Welch's grape juice began as a dentist's unfermented wine
For most of history, pressed fruit juice did not stay juice for long; yeasts turned it into alcohol. In 1869 a dentist named Thomas Welch bottled grape juice, sealed it with cork and wax, and boiled it, killing the yeast. He sold the result as Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine.
Juice long predates bottling. Clusters of grape pips dated to 8000 BCE hint at early pressing, though those grapes may have gone into wine. Lemonade, conceived in the Middle East, reached Italy in the sixteenth century as one of the first regularly made juices, and orange juice appeared in the seventeenth. The word traces through Old French jus, a liquid from boiled herbs, to a Latin term for broth, and has been stretched since the nineteenth century to mean alcohol or electricity.
Juice also changed maritime law. In the eighteenth century James Lind linked citrus fruit to preventing scurvy, and about a hundred years later the Merchant Shipping Act 1867 obliged every British ship heading to sea to carry citrus juice. Politics shaped trade in other ways: the McKinley Tariff of 1890 taxed imported juices by their alcohol content, charging far more above 18 percent.
Modern factories squeeze fruit mechanically, either with interlocking metal cups that strip the peel and force the flesh through a perforated tube, or by halving fruit and pressing it on reamers. Evaporators then heat the juice under vacuum and remove about two-thirds of its water, cutting its volume roughly fivefold for cheaper shipping, before it is reconstituted with water and flavour later. A newer alternative to heat pasteurisation fires microsecond pulses of high voltage through the liquid, killing microbes while keeping a fresher colour and taste. Enzymes can clear cloudy apple juice or take the bitterness out of grapefruit.
Labels are tightly policed. In both the UK and the US, a product named after a fruit plus juice must be 100 percent juice, while cheaper blends become juice drinks or cocktails, and a UK nectar needs 25 to 50 percent juice depending on the fruit. New Zealanders drink the most, nearly a cup a day, and on average richer countries consume more.
Source: Juice
