It is easy to make artificial champagne from the natural dry wines. An Italian, Carpene by name, has invented a simple and cheap apparatus. The result of Carpene's apparatus is a fairly good sparkling wine, at a very moderate cost.

Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, years ago made a sparkling Catawba, which was probably fermented in the bottle. Arpad Haraszthy some years ago made a good champagne in California, which he called the "Dry Eclipse." I believe this wine was fermented in the bottle. Haraszthy's "Eclipse Champagne" is yet on the market, but I think he is probably dead some time since. It is yet one of the best of our domestic sparkling wines, but whether it is bottle-fermented now or not I do not know. "Golden Age" is one of the better domestic brands, and so is Urbana and the Great Western of the Pleasant Valley Wine Company. Cook's Imperial Extra Dry is a fruity wine, and pleasant.

As a rule, our domestic champagnes lack body and are too sweet. They sell by the case at from twelve to fifteen dollars per dozen for quarts, and for pints they cost a trifle more. No good, reliable house can sell at a profit a domestic champagne fit for one to drink much below these prices. The stuffs in the market under these prices are slops and worse than slops.

American brandies are chiefly made in California. They are, as a rule, cheaper and much better than the ordinary French brandies. The market needs a good natural brandy, without artificial flavoring or coloring, distilled from good, pure wine and offered to invalids and those needing a good, pure liquor. The avarice and competition rampant in trade appear to make such a product almost impossible. Unfermented grape-juices are now much used by soda-water men and temperance people, so called.

Grape-juice, fresh, may be very nice and quite palatable. To prepare it, it is boiled more or less, and bottled and sealed. Much of it, to keep it, has some antiferment added, and this is done particularly when it is retailed in small quantities; and under these conditions it is unwholesome, and adds another turn to the screws that Satan will give the soda-water men when he gets hold of them for all the vile stuffs they have cunningly devised for credulous humanity. Adulterated wines and spirits of various flavors are used and wholesale adulteration is carried on, and no law appears to check it. You can buy any wine, brandy, or whiskey in a general market, or receipts for making them, and no genuine juice of the grape or grains will in any way enter into their composition. Such concoctions are called "rot guts," but they do not appear to kill more rapidly than the better and truer stuffs. Those who take them are generally the poor among the dissipated, who have not the means to over-eat and over-drink which those have who are more prosperous financially. The drunkard with unlimited means often goes sooner and more rapidly than the tramp and "bum" with no means whatever. As adulterants, ginger and peppers are used, Cocculus Indicus, quassia, aromatic seeds, wormwood, ammonia, nux vomica, gentian, juniper, chamomile flowers, almonds, orange-peel, licorice, honey and other sweets, and astringents.

In wines there is great roguery. According to Thompson, a fair imitation of Chateau Latour can be made with almonds and other nuts, and a Chateau Lafitte, with violets and nuts; and to other grades cherry-juice is added. Artificial pigments, alum, tannin, fusel-oils, cider, pear-juice, and lime salts are often added to wines. Logwood is frequently added to make clarets and Burgundies. It is the fusel-oil in liquors that usually causes headache, foul mouth, and dyspeptic symptoms following their use; and if carried on too long, the hobnail liver comes with all its succeeding horrors. There is no longer taste for even Chambertin or Chateau Yquem.

Wines are made from almost any fruit or vegetable containing sugar, - as from rhubarb, the tomato, the fig, the strawberry, the blackberry, the raspberry, and the currant. That made from the latter is among the best. If such an excess of sugar were not usually added, these wines might be useful in sickness. As usually seen, they are a sorry dose for sick or well.

Cider and perry - the first from the juice of the apple and the other from that of the pear - are common drinks. They contain a small amount of alcohol, malic acid, some extractives, sugar when new, and some salts. When first fermented they are very palatable, but soon get sour and go to vinegar. Cider in France is used as a gout cure. For the life of me, I cannot see why or how it can add to the alkalinity of the blood, except by forming salts in the system with the bases it meets, and even then not enough to have any practical effect. I have known one or two gentlemen who lived in France to declare it did them great good. Those who want cider had better drink fresh cider. All bottled cider, as a rule, is cider in which fermentation has been limited by the addition of anti-ferments, and is neither palatable nor proper to drink. Any one who wishes to try it for gout had better buy a small press, extract the juice and ferment it as he needs it. Then it will always be in prime condition. As a rule you cannot depend on bought cider as being "brut."

It is wonderful the number of articles made from the wine residues, and many of them are of everyday use. Those products that furnish the greater number of articles are the pomace, the lees, and the tartar. Tartaric acid is obtained from the pomace by a complex process. Spirit is made from the pomace by distilling it. Frankfort black is made from the pomace. Oil and tannin are extracted from the seeds, and vinegar is made from the pomace; but true wine vinegar - the best vinegar - is made from true wine gone on to the acetous fermentation. CEnocynin, a coloring matter, is made from the skins of the grape, and is much used in wine-making for coloring purposes. Verdigris is made from the pomace and copper. Grape pomace is also used for food for stock and for fertilizing purposes, I suppose from the salts of potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid formed in it. The lees contains alcohol and tartrates, and is valuable as to the quantities of these contained. The common raw tartar, or argol, is a very valuable by-product of the grape, and is precipitated on the lower side of the barrels. This tartar salt is usually in composition as potash or lime salt. There are two kinds of raw tartar, the white and the red. Raw tartar is a great commercial product, and it is therefore, like many other articles, much adulterated, sand being used, and also steam boiler crusts. Tartaric acid is made from the raw tartar by an interesting process. It is first changed to calcium tartrate, then by sulphuric acid all the tartrate of lime is made into sulphate of lime and tartaric acid, the calcium sulphate precipitating. The tartaric acid is then crystallized out. Tartar emetic is a double tartrate of potash and antimony. The acid tartrate of potash, cream of tartar, a bitartrate, is a very important by-product from the grape. The neutral tartrate of potash is a well-known substance.