In this latitude, October is the month of the vintage. From the first to the second week the grapes will be ripe enough to gather. All hands are now turned out to the vineyard, men and women, boys and girls, for the grape harvest is a busy and a merry time.

Each person has a knife, and two wooden buckets, the bunch of grapes is cut from the vine, and any unsound or unripe berries picked off, and thrown into one bucket, and the perfect bunch into the other. As the buckets are filled they are emptied into flour barrels, which are covered with a cloth to keep the bees and wasps out.

When a small wagon or cart load of barrels are filled, they are immediately hauled to the wine house, to keep the grapes from heating, by exposure to the sun.

In cutting the grapes, any bunch not perfectly ripe, is left on the vine to mature, and to be gathered with the last cutting, a week or ten days later. Enough grapes should be cut each day, to fill the press in the evening; which for one of ordinary size, may be 17 or 18 barrels, yielding 200 to 210 gallons of juice. This is for a moderate crop, and a vineyard of 6 or 8 acres. A large crop, and a more extensive vineyard, would of course require greater expedition in gathering, and two or more presses. The pressing is generally done in the evening. The grapes are mashed by passing the bunches through a small mill with a pair of wooden rollers, or, in a mashing tub, a vessel like an inverted churn, with a wooden beetle, breaking the skin and pulp, but not the seeds.

The mashed grapes are put on the press, when about one third the juice runs off without any pressure. The power is then applied, and the remainder of the juice pressed out by two or three pressings, cutting off 6 or 8 inches of the outer edge of the " pomace" and putting it on top of the mass each time. The juice from the last pressing, being dark and astringent, is put with that from the refuse grapes, to make an inferior and cheap wine.

As the juice runs from the press, it is conveyed through a gutta-percha pipe into the casks in the cellar under the wine house, and left to ferment. The casks are filled about f or 6 sixths of their capacity and the bung hole covered with a cloth, that the carbonic acid gas, in the process of fermentation, may escape.

A better plan is to fix a tin syphon in the bung hole, one end being turned down into a bucket of water, so that-the gas shall escape through the water; this excludes the air from the new wine when the fermentation ceases, or is feeble.

In three or four weeks it will bo safe to fill the casks up bung full, and drive the bungs in lightly.

The " pomace" of the grapes, and the " lees" of the wine, are given to the distillers to make brandy, they retaining half the product for making it.

Straining the grapes has been abandoned, as a useless expense, and the wine fines better by the small amount of "tannin" extracted from the stems. No work in the vineyard is required after the crop is gathered, unless it may be to repair the surface drains, and trenches, if any, to prepare for fall and winter rains.

By william saunders, germantown, pa.