The old saying about the inutility of carrying coals to Newcastle
receives a new rendering in the fact that vine plants are being brought
from America to replenish the vineyards of France, which have been in
some instances devastated by the phylloxera. Grapes are now extensively
grown in the United States both for dessert and wine-making. A lady
who has recently been travelling in California, where the grape family
is wonderfully numerous, and many of the vines exceptionally prolific,
sometimes obtaining a ‘luxuriance which sounds almost incredible’—this
lady—C. F. Gordon-Cumming—tells us, among other facts, of bunches of
grapes which have been found to weigh as high as fifty pounds! The
vineyards of Colonel Wilson, in the neighbourhood of the garden-city
of Los Angeles, cover two hundred and fifty acres of ground, and the
grapes yield one thousand gallons of wine to the acre. In another
vineyard, there grow upwards of two hundred varieties of grapes; and in
the cellars of its proprietor are stored two hundred thousand gallons
of grape-juice, ripening into wine, of which many kinds are made in
the state of California. Need it be said that grapes in these regions
are cheap—a hatful can be purchased for a few cents! Only think of the
above-named Colonel Wilson having ‘two and a half million pounds of
grapes, hung up by their stalks, to keep them fresh for the market’!
That fine fruit, the peach, is equally cheap in the peach-growing
districts of the United States. The annual value of the American
peach-crop is estimated at eleven and a half million pounds sterling.
In some seasons, peaches are so abundant, that, to prevent their being
lost, they are used in immense quantities for the feeding of pigs.
Cannot this fruit be utilised for consumption in Europe? Supplies of
the fresh fruit might be sent to us in the refrigerated chambers of the
steamboats.