PRACTICAL PAPERS—VINE CULTURE, ETC. 
817 
The basalt soil is esteemed richer than the sandstone, and is 
often hauled on to the other to enrich it. For instance, the 
vine dressers of Durkheim actually manure their thin, poor, 
gravelly land with tens of thousands of -yards of earth, 
brought from the neighboring town of Deidesheim, and yet the 
Durkheim wine is quite superior to that of their neighbors. 
All this was quite different from anything we noticed in 
France; there, calcareous rocks seem to underlie everywhere, 
nor could we learn of any wine of high repute in France that 
derived its quality from sandstone or basalt. The vine hus¬ 
bandry of the Swiss and Germans is of the first order. No¬ 
where do you see in their vineyards the straggling appearance 
so common in those of France (the effect of frequent layer¬ 
ing), but the lines were always beautifully true and even. 
Although the intervals or rows were wide enough for the plow 
to pass, nearly all the cultivation was done by hand, and done 
most thoroughly, too. In France, as in America, they stir the 
ground two or three times during the season. In the Ehine- 
gan it is done four times; but about Forst Deidesheim and 
Durkheim they do it as often as every two or three weeks, 
from the beginning to the end of the season. It is in the 
above neighborhood that basaltic earth is applied as a manure, 
as is also clay, to make the ground more retentive of manure ; 
and this they do to such an extent that old vine fields are seen 
which have been raised visibly above the level of the others 
adjoining them.* 
The expenditure of labor in a year on an acre of those fields 
amounts to about one hundred and forty days work. In the 
Pfalz, it is usual to train upon horizontal laths or lines of wire 
running fifteen inches above the ground, very much as is done 
in Medoc, only that where wire is used a second line is 
stretched above the other. If the plan is good in Medoc and 
Pfalz, it is hard to see why it would not be good everywhere, 
especially in countries as cold as Germany and the northern 
♦Some years since the vineyard of P. T. Buhl of Deidesheim, produced wine on the 
natural soil of a very inferior quality, selling at fifty centimes the litre, at a very great 
expense. The whole vineyard was covered to the depth of three feet hy volcanic or ba¬ 
saltic earth brought from a distance of several miles. The experiment at the time was 
thought to be a very hazardous one, but the enhanced value of the wines after the addi¬ 
tion proved that the owner was wiser than his neighbors. 
