Page:A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine and, and the Art of Making Wine.pdf/79

 found out the soil and situation which fits it best, or has become naturalized to the climate and soil where it grows. Choose your plants from the best in your own neighbourhood, attend to their cultivation, and to the fermentation of your wine, and you will have the best your land is capable of producing.

Now, though the correctness of this reasoning may be questioned, the conclusion to which it leads, is most probably the safest; for though great improvements might, by judicious transplantation, be effected in the French vineyards, the expense and uncertainty may be so great, as to make it not the interest of a private individual to attempt them. But the situation of the planter of New South Wales is different, and it is for his assistance that this work is intended. It becomes important, then, to examine whether the wines of New South Wales may not owe much of their future excellence to the nature of the grapes introduced, and if so, how far we can establish principles to guide us in the choice.

However satisfactory, then, the reasonings of the French writers may appear, when addressed to the planter of a country where the vine has bren cultivated for two thousand years, before it can restrain us from endeavouring to obtain, by transplantation, those kinds of grapes which are