ON COLONIAL WINES. 239 
thorough and complete as I could have wished, yet 
they appeared to me then, and do so still, useful in 
clearing the path of the vignerons. 
The wine industry differs in multifarious ways from 
nearly all others, because the subject matter of it is so 
various, and the methods of treating the same materials 
so different in different places. Hence there need be 
no wonder at the same substance, when pure, pre- 
senting so many variations. 
WINE IN EELATION TO CLIMATE, &c. 
Climate, soil, aspect, any one or more of the hun- 
dreds of varieties of grapes which by chance may 
enter into the formation of a wine— the duration of 
fermentation, the temperature of the cellar, racking, 
fining, &c— all have to do with modifying the 
ultimate product, the wine. Then, again, the pro- 
perties of nearly all the European vines change 
very much in Victoria. No one can doubt for a 
moment that the excellent judges, to whom were 
submitted recently some hundreds of samples of 
Australian wines in Germany and France (the re- 
mainder of the samples sent for competition at the last 
Wine Exhibition, held by the late Board of Agricul- 
ture), expressed their conscientious convictions of their 
merits or defects. But this is remarkable, especially 
as regarded the white kinds, that in several instances 
where they ventured to name the grape or grapes a 
wine was made from, they were wrong. 
It must be borne in mind that wine is a very com- 
pound fluid ; among its principal constituents, such as 
are always present in it, are water, spirit of wine, 
tannic acid, tartaric acid, phosphoric acid, racemic acid^ 
