416 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



subjected to the ravages of our insect foe. After knowing how to raise 

 the best grape, we may then be able to answer the question, " Which is 

 our best grape." 



Once I heard a hotel lady making the remark to her husband — the 

 hotel keeper : *' now you always object to buying this or that vegetable, 

 we must have it. our boarders want it, they like it, and if we want to 

 keep on in business, Ave must furnish them with what suits their taste 

 and not yours." And right here runs through my memory what the old 

 Romans used to say : " De giistibjis non est disputandiim" 



The best grape for market may not be a good grape either for table 

 or wine and vice-versa. 



If we want a market grape, we have to study the wants of that 

 market where we want to sell, and accordingly raise the grape to suit it. 

 A solid perfect bunch of either black, red or white grapes will attract 

 the eye, and sells in any market either at home or abroad. It is said 

 the Kansas City market prefers the white grape, and those supplying 

 that market will find a very good variety in the Empire State, Martha, 

 Niagara and Triumph, or Brighton, Catawba and Goethe in red, and 

 Concord in dark colors, these are old, tried, standard grapes, either for 

 market or table. But the question is, which is our best grape .■* " 



Since the introduction of the Norton into the Missouri vineyards 

 ( to my recollection about thirty years), when Mr. George Husm.an, 

 then of Hermann, Missouri, read his celebrated essay on grapes before 

 the Missouri State Horticultural Society, then in its infancy, meeting at 

 the city of St. Louis, and urged zealously the planting it at large as the 

 best grape for red wine. And every word spoken in its praise at that 

 time was not said in vain. The Norton has proved during those many 

 years the best of its kind, and should be planted in every garden, on 

 every farm, on every spot of land where a family resides. And a bottle 

 of Norton Virginia Seedling wine should find its place beside the family 

 medicines in every household of the land. Now, if the Norton is the 

 best grape for red wine, which is the best for white wine, for market and 

 table .'' A grape which combines these three cardinal qualities, is a 

 standard variety in our vineyards, though most of us don't know that. 

 It produces a large, showy bunch of a rich, desirable, reddish or copper 

 color, ripens about mid-season, catches the eye by the first glance in 

 market, is a good shipper and a very good table grape ; it brings a high 

 price in market either abroad or at home, and, if made into wine, makes 

 a white wine, which is not yet excelled by any produced in this country, 

 California not excepted. And this grape is ^thc Catawba, " our best 

 grape." 



