What is the chemical reaction behind cleaning a red wine spill on carpet with salt and sparkling water?

Question

What is the chemical reaction behind cleaning a red wine spill on carpet with salt and sparkling water?

Answer 1

wow - this is a hard one - I made some progress

Osmosis is the diffusion of a solvent (frequently water) through a semi-permeable membrane, from a solution of low solute concentration (high water potential) to a solution with high solute concentration (low water potential), up a solute concentration gradient.

Salt causes the liquid to move away from the host (carpet) to the salt (see first link)

The surface tension of the water in the newly spilled wine will absorb onto the surface of the salt.

I did find an interesting scanned news article from 1910 discussing the effectiveness of salt on wine stains... pretty cool (second link)