CHAPTER II

SAINT GENES.

THAT night I lodged in the only inn at Créon, a

humble little affair where the peasantry resorted to enjoy their hard-won leisure and drink their wine, but where the food and bedding were good enough for any body. The next morning I was driven over to the château of St. Genes, whose proprietor recognized and welcomed me with the politeness of a Frenchman and the hospitality of an American.

With small loss of time, and without needing to go far, we began the tour of M. P————'s well-kept and extensive fields. Having long attended to his own affairs, he was well informed on every practical detail; and having once been a lawyer, he could explain them fluently. The weather was fine, the country was beautiful, and I was happy to be walking in a French vineyard that day.

The soil of the first piece we entered was a sandy loam; in other places I found it to be gravelly loam,

but all was mixed with more or less of clay. The better wines grew on the gravel. The piece in question was furnished with wire trellis. The vines were set two feet apart in the rows, and the space between the rows was four feet wide. The posts were round and straight locust saplings grown for the purpose, and were placed twenty feet apart. Through holes in them the wires were strung, and an ingenious contrivance tightened them. They were further supported by intermediate stakes. There were three lines, each being eighteen inches from the other, and the lowest at the same distance from the ground.

The fruit-bearing cane was trained along the lower wire, so that the bunches seemed to belong as much to the one as the other. The canes thus trained, however, are not allowed to grow into arms, but are renewed every one, two, or three years. The fruit of the second year, and which was produced from buds on the shoots grown during the first year, seemed to hang so close to the horizontal cane and wire that I think those shoots must have been cut back to one eye only, but on this point my recollection is not quite distinct. The shoots, as they grew, were attached to the two upper wires. Although the season had been bad, the grapes were healthy, and with a fortnight or so of the fine weather just set

M. P's wire

That gentleman

in, promised to do tolerably well. trellis was indeed a pretty sight. thinks the wire saves one half the cost of manipulating the vines; namely, of training, pruning, attaching, rubbing off, pinching back, unleafing, amd gathering.

"What is that?" I exclaimed, with no little astonishment, as, turning away from the trellis where vines were so tenderly upheld, we entered on a field where there was never a bit of trellis nor stake at all, nor peg to tie to, nor tree to hang upon, but where each individual plant, alone and self-sustaining, scorning all support-its arms embracing nothing, its tendrils twining nothing-stood on its own bottom, and held up its own top, like a strong-minded woman planted on her rights!

It was a field of the variety known as "la folle blanche" (the crazy vine), vulgarly called "enragatt," growing "en souche basse," which may be translated by stump or stool, souche meaning literally "stock."

I paused long in presence of this abrupt commentary on all our learned talk about different kinds of trellis and modes of training to them, and did not move on till I had learned something about training "en souche" and "la folle blanche."

I learned it was an uncommonly hardy plant, nev

er injured by frost, nor, to M. P's knowledge, by any disease; that it was a regular and reliable bearer, and, on a good sandy loam, such as I then saw, could be counted on for over a thousand gallons to the acre, and sometimes gave as much as twentyfive hundred.

As a workman drew apart the branches of one of the souches, a profusion of full-sized white grapes was revealed, all hanging close about the head, and easily sustained by the rugged old stock, which was about ten inches high and five inches thick. "It is a perfect fountain of wine," said the man.

The quality of the wine from the folle blanche depends, of course, much upon the soil. In Médoc they habitually grow it with the malbec, a fine variety, but whose must is deficient in acid; and the combination results in a wine of the very first grade, such as sometimes sells from the cellar at eight dollars a gallon. Although commonly grown for quantity, and on strong soils, it nevertheless makes the most of its advantages, and on gravelly loam will give a very good merchantable white wine. The Bordeaux merchants compound it with a stronglycolored coarse wine from the back country, costing twenty-five and thirty cents a gallon, to make a cheap claret, which is sold, labeled with the names of all

the great houses of Médoc, to Americans. The price of wine from the folle blanche is forty cents and upward, though M. P— sells his for fifty and sixty cents and upward. In the department of the Charente this plant is the favorite, and chiefly from its strong juice the Cognac brandy is made.

Now white wine mixed with red does not make a true red wine, and those of us who drink such compounds as the above drink two distinct beverages mixed together. But both are pure, and, if not adulterated with alcohol, wholesome. Delavan and Dow tell us that all our imported wines are not wines at all, but mere chemical illusions, as if France, with a yearly product of a thousand million imperial gallons, needed to draw upon her cisterns, wells, and drug-shops for the small quantity she exports. In. some parts of the south they sell pure wine at wholesale for a cent the bottle-not very drinkable stuff, to be sure, but a good deal better than dye-stuff, one would think, and cheaper too.

M. P— -, seeing how much his wine-fountains interested me, kindly offered to send me some cuttings from them. Knowing how completely had failed all attempts to acclimate European varieties in America, I did not then accept the offer; but a few months later, and after witnessing in the south of France the