Developing photos in white wine.

Maybe you have heard of “wineol”, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you just want to develop your film in a totally different and crazy way. Wine is one of the ways. A film developer needs three things - a phenol, an accelerator and an alkali. Other things are just the fine tuning.

To develop in wine you first need a wine - any wine will do, and dependent upon the wine you get quite different results. For example, this photo in white wine - it was corked so why not use it instead of dumping it down the drain? - has more acutance than a second sheet I developed in red wine. It’s fun to experiment with. Then you need an accelerator - ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is the environmentally friendliest and simplest to procure and an alkali that also buffers the solution somewhat - here the easiest and again easiest to procure is wash soda.

Then it’s experiment time. How long? What temperature? Agitation or no agitation?

Here I hope to answer most of those questions for you. I have had the advantage of being able to conduct my experiments with 9x12 cm film and 4x5 inch film. One shot stuff - so I don’t have the chance to ruin an entire roll. I have the second advantage of being a trained experimental scientist - and I can even remember how to conduct an experiment to limit the variables.

So here’s the results:

White wineol recipe. (1 litre developer)

To one litre of white wine (your choice) first add 10 tablespoons of wash soda. Check the pH with a pH strip to make sure it is above 9 - above 10 is even better. If it isn’t (wine is in itself quite acidic - especially if it is a well balanced wine) add one more tablespoon . Stir to ensure it is all dissolved

Then add 2 tablespoons of table salt. If you use iodized table salt (against all the myths on the internet) you reduce the fogging that these alternative developers can produce. The iodide in the salt works just like pottasium bromide in a commercial developer. Again stir.

Now - carefully - make sure you have a vessel that is large enough to allow foaming - add 4 tablespoons of Vitamin C. It wont foam as bad as the beer does because, unless you have used a sparkling wine, it doesn’t have carbonation. Stir and let the solution sit until the bubbles have all subsided .

You now have a wineol developer. Develop, stop and fix your film exactly as you normally would, using the wineol as a one shot developer. This is a so-called “universal” recipe - you can develop any black and white film in it with the same time/temperature scale, you dont have to change the time of development dependent upon the film. At 20 degrees you will need - with 10 second agitation every minute and constant agitation for the first minute - 12.5 minutes to develop your film.

Have fun experimenting .