Page:A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine and, and the Art of Making Wine.pdf/43

Rh holds just, that beyond the 50th degree of northern latitude, the juice of the grape is not capable of undergoing a fermentation, to convert it into an agreeable drink.

The flavour, and especially the saccharine principle of the grape, are effects of the uninterrupted rays of a powerful sun: where the sun's rays are less powerful and constant, the sour or acrid juice, which developes itself in the grape at its first formation, is not sufficiently elaborated, and does not lose its primitive character of greenness, before the return of winter arrests its further progress to maturity.

The unripened grape contains scarcely any sugar, and the expressed juice, when fermented, yields a sour liquor, in which the alcohol scarcely exists in sufficient quantity to impede the movements of a putrefactive fermentation.

The vine, like every other production of nature, has its appropriate climates, and, in general, it is only between the 35th and 50th degrees of northern latitude that it can be cultivated with advantage; if it flourishes at a lower latitude than 35 degrees north, the heat of the climate must be modified by natural causes, as in the Canary Islands, to which the cooling influence of the surrounding ocean, imparts the advantages of a colder clime, or measures must be resorted to for counteracting the