Some years’ residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough Inferno, generous Forzato, delicate Sassella, harsher Montagner, the raspberry flavour of Grumello, the sharp invigorating twang of Villa.  The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me the age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms upon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood to ripen.  I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best Valtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos, where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a flavour unknown at lower levels.  In a word, it had amused my leisure to make or think myself a connoisseur.  My literary taste was tickled by the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhaetic grapes by Virgil: 

  Et quo te carmine dicam,
  Rhaetica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.

I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank one bottle at Samaden—­where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous recruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it—­he would have been less chary in his panegyric.  For the point of inferiority on which he seems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well in cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate.  Such meditations led my fancy on the path of history.  Is there truth, then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonised by Etruscans?  Is Ras the root of Rhaetia?  The Etruscans were accomplished wine-growers, we know.  It was their Montepulciano which drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted.  Perhaps they first planted the vine in Valtelline.  Perhaps its superior culture in that district may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpine valley.  One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tirano understand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy.

Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of Milan.  For some three centuries they held it as a subject province.  From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles—­Von Salis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg—­across the hills as governors or podestas to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno.  In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over snow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni.  That quaint traveller Tom Coryat, in his so-called ‘Crudities,’ notes the custom early in the seventeenth century.  And as that custom then obtained, it still subsists with little alteration.  The wine-carriers—­Weinfuehrer, as they are called—­first scaled the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at Poschiavo and Pontresina.  Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of the Scaletta rose before them—­a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts.  The country-folk