320 
STATE AGEICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
if it shows any acidity, and must be very fine indeed if it pos¬ 
sesses any easily tasted bouquet. Altogether, we must award 
the palm of excellence to the white wines of the Khine, as we 
do to the skill and industry of the vine dressers who produce 
them. In considering the merits of the different soils as geo¬ 
logically distinguished from each other, we seem drawn to the 
conclusion, that so far as our observation has gone, the red sand¬ 
stone is the superior one; but we confess ourselves unfit to 
make any such sweeping generalization, and will only say that 
the soil in question, for aught we can see, seems as fit as 
any other to grow a superior wine. The difference between 
wine made by fermenting the bruised grapes, juice, skin, pulp 
and seeds altogether and called red wine, and that made by 
pressing immediately after gathering, and fermenting its pressed 
juice by itself, called white wine, is not a difference of color 
alone. For certain bodilv temneraments and for certain con- 
«/ 4 . 
ditions of health—possibly, too, for the peculiar constitution 
of the Grerman people—white wine may be the best. And to 
that of the Ehine country Liebig attributes the virtue of being 
an antidote for calculus and gout. But all this being admit¬ 
ted, the better reasons seem to favor the production and use of 
the red wine in preference to the white, where it can be done. 
The testimony we have obtained from the best sources of 
knowledge on this point amount to this: 
Eed wine is much less heating, much more tonic, much less 
exciting to the nerves, much less intoxicating to the brain, and 
its effects are more enduring than white wine. As we of 
America are, by reason of ^ur dry climate, as well as from 
moral causes, more excitable, both from brain and nerve, than 
the Europeans, and at the same time much oftener in need of 
tonic diet, and our summer heats are so much more intense 
than in the wine latitudes of Europe, all the above considera¬ 
tions should have peculiar weight with us. So highly, at least, 
do the French people appreciate them that they consume now 
little white wine, and it bears always a lower price in the mar¬ 
ket than red of equal quality. To the general consumption 
of this drink intelligent Frenchmen are apt to attribute the 
