DR. L. GALL ON IMPROVEMENTS IN WINE-MAKING. 237 



II. 

 THE GRAPE AND ITS COMPONENTS. 



The general appearance of the grape being universally known, 

 it needs no farther description in this chapter. We shall there- 

 fore confine ourselves to show which of its interior parts contrib- 

 utes most to produce a palatable and durable wine. 



As all-wise Nature has provided every species of plants with 

 constituent parts, whereby they are enabled to germinate, grow, 

 and draw their necessary nourishment, so the fruit contains cer- 

 tain elements which arc required for the first support of the fu- 

 ture plant ; these, therefore, are not only useful, but indispensable 

 to their own offspring, though not always so for the application 

 to man's taste and purposes. For instance, each grain of barley 

 contains, besides starch, albumen, sugar, gum ; also oil, water, phos- 

 phate of lime, and mucus ; and all of these matters are eminently 

 necessary for the jDroduction of the roots, stalk, leaves, flowers, 

 and fruits of the new barley plants. But for producing the bev- 

 erage called beer, man only uses the three first ingredients ; and 

 for the fabrication of malt whisky or alcohol out of barley or any 

 other species of grain, absolutely no other is of any value but the 

 starch. In the same manner, man only makes use of the sugar 

 matter which he draws out of the sugar-beet for the making of 

 the sugar itself, leaving aside all the other ingredients contained 

 in the plant. 



The same may be said of the grape. Of its perhaps twenty 

 different ingredients, some — if the fermentation of the must takes 

 place in a fully-filled cask — will be cast out at the very beginning 

 of the fermentation ; others while it is going on ; and others in a 

 shorter or longer period afterward ; and some will even " settle" 

 after a number of years have passed. These ingredients, there- 

 fore, do not belong properly to the main produce of the grape — 

 the wine. They form no constituent part of it ; they were only 

 necessary for the nourishment of the new plant emanating from 

 the seed. 



Therefore it is evident that only the grape itself is a product of 

 nature. The wine, however, or the art of making it — be the qual- 

 ity good or bad, according to that of the grape, or his knowledge 

 to prepare its juice — is one which only an accident could teach to 

 man ; to improve which, only other accidental observations, re- 

 flections, and various alterations could lead him. 



Only very lately, however, after groping about in the dark for 

 more than a thousand years, man — guided by the hand of pro- 

 gressing natural science — has discovered that it was his own fault 

 if he could only produce from grapes not yet fully ripe another 

 but very inferior quality of wine. It only depends on him to 



