On Oolonial Wines. 57 
various ; for I became much interested in it. By distillation 
I obtained 10 per cent. of alcohol: and by evaporation, con- 
siderable, but not excessive, residue. Its colour was near 
Burgundy, and its bouquet, though deficient, was agreeable ; 
but unlike that of any wine I am acquainted with. It might. 
be calledadry wine. It contained a good deal of extractive, 
tannic acid, &c., and I well remember the trouble it gave me to 
reduce the residue after evaporation to a condition of dryness. 
Much used to be said about the perishable nature of all 
colonial wines. “If you open a bottle you must drink it, or 
it will turn sour directly.” Now, when I proceeded to 
- operate on this wine, I was at once struck by the falseness of 
the cry about being easily destroyed, turning sour, &., at 
least in the case of red. The method I took in experiment- 
ing on this sample, was to take a bottle in hot weather, 
open it and take out two wine glasses-full, and replace the 
cork in about the same way as a servant might be supposed 
to do, and let it stand for a week, and then re-open it and 
draw another glass or two, and replace the cork, and so on. 
I can state truly of this wine, as indeed of some of the 
Adelaide red wines, that nothing could surpass its resist- 
ance to acidity. I exhibited to a number of private friends 
the bottles in which I carried out the above experiments ; 
marked as they were by rings of deposit, thicker as they 
descended towards the bottom; while in some cases, the last 
three glasses had deposited nearly all their colouring matter, 
but were still strong sound wine. 
After this, I considered the durability of our red wines to 
depend entirely on the ripeness of the grapes, careful fermen- 
tation, and on keeping the casks well attended to before the 
time of bottling, and great caution about matters made use 
of in fining. Subsequently I subjected those red and white 
wines, with which Mr. Blake commenced to create a wine 
market in Melbourne, to much the same kind of tests, and. 
in the case of the reds, with success second only to the 
Camden Reds. But in the case of his white wines, “the 
Kaludah ” and “ Irrewang,” and remarkably in the case of the 
latter, 1 found that they would resist change, and remain 
good after being opened, better than ordinary good German 
wines, of a somewhat similar class—Riesling for example. 
And here again, while the kind of grapes had something to do 
with it, fermentation and after treatment had much more. 
Three specimens of “Irrewang,” yielded an average of 
9103 of alcohol, while the same number of specimens of 
Kaludah, gave only 8:31. 
