Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/205

 superior wines, and the length of time before they would begin to obtain a return for their outlay.

Although wine is made in the fourth year from the plantation of the vine cuttings, yet it is not until vines attain a more mature age,—fifteen years old, for instance, that they begin to furnish the best wine they are capable of affording.

Now, although it might naturally have been expected, from the immature state of the young vineyards hitherto planted in New South Wales, and our comparative inexperience as to what kind of grapes are best suited in that country for making first rate wines, that the Australian wine, hitherto made, would have proved of an inferior description, yet the contrary result has taken place; for the generality of the wine of New South Wales, notwithstanding its newness, is of most excellent quality. I have drank some very good wine, the produce of the vineyards of the Messrs, Macarthur, &c.; and better judges of the comparative merits of wine than myself, have pronounced it worthy of bearing comparison with the finer products of the French and Rhenish vineyards. A foreign friend of mine, who returned with me lately from Sydney, and who has been all his life connected with the wine-growing districts of the Rhine, praises, in the highest terms, the colonial wine, and he has brought with him to Europe, several samples of it for exposition to the vine-growers of his native country, to prove to them the advantage which would attend their emigration