My Command in South Africa 1874-1878 Author:Arthur Augustus Thurlow Cunynghame Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WINE-GROWING. Although the chief industry at the Paarl and at Stellenbosh is the culture of the vine, yet the wine, far from improving1, has f... more »or many years rather fallen off in its quality. This may be owing to many causes. The first, no doubt, is the high price of labour. The second may be the great expense of sending the wine to market at the Diamond Fields and other places in the interior of the colony. To these causes may be added the high duty charged by the colony of Natal upon the wines of the Cape, ignorance of proper methods of preparing them, and the difficulty arising from a want of sufficient capital to store them until they have become properly fit for use. There can be no doubt that at present Cape wines deservedly stand low in public estimation. There may be many reasons for this. The quality of the earth appears to produce in the grape an earthy matter, which may affect the wine, making it resemble an inferior Madeira. From this flavour the most carefully prepared kinds are not free. The taste of the consumers generally is so undefined that they have not yet learned to distinguish the value of good Spanish wine, principally because they never see it. Lastly, perhaps, it may be more profitable to make the juice of the grape into brandy; for where carriage to a distant market is so expensive —such as sixpence or more per pound weight, or sixpence per pint, to the Diamond Fields—it acts as a great inducement toIll] (JAPE WINES AND " CAPE SMOKE." 21 make an article with the greatest possible strength in proportion to its bulk. Only a very small proportion of the brandy has any pretension even to imitate the Cognac of France, the larger proportion being manufactured into "Cape Smoke," a most disagreeable spirit, commonly used throughout the c...« less