Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals:  the wine-grower also “Prospects.”  One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.  This is a failure; that is better; a third best.  So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:  these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed.  But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.  The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.  To find one properly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune’s favourite.

Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.

“You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?” a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his premises.  “Well, here’s the reason.”

And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a single department could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.

“Chateau X-?” said I.  “I never heard of that.”

“I dare say not,” said he.  “I had been reading one of X-’s novels.”

They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States.

Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.  The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the faggots.