WINE AND RAISINS--PROFITS OF DRYING FRUITS.
I have now seen the grape grow in almost every part of California where
wine is made. The temptation to a new settler in this State is always
strong to plant a vineyard; and I am moved, by much that I have seen, to
repeat here publicly advice I have often given to persons newly coming
into the State: Do not make wine. I remember a wine-cellar, cheaply built,
but with substantial and costly casks, containing (because the vineyard
was badly placed) a mean, thin, fiery wine; and on a pleasant sunny
afternoon, around these casks, a group of tipsy men--hopeless,
irredeemable beasts, with nothing much to do except to encourage each
other to another glass, and to wonder at the Eastern man who would not
drink. There were two or three Indians staggering about the door; there
was swearing and filthy talk inside; there was a pretentious tasting of
this, that, and the other cask by a parcel of sots, who in their hearts
would have preferred "forty-rod" whisky. And a little way off there was a
house with women and children in it, who had only to look out of the door
to see this miserable sight of husband, father, friends, visitors, and
hired men spending the afternoon in getting drunk.
I do not want any one to understand that every vineyard is a nest of
drunkards, for this is not true. In the Napa and Sonoma valleys, in
the foot-hills of the Sierra, at Anaheim and elsewhere in the southern
country, you may find many men cultivating the grape and making wine in
all soberness. But everywhere, and in my own experience nearly as often,
you will see the proprietor, or his sons or his hired men, bearing the
marks of strong drink; and too often, if you come unexpectedly, you will
see some poor wretch in the wine-house who about four o'clock is maudlin.
[Illustration: POINT ARENA LIGHT-HOUSE.]
Seeing all this, I advise no new settler in the State to make wine.
He runs too many risks with children and laborers, even if he himself
escapes.
In giving this advice, I do not mean to be offensive to the great body of
wine growers in California, which numbers in its list a great many
able, careful, and sober men, who are doing, as they have done, much and
worthily for the prosperity of the State and for the production of good
wine, and whose skill and enterprise are honorable to them. But the best
and most thoughtful of these men will bear me out when I say that wine
growing and making is a business requiring eminent skill and great
practical good sense, and that not every one who comes to California with
means enough to plant a vineyard ought to enter this business or can in
the long run do so safely or profitably.
Fortunately, no one need make wine, though every man may raise grapes;
for it is now a fact, established by sufficient and practical trial,
that raisins, equal in every respect to the best Malaga, can be made in
California from the proper varieties of grapes, and can be sold for a
price which will very handsomely pay the maker, and with a much smaller
investment of capital and less skill than are required to establish a
wine-cellar and make wine. The vineyard owners already complain that they
can not always readily sell their crude wine at a paying price; but the
market for carefully-made raisins is, as I am told by the principal fruit
dealers in San Francisco, open and eager. To make wine requires uncommon
skill and care, and to keep it so that age shall give it that merit which
commands a really good price demands considerable capital in the necessary
outlay for casks. While the skillful wine-maker undoubtedly gets a large
profit on his vines, it begins to be seen here that there is an oversupply
of poorly-made wine.
But any industrious person who has the right kind of grapes can make
raisins; and raisin-making, which in 1871 had still a very uncertain
future in this State, may now safely be called one of the established and
most promising industries here.
In 1872 I ate excellent raisins in Los Angeles, and tolerable ones in
Visalia; but they sell very commonly in the shops what they call
"dried grapes," which are not raisins at all, but damp, sticky,
disagreeable things, not good even in puddings. This year, however, I
have seen in several places good native raisins; and the head of the
largest fruit-importing house in San Francisco told me that one
raisin-maker last fall sold the whole of his crop there at $2 per box
of twenty-five pounds, Malagas of the same quality bringing at the
same time but $2.37-1/2. There is a market for all well-made raisins
that can be produced in the State, he said, and they are preferred to
the foreign product.
At Folsom, Mr. Bugby told me he had made last year 1700 boxes of raisins,
and he was satisfied with the pecuniary return; and I judge from the
testimony of different persons that at seven cents per pound raisins will
pay the farmer very well. The Malaga and the White Muscat are the grapes
which appear here to make the best raisins. Nobody has yet tried the
Seedless Sultana, which, however, bears well here, and would make, I
should think, an excellent cooking raisin.
For making raisins they wait until the grape is fully ripe, and then
carefully cut off the bunches and lay them either on a hard clay floor,
formed in the open air, or on brown paper laid between the vine rows. They
do not trim out poor grapes from the bunches, because, as they assert,
there are none; but I suspect this will have to be done for the very
finest raisins, such as would tempt a reluctant buyer. The bunches require
from eighteen to twenty-four days of exposure in the sun to be cured.
During that time they are gently turned from time to time, and such as are
earliest cured are at once removed to a raisin-house.
This is fitted with shelves, on which the raisins are laid about a foot
thick, and here they are allowed to sweat a little. If they sweat too much
the sugar candies on the outside, and this deteriorates the quality of the
raisin. It is an object to keep the bloom on the berries. They are kept in
the raisin-house, I was told, five or six weeks, when they are dry enough
to box. It is as yet customary to put them in twenty-five pound boxes,
but, no doubt, as more experience is gained, farmers will contrive other
parcels. Chinese do all the work in raisin-making, and are paid one dollar
a day, they supplying themselves with food. There is no rain during the
raisin-making season, and, consequently, the whole outdoor work may be
done securely as well as cheaply.
Enormous quantities of fruit are now put up in tin cans in this State;
and you will be surprised, perhaps--as I was the other day--to hear of an
orchard of peach and apricot trees, which bears this year (1873) its first
full crop, and for one hundred acres of which the owners have received ten
thousand dollars cash, gold, selling the fruit on the trees, without risk
of ripening or trouble of picking.
Yet peaches and apricots are not the most profitable fruits in this State,
for the cherry--the most delicious cherries in the world grow here--is
worth even more; and I suspect that the few farmers who have orchards
of plums, and carefully dry the fruit, make as much money as the cherry
owners. There has sprung up a very lively demand for California dried
plums. They bring from twenty to twenty-two cents per pound at wholesale
in San Francisco, and even as high as thirty cents for the best quality;
and I am told that last season a considerable quantity was shipped
Eastward and sold at a handsome profit in New York.
The plum bears heavily and constantly north of Sacramento, and does not
suffer from the curculio, and the dried fruit is delicious and wholesome.
Some day the farmers who are now experimenting with figs will, I do not
doubt, produce also a marketable dried fig in large quantities. At San
Francisco, in October, 1873, I found in the shops delicious dried figs,
but not in great quantities, nor so thoroughly dried as to bear shipment
to a distance. The tree nourishes in almost all parts of the State.
Usually it bears two and often three crops a year, and it grows into a
noble and stately tree.
I am told that when Smyrna figs sell for twenty to thirty cents per pound,
California figs bring but from five to ten cents. The tree comes into full
bearing, where its location is favorable, in its third or fourth year; and
ought to yield then about sixty pounds of dried figs. I suspect the cost
of labor will control the drying of figs, for they must be picked by hand.
If they fall to the ground they are easily bruised, and the bruised part
turns sour.
They are dried in the shade, and on straw, which lets the air get to every
part. Irrigation is not good after the tree bears, as the figs do not dry
so readily. Birds and ants are fond of the fruit; and in one place I was
told the birds took almost the whole of the first crop. There are many
varieties of the fig grown in this State, but the White Smyrna is, I
believe, thought to be the best for market. There are no large plantations
of this tree in the State, but it is found on almost every farm and
country place, and is a very wholesome fruit when eaten green.
When the farmers of the Sacramento Valley become tired of sowing wheat,
and when the land comes into the hands of small farmers, as it is now
doing to some extent, it will be discovered that fruit-trees are surer and
more profitable than grain. A considerable emigration is now coming into
California; and I advise every one who goes there to farm to lose no time
before planting an orchard. Trees grow very rapidly, and it will be many
years before such fruits as the cherry, plum, apricot, or the raisin-grape
are too abundant to yield to their owners exceptionally large profits.
[Illustration: SHIPPING LUMBER, MENDOCINO COUNTY.]