Page:The Amateur Emigrant-The Silverado Squatters.djvu/165

Rh, that a single department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar. "Château 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. A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in