Brix in fruits, vegetables, juices, wine, soft drinks and in the starch and sugar manufacturing industry. Different countries use the scales in different industries: In brewing, the UK uses specific gravity X 1000; Europe uses Plato degrees; and the US use a mix of specific gravity, degrees Brix, degrees Baumé, and degrees Plato. For fruit juices, 1.0 degree Brix is denoted as 1.0% sugar by mass. This usually correlates well with perceived sweetness. Modern optical Brix meters are divided into two categories. In the first are the Abbe-based instruments in which a drop of the sample solution is placed on a
History of the wine press Terentius Varro, Pliny the Elder and others described wooden wine presses that utilized large beams, capstans and windlasses to exert pressure on the pomace. The wines produced by these presses were usually darker, with more color extracted from the skins but could also be more harsh with bitter tannins also extracted. That style of wine press would eventually evolve into the basket press used in the Middle Ages by wine estates of the nobility and Catholic Church leading to the modern tank batch and continuous presses used in wineries today. The exact origins of winemaking (and, thus, of pressing grapes)