850 FRUIT CULTURE IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES. 



red wines from three to seven, days, when they are transferred to new 

 jars. The lees are used for the distillation of brandy. The wine remains 

 in lightly closed jars, which are buried in the ground until December, 

 when they are hermetically closed and covered with about 2 feet of 

 earth. This method of wine-making prevails, with slight alterations, 

 throughout the Caucasian wine districts. In Transcaucasia the wine is 

 transported in goat-skin bags, and generally sold in them. The casks 

 are smeared with fat or kerosene, which gives the wine a disagreeable 

 taste. The vine is also cultivated in Turkestan, and to some extent 

 brandy and wines are made. 



RUSSIAN VS. FOREIGN WINES. 



The great drawback to Russian wines is the faulty manner of pre- 

 paring them, which leaves much to be desired, especially as regards 

 their keeping qualities. There is, moreover, a great deal of mixing and 

 adulteration practiced in the districts where the wine is grown. Wines 

 of various vintages are constantly mixed, causing a great variation in 

 the quality of the wines. Dealers are also in the habit of adding various 

 ingredients to the unripe wine for the purpose of counterfeiting the 

 better known varieties of foreign wines. Laterally, in consequence of 

 the depredations of the phylloxera in France, foreigners have appeared 

 in certain districts who buy up the new wine and export it abroad, 

 whence it returns labeled as French wine. The habit prevailing in so 

 many lands of giving the foreign product the preference over the home- 

 made article is a serious obstacle to the development of the Eussian 

 wine trade. The majority of Eussian consumers prefer the imitations 

 sold as Madeira, Sherry, Bordeaux, etc., to the natural Crimean wines. 



The Crimean, the Kachetian, the Bessarabian, Don, and Astrachan 

 wines are better than the others. All have not been carefully analyzed, 

 but in 1864 and 1870 many of the better varieties were analyzed in 

 Moscow and Odessa. The dessert wines have the greatest specific 

 weight, the table wines (vins ordinaires) the least. All carefully-pre- 

 pared and well-fermented Russian wines are as a rule stronger than 

 foreign wines made from the same variety of grapes. 



The Eussian wines, classified according to their acidity, rank as fol- 

 lows, viz : The Bessarabian red wines are the sourest; thenVome the 

 Caucasian and Crimean red wines, the Caucasian and Bessarabian 

 white wines, and the Crimean dessert wines. Altogether the Eussian 

 red wines, as regards acidity, resemble most the French red wines; the 

 white wines are less sour than the German wines. The Eussian red 

 wines contain more tannin than the French ones, while the white wines 

 have little or none. 



TOTAL WINE PRODUCT. 



The grape-growing districts of Eussia and Caucasia yield annually 

 not less than 48,750yOOO gallons of grape juice, nearly 16,125,000 gallons 



