State Library of NSW
[Page 114]
I should like you to taste them. I believe them to be perfectly pure & unmixed. I have heard the subject so much discussed before so many persons, all conversant with the wine trade, that I feel confident the wines I tasted are pure. They say their chief profits are upon the common wines, which they buy according to their judgement and mix with Beni Carlo & a little Hermitage according to the markets they are for. But that mixed wines no longer go down so well in England, and the thing they all assure me is that wine bottled on the estate is never fined more than once just previous to bottling, and wine they purchase in the wood twice, i.e., just after they receive it and again before bottling. That the wine being judged by flavour & by its brilliancy to be fit to bottle they pay no attention to the weather, cloudy or bright all the same if the wine be bright and sufficiently mellowed. They pay great attention to this last and keep it making twice a year without fining into fresh casks moderately sulphured. The "La Fitte" I saw a year old was as bright as possible and very deep in colour, it had never been fined. The white wines are often very difficult to get bright enough to bottle and in some [indecipherable] can never be brought into a fit state. Repeated fining they say is worse than useless, but that repeated racking should be adopted (4 or 5 times a year) each time with a square inch or two of sulphur match per Hhd. They have promised me a few samples of the first growths of really fine years, so as to convey a proper idea of the true character of each in its perfection say 1 dozn of each & tell me it shall not cost me much. I wish much that you should really know what they are like. I have been drinking at the rate of a bottle or more a day for the last few days of including [very?] fine growth in this [Depart.?]. I must select ½ a dozen from these that you may judge. They are very inquisitive about our wines but I have not praised them; replying that I cannot give them by description, the least idea of what they are, but that I will send them some. They are only going to bottle the wines of 1849 now at Langoa. For casks they only
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