sample, drying the sample each time over the candle flame. In this way he concentrated the wine residues into a small area. Then he took out a length of straw put it close to the flame and blew gently, agitating the flame to a higher heat. This he used to heat up the chalk and the wine deposits. Within minutes the end of the chalk was toasty brown. Grunting, he examined the brown chalk through a broken pair of glasses and passed the results over to his master, knowing quite well that Gustav Druer had no idea what it meant.
"Well?" the wine merchant asked him, ignoring the chalk.
Teplicka did not answer at once, but held up the beaker of partially fermented wine once more and applied a different test; he sipped it. The look on his face made Druer's hopes sink even faster.
"Come on man, what is happening?"
Teplicka replied by holding the wine under the merchant's nose and blowing across the surface. Even to an untrained olfactory organ, the sharp smell of what science would eventually call acetaldehyde was unmistakable. Not knowing the scientific name, Teplicka used the more common term.
"Nutty," he said succinctly, for he was a man of few words.
With a groan, Druer put his hand up to his face and rubbed his eyes in frustration and anger. "All or them?" he asked, meaning all the barrels in the cellar.
"At least a dozen," Teplicka told him. Then he added, "This batch, the ones that should have been ready for Holy Saturday." At which Druer groaned again, this time more loudly. He did not need his vintner to tell him the meaning of this last remark.
It had been a bad winter for Gustav Druer. Wine was not popular in this corner of the Habsburg domains even under the best of circumstances, and in the past winter, storms, and the threat of war with Prussia had depressed sales even further. To make up for his losses, Druer had sunk a considerable portion of his wife's dwindling dowry into a must of grape juice that was produced locally in Moravia. This he had fermented himself (to save more money) and then racked off the partially fermented juice into some secondhand barrels he had obtained from a bankrupt winery in Melnik. Against the advice of his vintner, he had neglected the pre-treatment of the barrels with burning sticks of sulfur, and it looked as if he was now paying the price.
Spread across his cellar floor were two dozen wine barrels that should, by now, have held raw but increasingly palatable burcak wine of a type normally drunk in autumn after the harvest, but which Druer had intended to sell in large quantities on the streets of Brno during the upcoming Easter festivities. He had adapted the idea from a local custom in which large barrels of carp were set up in the streets of the town just before Christmas. In celebration of the holy days, the citizens of Brno bought and cooked the carp as part of their feast. Druer had hoped the idea of setting up barrels of newly fermented wine just at the time of Easter, when everyone was out of doors reveling in the rites of spring, would trigger the urge to revel a little more with a liter of two of his produce.
Now it looked as if he was about to go bankrupt. The barrels of wine on which he had placed so much faith, and on which he depended to revive his fortunes, were all starting to go sour. No one knew why, but occasionally some batches of fermenting wine turned bitter, lost their potency and flavor, and became worthless. This appeared to be happening to more than half the wine he had been making for Easter.
"Is there anything we can do?" he asked, knowing the answer already.
Teplicka answered with a laconic shrug.
"You need a miracle," he said, and spat on the floor.