THEPROGRESS OF ENGLISH VINEYARDS.
LORD BETE'S vineyards at Castle Coch, near Cardiff, have produced another great crop. The incessant rain of September made it difficult to gather the grapes -dry. But the quantity made from two vineyards—a second is now in bearing at Swanbridge, seven miles from Cardiff— was forty hogsheads, the same yield as that of 1893. As the wine has to remain three years in the cask before being bottled, and four years in bottle before being fit for use, the .quality of the vintage cannot be predicted. So far the character of the wine has steadily improved. The whole vintage of 1881 sold for 60s. a dozen, and part, resold last year, made 115s. a dozen, having then acquired the character of a very fine still champagne. The wine of the great crop of 1893 will not be ready for drinking before the year 1900. If its quality is then found to equal that of the earlier and smaller vintages a demand for English wine will follow, and the foundation of a new industry in the southern counties of England may date from the beginning of the twentieth century.
But vines cannot, like wheat, be grown in a year. To antici- pate the demand and to give the widest possible publicity to what has already been done, Lord Winchilsea, with the energy which marks all his efforts to help agriculture, has published in the " Fruit-Growers' Year-Book " a history of the Castle Coch vineyards down to the end of last year. The account is written, by Lord Bute's request, by Mr. Pettigrew, the head gardener, who has had charge of the vine- yards from their first planting in 1875, and it supplements a paper read by him before the Horticultural Society in 1894. The results are briefly as follows. The yield of wine has, with various fluctuations, risen from forty gallons in 1877 to forty hogsheads in 1893 and 1896, and the cost of all previous experiments was covered by the crop of the first of these years. It is also proved that the success of the Castle Coch vines is not an accident of locality. In a second vineyard, planted on a different part of Lord Bute's estate, "the vines are thoroughly established, grow vigorously, and ripen well in most years. More than two acres are now planted, and -one is already in good bearing condition. We are planting thousands of vines every year, and propose to plant an acre -every spring." Six hogsheads of wine were given in 1895 by the one acre in bearing condition in the new vineyard, in a season when not only the grapes at Castle Coch, but fruit and grain crops, were spoiled by mildew. The kind of vine grown is the " Gamay Noir," used in the vineyards near Paris and in the colder parts of France, and it is planted in rows three feet apart, and trained to stakes four feet high. At the end of the season the vines are pruned close back, leaving only two buds of last year's growth.
We need little more to convince us that the vine can be grown in this country to produce, one year with another, enough grapes for vintage. But if English vineyards are ever to succeed we must settle early what kind of wine we mean to make from them. The processes have been for so long a "lost art" in this country, that we have forgotten that wine as a rule needs very careful "making," and that its treatment in the process makes an immense difference in character, quality, and price. The mistake made in the history of English vineyards during the last hundred years has been the same as that which has made the Cape wines a failure. First we tried to produce either a port wine, a sherry, or a heavy Burgundy. Failing that, many private owners of vines have tried to make a rough claret, such as may be bought in Spain for 3d. per quart, or could until lately have been bought in Italy for about a halfpenny per pint. Now port at one end of the scale, and rough claret at the other, are both " natural wines,"—the former mainly, the latter entirely, the produce of soil and sun. It was quite useless for an English grower to try to make a wine like port, which is grown in a district where the vines are almost roasted for two months in summer. Rough claret could no doubt be made, but it would never pay. In the first place, the grower would have for com-
petitors all the countries round the Mediterranean basin, where the same wine is collected in " tank " steamers by millions of gallons, to be refined by the artists in vinification at Bordeaux, and in the next, it is a working man's wine, and the working classes of England would never touch it. They want something stronger in body and alcohol. The middle class or the rich want something more agreeable to the palate. So port and rough claret may be dismissed from the British wine-list. High-class claret needs special soil, but it also requires less " making " than any other wine. That of Medoc is made only from picked grapes with a few gallons of spirits thrown into the vats as the grapes are laid in. It cannot be said that we have any evidence that really good claret cannot be grown here. The quality of the native juice of the Castle Coch grapes must be very high, for the process used in their vinification is very simple, and the only ingredient added is some sugar,—with probably some spirits to prevent decay. But the result, as we have said before, is a still champagne. This seems to show the direction in which future owners of vineyards in this country may look for profit. They must learn to make, not still champagne, but sparkling wines. Though it is rather heresy to say so, it is easier to make a fair sparkling wine than a still wine of equal quality. Champagne is made from the juice of imperfectly ripened grapes. Nature does rather less, and manufacture rather more, for this excellent wine than for others. The English climate is obviously better suited for growing quantities of grapes which are not required to ripen thoroughly on the vine, than for partly maturing the wine by heat in the grape before the clusters are gathered. The sparkling wines of Champagne, of the Moselle, and even of Neufchatel are made by adding cognac and sugar—in the form of sugar-candy—to the wine after it has partly fer- mented and has been made clear,—also by a "process." The effervescence, no small part of its merits in the judg- ment of ordinary wine-drinkers, can always be secured ; and part, at any rate, of the flavour is given by essences in the form of liqueur made from other wine, or essences of fruits. What is needed is a basis of thoroughly sound and clear juice of the grape, to which the " manufacture " can be applied. The light white still vintages of the Rhine, the Maine, Saumur, Meissen, Neufchatel, and California are all improved by being converted into sparkling wines by the same process as that first used in Champagne, and there is no reason why the juice of the English grape should not be treated in the same way.
If the latest Welsh vintage is a success it should not be long before every large proprietor had his vineyard here, just as every large owner in Italy has his own brand of wine pressed in his own vats. Its sale might go far to make the farming and trading classes, though not the labourers of the country, drink something else besides ale, port, and spirits ; and while enriching the growers, might bring a mass of recruits into line with that common consent by which the greater part of Europe has agreed that there is a virtue in the juice of the grape which no other natural product con- tains. Wine is the quickest, the most wholesome, and the best restorative in the world, and the better the quality of the wine, judged as a connoisseur judges it, the more, generally speaking, of these qualities are contained in it. " The assumption that it is the alcohol in the wine that is chiefly restorative and of value is altogether a mistake," wrote Mr. Oswald Crawfurd in his celebrated essay on port wine. " It is not the alcohol, but the ethers and the other and various purely vinous ingredients, the products of Nature's own laboratory, which are chiefly restorative. It is not a chemical question,—Solvitur bibenclo." Wine is both soothing and restorative, spirits are only stimulative; and a very good case might be made out for lowering the duty on those strong wines which contain a high percentage of " vinous elements," with which alcohol is combined in its most beneficial form. Very light wines, when largely drunk, do not satisfy even the French. The population of Paris drink spirits to supplement the absence of body in their wine, in the proportion of over one hectrolitre of spirit to four of wine. But it is not in growing cheap wine that the future of the English vineyards must be looked for. Like the vine-growers of California, we must go to school in France, and bring to the making of the wine some part of the skill, method, and care which aid Nature in securing for French wines the highest prices and the highest place.
Previous page
