134 



CHAPTER XIV. 



GRAFTING. 



Although grafting is an operation which, it might seem, ought not 

 to be required on a properly laid-out young vineyard, yet this hand- 

 book would be incomplete without a brief chapter devoted to the 

 subject, more especially as it may often be found very useful to graft 

 a few vines of a vineyard. 



It is naturally better that the most suitable sorts should be planted 

 in the first place, so that it will subsequently prove unnecessary to 

 change them, but this is not always an easy matter, especially in a 

 new district where the vine has not been cultivated before, and where, 

 under the peculiar circumstances of the locality, one sort may prove 

 so far superior to the others as to render it advantageous to replace 

 them either completely or partially by it. Grafting enables this to 

 be done without the loss of three or four years' crop, which rooting 

 out and replanting would necessarily entail. 



Another case in which grafting is employed must also be mentioned, 

 but it is to be hoped that we may never be obliged to have recourse 

 to it on this account. This is the rafting of European sorts on 

 phylloxera-resistant American stocks. The American vines, although 

 phylloxera resistant, with very few exceptions produce wine of totally 

 different character to the different " cepages" of the V. Vinifera 

 (European sorts). By grafting the latter upon the former we have a 

 solution to the difficulty, which has already enabled European vine- 

 growers to reconstitute to a great extent the millions of acres which 

 were destroyed by the pest. 



In addition to these cases, grafting often has a truly beneficial 

 effect in making a vine bear more regularly and in diminishing the 

 non-setting of the fruit, chiefly because the joint, presenting a certain 

 opposition to the flow of the sap, weakens the vine to some extent in 

 the same manner as late pruning, the annular incision, &c., which, as 



