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The Concord generally begins to color here the 5th of August, and we could gather the majority of our grapes, of that variety, for market, by the 15th or 20th of that month; but for wine-making we allow them to hang until the 15th or 20th of September, and sometimes into October.
I shall therefore try to give such simple instructions about wine-making and its management as will enable every one to make a good saleable and drinkable wine, better than nine-tenths of the foreign wines, which are now sold at two to three dollars per bottle.
Among the foremost who experimented with this object in view I will here name CHAPTAL, PETIOL; but especially DR. LUDWIG GALL, who has at last reduced the whole science of wine-making to such a mathematical certainty, that we stand amazed only, that so simple a process should not have been discovered long ago.
Yet there is no more pacifying industry than wine-making, whatever may be said of wine-drinking; and the French anxiety to turn the Kabylian caves into wine-vaults is sensible and laudable. On the morning of Sant' Antonio's Day we strolled through the streets of Padua, side by side with the country-folk who had come from miles around to offer up their prayers at the shrine of the saint.
Or he can dispose of his grapes at a fair price, to one of his neighbors, or take them to market. But there is another consideration, which I cannot urge too strongly upon my readers, and which will do much to make grape-growing and wine-making easy. It is the forming of grape colonies, of grape-growers' villages. The advantages of such a colony will be easily seen.
As I have said before, our cultivated grapes are derived from several native species found growing wild, and some now valued highly for wine-making are nothing but wild grapes domesticated; as, for instance, Norton's Virginia, belonging to the oestivalis class. The original plant of this variety was found growing upon an island in the Potomac by Dr. Norton, of Virginia.
I have thought it necessary to be thus explicit to give my readers an insight into the general principles which should govern us in wine-making. I have quoted freely from the excellent work of DR. GALL. We will now see whether and how we can reduce it to practice. I will try and illustrate this by an example.
The canoes are then drawn up on the beach and thoroughly washed out, while the whole praia is covered with natives with the baskets on their backs in which they collect the eggs. The eggs are then cleansed from the grains of sand adhering to them, and emptied into the canoes, when they are trodden on by the children, much in the same way as grapes are mashed for wine-making.
We may at this juncture ask ourselves if this enologic pre-eminence of Italy was the result only of a greater skill in cultivating the vine and pressing the grapes. I think not. It does not seem that Italy invented new methods of wine-making; it appears, instead, that it restricted itself to imitating what the Greeks had originated.
At Pojuaque the coach always made a noon stop, and the team was changed and the passengers got dinner at old man Bouquet's. He was a Frenchman, old man Bouquet was; but he'd been in the Territory from 'way back, and he'd got a nice garden behind his house and things fixed up French style. His strongest hold was his wine-making.
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