No. 151.] 539 



pernong itself, might be made ere long to supply half the United 

 States with the best of wine at a very moderate price, and the com- 

 paratively low price which it oears, is one cause of prejudice against 

 it. Those that go for the name and credit of having foreign Ma- 

 deira at three dollars, say, per gallon, eschew the better American 

 at one dollar. 



But, to return from this digression, and as a further evidence of 

 the productiveness of American vines, after a hundred visitors at a 

 time had partaken plentifully, in the compass of about a quarter of 

 an acre, the grapes abstracted therefrom could not be missed. But 

 apparently the same unvaried sheet of fruit, hung on the canopy 

 above. There is a great contrast in the method of plucking grapes, 

 here and in the east. There they have to stoop to gather them, and 

 here benches and other facilities to stand on in order to reach the 

 grapes are required. The kinds that diversified the entertainment 

 just named, were the Scuppernong, Weller's Halifax, Norton's Vir- 

 ginia, Seedling, Cunningham, and Fragrant, (the last named as well 

 as Scuppernong grapes, diffusing a delightful perfume throughout the 

 premises,) together with a few Isabellas and Catawbas that had sur- 

 vived the rot, their usual calamity in the South. 



Although my communication (for your excellent periodical,) is now 

 much longer than I intended when commencing it; yet I venture to 

 add a very few brief rules as to my mode of making wine with su- 

 gar as the keeping ingredient. I say keeping ingredient, for what- 

 ever are the pretences to the contrary, for sinister or other purposes, 

 I learn from the most reliable sources, that there is scarcely an ex- 

 ception to the fact, that some ingredient is added for the safe keeping 

 of wine in eastern vineyards, although not generally to the juice used 

 by the inhabitants as cider was formerly used here In Europe, bran- 

 dy made of soured wines, is generally added as their keeping ingre- 

 dient. A foreigner of undoubted veracity, who had visited the Isl- 

 and of Madeira, informed me that there they put in their wines 

 brandy made from oranges. Oranges in Madeira, are as plentiful it 

 appears, as apples are in America. From most reliable information, 

 they add one-third wine brandy to Port-wine before its exportation. 

 ^ It may be here remarked as a very important fact to counteract the 

 mere theorizing on American wine making, that although far more 

 wine juice per acre is yielded, it is less saccharine in quality in Ame- 

 rica than Europe; therefore needing more here than there, an ingre- 

 dient of some kind to be added plentifully enough not only to give 

 zest and strength, but in our hot climate, to guard against the acetous 



