Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 23.djvu/651

Rh 1. Soil.—It is well known that the vine can grow in almost every soil; but to produce grapes fit for wine it requires an open soil with good drainage. Swampy lands, or lands exposed to periodical floods, or retaining surface-water, are unfit for grapes. The plant would not grow, or would soon decay and perish. Very high lands with hard clay are too cold, the grapes would not ripen.

With those exceptions the vine will thrive in any soil. On a rich deep land it grows luxuriantly, and produces abundance of large fruits; but the wine will often acquire a particular taste, sometimes disagreeable, and well known in France by the name of gout de terroir. Shallow dry soils will produce less grapes, but the wine is of a finer flavour. A sandy soil, as found in the Ahuriri plains and elsewhere, will form a good vineyard; but the slopes of hills are better suited for that purpose, wherever we find a calcareous, cretaceous, siliceous, or even volcanic subsoil. In France, and elsewhere, the vineyards most celebrated for the excellence of their wine are on stony soils: calcareous in Burgundy, along the Rhine and the Moselle; purely cretaceous in Champagne; rather marly around Bordeaux. In the best vineyards the land is so much covered with small stones that the soil itself has been completely hidden. It is, then, easy to understand how the grapes, receiving the action of the sun directly and through radiation, may attain their finest qualities. The vine is generally planted on the slopes of the hills; but when the declivities are too steep they are terraced, and vines planted on the patches of good land mingled with bare rocks. This mode of cultivation is used along the gorge of the Rhone, near Vienne, in France, and the wine produced there is well known by its superior quality, as vin des côtes rôties. The best claret, or Bordeaux wine, the best wines of Spain, Cyprus, and Hungary, are produced in the same manner.

2. Climate.—A very moist climate is not suitable for winemaking; nor is a mild climate the mean temperature of which is about the same all the year round, because the ripening of the wood as well as the fruit requires a considerable summer-heat continued for several months. This is the reason why vine-growing does not succeed well either in the south of England, or in the north-west of France, or in Belgium. On the contrary, we know of large vineyards producing excellent wine in the north-east, as in Champagne, along the Rhine and the Moselle, because the climate of those countries, though colder than in the south of England, is very hot in the summer months, even at night.

3. Exposure.—This condition supposes (1) an aspect sheltered both from the spray of the sea and the dampness of the valleys above which the vineyard may be planted, and from