The grape is renowned in song and story; in history both sacred and profane it holds a leading part, and Bacchus, its mythological god, is the father of all the ills it has brought to the world and the hero of all who worship at his shrine. What a power for good and what a weapon for evil environ its luscious juices! Botanically, it is of the genus Vitis, the type of the order Vitacea.

In the wild state the flowers of some specimens are imperfect but very fragrant, but in cultivated specimens they are always perfect and have the delightful odor of the mignonette. The horticulturist now divides grapes into the European and American varieties. The European varieties will not grow in the open air east of the Rocky Mountains, and they have been so long cultivated in Europe for flavor and size that the vine has become delicate and the prey of insects and fungi, and to rehabilitate them, it has become necessary to grow the European varieties on true American stocks. The same fact is often shown in nature, not only in fruits and vegetables and such, but in animals as well. In American grapes the seeds are held together by the pulp, which slips from the skin easily. In foreign grapes the seeds are easily extracted and the skin adheres to the pulp and all are eaten together, as before stated.

The grape is subject to many enemies, both in this country and in Europe, of which I know practically something, for I have a vineyard of my own which has often demonstrated to me the truth of the saying, "There is many a slip between the cup and the lip." The phylloxera - Phylloxera Vasta-trix - is the great European enemy, and also in California, while in the East the rots, fungi, and Anthracnose are the serious troubles. You cannot raise grapes now without spraying with copper solutions and arsenites, and what effect these sprayings are going to have on the yeast fungus which nature develops on the stems of grapes to set up the wine fermentation is for the future to decide. If we are to get these ferments from yeast, the flavor of the product must suffer.

Wine is the fermented juice of the grape. The finer wines are still made in Europe, where the experience of ages gives them every advantage, but America is now producing the ordinary wines of good flavor and purity, and these are far better, and within the reach of all, pecuniarily, than the doubtful and expensive foreign wines, unless you can get these out of the line of general trade, from special sources, and at enormous prices; as, for instance, champagne of a certain year and certain vintage at one hundred dollars per dozen, which is frequently paid by those having the taste and the means with which to gratify it. Forty years ago I drank clarets and the other lighter wines in California. Invariably they had an earthy taste, as though filtered through earth. They had not the least idea then what particular soil and what particular location gave certain flavors to the grape, and thence to the wine, a fact which they are rapidly learning now. To illustrate this point, I once visited the celebrated Schloss Johannisberger, less than fifty acres in extent, on the Rhine, where that fragrant, aromatic, and much-sought-after wine is made from the grapes grown on the hill, and is equalled by no other wine of its kind, except, perhaps, a fine old Tokay. The gentleman with me, an attache of the place, showed me much as to the intricacies of getting true Johannisberg. They knew the soil, every foot of it. He showed a place on the hill-side, say thirty feet square. In this square were arranged a number of small plots, and every one of these small plots produced a grape which gave a wine of a different flavor. The best gave a wine worth its weight in gold, - the genuine Schloss Johannisberger, - and only a Metternich, or friends of the house of Metternich, ever tasted it, and so on down, until the poorest quality went to the general trade; but he added, "No one ever gets a bottle even of the poorest Johannisberger from the general trade. If he thinks he does he has been defrauded." The light wines are those which contain the smaller percentage of alcohol, as clarets and hocks, and do not keep after they have been exposed to the air. These have about 8 per cent. of alcohol. The heavy, or fortified, or reinforced, or brandied wines are another division, and keep indefinitely when exposed to the air. Sherry and Madeira are examples of these, and they contain from 17 to 18 per cent. of alcohol.

We have sweet wines and dry wines. A sweet wine is sweet, and a dry wine has very little sugar. We speak of a sweet or a dry sherry. We speak of champagne as dry, extra dry, as sec, or tres sec, and of Vin Brut, a wine fermented absolutely naturally, without artificial interference; no sugar is added, and the natural sugar of the grape has nearly all gone to alcohol. True dryness is a result of age, the sugar being slowly converted into alcohol, but the wine-man is full of tricks; in fact, wine is the subject of trickery from the grape to the consumer. To hurry up dryness, an artificial acetous fermentation is started and the sugar is nearly all consumed by this in a comparatively short time, - say six months, - while the natural process may take years. Thus is champagne dry because it is sour from the development of vinegar, and is not dry because the sugar has been naturally converted into alcohol as it should be to be good wine. Take this wine, let it become exhausted by losing all of its free carbonic acid gas, and it will turn litmus blue to red, showing that its acidity is not altogether due to the carbon dioxide

The connoisseur applies various terms to wines. There is the aroma or bouquet; there is the body, that which makes us feel as though we were swallowing something denser than water, though not really true, and the nearer wine approaches, in swallowing it, to water, the less body it has. Then wine has color, fruitiness, astringency; strength, due to its alcohol; its acidity and its sparkle, due to its carbon dioxide mainly. If it were not for the sparkle, there would be much less consumption of many palatable drinks than there is at present. What would beer be without its sparkle, or champagne? Try exhausted beer or exhausted champagne, and you will see. Wine properly used has a good effect on the system. Its abuse entails untold evils. Liebig said, "Wine is unsurpassed by any product natural or artificial, as a restorer of the vital forces when they have been exhausted; it animates and revives the saddened spirits, it serves as a corrective and antidote in all irregularities of the animal economy, which it preserves from the passing ills to which organic nature subjects it." In wine there is a union of alcohol with an acid liquid; the acid holds the alcohol in check, especially the effect of the alcohol on the nerves; the tannin and coloring matters favor rather than retard digestion, and the bouquet serves to soothe and quiet restlessness. Wine has a density nearly equal to water, it is absorbed much less rapidly than spirits, and thus its effects come less rapidly and last longer than the effects of spirits. Hence as remedies, when you want rapid action, use spirits, not wine.

Wine enters the system with no change except being mixed with the digestive juices, and absorbs none of the digestive ferments in its own digestion, and hence its usefulness in dyspeptic troubles.

The expert wine-tasters are important men, and are really of great use in the world. Their powers of discrimination by taste and smell are beyond belief, and such men are absolutely necessary to protect both the dealer and the consumer, for chemistry has become such a science as to make possible the imitation of all beverages without the presence of any of their natural constituents. It is responsible for nearly all of the frauds which deceive both the eye and the palate and overturn the digestive processes. The wine-taster is the bulwark here which separates honesty from fraud.

Red and white wines differ materially in their composition and effect upon the system. Red wines are the best and safest, as a rule, for the white wines are often bleached by sulphur fumes, and these fumes slow digestion.

Statistics show that we in America are becoming more and more a wine-drinking people and less a spirit-drinking people. If we drink at all, this is better. As a rule, red wines are fermented in contact with the stems, seeds, and skins of the grapes, and the white wines are fermented separately from these. Guyot says the difference in color is an accident if honestly done without bleaching. The real difference consists in the special and often opposite hygienic qualities of these two kinds of wine. If white wine is fermented from white grapes in conjunction with their seeds, stems, and skins, we may get a white wine having the hygienic qualities of red wine, not otherwise. White wines made without using the seeds, stems, or skins of the grapes are diffusible stimulants to the nervous system. If they are light, they act rapidly on the physical organization, of which they intensify all the functions; they escape rapidly through the skin and mucous membranes, and above all through the kidneys. Red wines are more tonic and persistent stimulants of the nerves, the muscles, and digestive organs; their organic action is slower and longer, they are not eliminated so rapidly from the system, and their general action is astringent, persistent, and concentrated. These are the well-defined differences between the red and the white wines.