Book Description

Excerpt from Beverages, Past and Present, Vol. 2 of 2: An Historical Sketch of Their Production, Together With a Study of the Customs Connected With Their Use Any old bottle - medicine and ink ones predominated would have answered the purpose, and second-hand corks were almost a luxury, for pieces of com-stalk and wads of paper were mainly used for this purpose. The vintage is a most indifferent affair in this country: no care is taken to separate the various kinds of grapes, and as for sorting the ripe from the unripe and the good from the bad, such a thing was never thought of, for they say the fermentation will rectify all these conditions and what is the use of doing a lot of unnecessary work? In other countries this contention has been proven to be wrong, but in Tran sylvania the results seem to prove the assertion and bear the practice out. In fact, everything about the vintage is imperfectly manipulated, and yet the result is almost perfection; perhaps it is the element of climate that has much to do towards this condition of affairs. There may be, and undoubtedly is, some thing in the atmosphere that has a corrective tendency and makes the fermentation period a most powerful agency. The soil on these mountain-sides too is almost ideal for the grape, being composed of sand and marl, and consequently any variety quickly becomes ao climated or established. There are fourteen species of grape indigenous to the country; that is to say, which have been for centuries acclimatised here. Amongst them are five sorts of muscadine grape; but these, though most highly valued for the table, produce inferior wine. The most prized by the wine-growers is one with a small berry, called Maiden Grape (avi cella m'iida) which produces an incomparable wine. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.