Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/322

272 drink, though some drink it as soon as it comes out of the vat. I was assured that it was made without any adulteration, and that it would keep many years and bear transport by sea. The whole produce of a vintage is generally sold off at once, and I could hear of no wine in the island itself more than a year or two old: what I tasted was of excellent quality. This is one of the few places in the Archipelago where wine is made for exportation. The Greeks generally content themselves with making enough for their own consumption from year to year, very much as the farmers in Herefordshire make cider. They have bottles but no corks, barrels with only wooden hoops, and everything else in the same provisional style.

The annual produce of the vintage varies from 25,000 to 10,000 barrels. A barrel holds nearly sixteen imperial gallons. The annual value of the vintage in a good year is reckoned at 800,000 piasters, about £6,779$126$ M. Tolmides estimated the number of vines in the island at about a million. He thought that the whole annual expense of cultivation might be reckoned at seventeen shillings for every thousand vines. A vineyard, when first planted, does not produce wine for six years; in the seventh year it begins to be profitable.

The wine of Tenedos used to be exported to Odessa, but since the Russian war has been sent to Constantinople.

No other article of commerce is exported from the island, except a small quantity of wool.