I drunk at Paris, as good “sparkling champagne” as anybody I knew, de V——­ having the good nature to let me have it, from his cellar, for the price at which it is sold to the dealer and exporter, or at three francs the bottle.  The octroi and the transportation bring the price up to about three francs and a half.  This then is the cost to the restaurateur and the innkeeper.  These sell it again to their customers, at six francs the bottle.  Now a bottle of wine ought not, and I presume does not, cost the American dealer any more; the difference in favour of the duty more than equalling the difference against them, in the transportation.  This wine is sold in our eating-houses and taverns at two dollars, and even at two dollars and a half, the bottle!  In other words, the consumer pays three times the amount of the first cost and charges.  Now, it happens, that there is something very like free trade in this article, (to use the vernacular), and here are its fruits; You also see in this fact, the truth of what I have told you of our paying for the want of a class of men who wilt be content to be shopkeepers and innkeepers, and who do not look forward to becoming anything more.  I do not say that we are the less respectable for this circumstance, but we are, certainly, as a people, less comfortable.  Champagne, Rhenish, and Bordeaux wines ought to be sold in New York, quite as cheap as they are sold in the great towns of the countries in which they are made.  They can be bought of the wine-merchants nearly as low, even as things are.

If the innkeepers and steam-boat stewards, of America, would buy and sell low-priced Burgundy wines, that, as the French call it, carry water well, as well as some other wines that might be named, the custom of drinking this innocent and useful beverage at table would become general, attention would then be paid to the vine, and in twenty years we should be consumers of the products of our own vineyards.

The idea that our winters are too severe can hardly be just.  There may be mountainous districts where such is the fact, but, in a country that extends from the 27th to the 47th degrees of latitude, it is scarcely possible to suppose the vine cannot flourish.  I have told you that wine is made on the Elbe, and it is made in more than half the Swiss cantons.  Proper exposures and proper soil are necessary for good wines, anywhere, but nothing is easier than to have both.  In America, I fear, we have hitherto sought land that was too rich; or rather, land that is wanting in the proper and peculiar richness that is congenial to the vine.  All the great vineyards I have seen, and all of which I can obtain authentic accounts, are on thin gravelly soils; frequently, as is the case in the Rheingau, on decomposed granite, quartz, and sienite.  Slate mixed with quartz on a clayish bottom, and with basalt, is esteemed a good soil, as is also marl and gravel.  The Germans use rich manures, but I do not think this is the case in France.