The grape that makes good wine is rarely fit to eat.  Much care is had to reject the defective fruit, when a delicate wine is expected, just as we cull apples to make fine cider.  A really good vineyard is a fortune at once, and a tolerable one is as good a disposition as can be made of land.  All the fine wines of Hockheim are said to be the produce of only eight or ten acres.  There is certainly more land than this, in the vine, south of the village, but the rest is not esteemed to be Hockheimer.

Time is indispensable to fine wines, and time is a thing that an American lives too fast to spare.  The grapes become better by time, although periodically renewed, and the wine improves in the same way.  I have told you in these letters, that I passed a vineyard on the lake of Zurich of which there are records to show it has borne the vine five hundred years.  Five centuries since, if historians are to be believed, the winters on this lake must have been as severe as they are usually on Champlain; they are almost as severe, even now.

Extraordinary characters are given to some of the vines here.  Thus some of the Moselle wines, it is said, will not make good vinegar!  If this be true, judging by my own experience, vinegar is converted into wines of the Moselle.  I know no story of this sort, after all, that is more marvellous than one I have heard of the grandfather of A——­, and which I believe to be perfectly true, as it is handed down on authority that can scarcely be called in question.

A pipe of Madeira was sent to him, about the year 1750, which proved to be so bad that, giving it up as a gone case, he ordered it to be put in the sun, with a bottle in its bung-hole, in order that it might, at least, make good vinegar.  Bis official station compelled him to entertain a great deal, and his factotum, on these occasions, was a negro, whose name I have forgotten.  This fellow, a capital servant when sober, occasionally did as he saw his betters do, and got drunk.  Of course this greatly deranged the economy of the government dinners.  On one occasion, particular care was taken to keep him in his right senses, and yet at the critical moment he appeared behind his master’s chair, as happy as the best of them.  This matter was seriously inquired into next day, when it was discovered that a miracle had been going on out of doors, and that the vinegar had been transformed into wine.  The tradition is, that this wine was remarkable for its excellence, and that it was long known by the name of the negro, as the best wine of a colony, where more good wine of the sort was drunk, probably, than was ever known by the same number of people, in the same time, anywhere else.  Now should one experimenting on a vineyard, in America, find vinegar come from his press, he would never have patience to let it ferment itself back into good liquor.  Patience, I conceive, is the only obstacle to our becoming a great wine-growing and a great silk-growing country.