This page has already been transcribed. You can find new pages to transcribe here.

Transcription

[Page 119]

The soil in the latter, where soil is distinguishable is not unlike Sydney garden soil, only more or less intermingled with quartz pebbles of various colors.  The produce of this estate before the vine disease was in good years equal to 500 pipes.  He will this year not exceed 140 and last year was only 60.  There is both red & white wine.  The latter well known under its name "Chateau de Carbonnieux" as a "Grave" wine (i.e. not a Medoc).  I liked the white much better than the red.  It is light and is quite as bitter ? if not more so than Camden wine.  Indeed not unlike it only lighter.  The red grapes were all gathered & fermenting.  But I saw the whole process with respect to the white.  Owing to the smallness of the crop they were all gathered at once, but in ordinary crops it is the practice to go over the vines repeatedly gathering only the bunches which are well advanced in rottenness.  So long as the grapes are not cracked & thus dried up or sour, or "sour rotten", the more grapes are in the 1st & 2nd stages of rotting decay & mouldiness the better.  This is the rule at Bousac [Boussac], Sauterne, Preignac, and wherever white wines of character are made.  They cannot give a reason for it except that the wine is bitter.  The spec. grav. of the grape juice was 1075º to 1077º temp. 61º.  The grapes are gathered, & brought home as in the Medoc.  Shot from the tubs into large square stone troughs flagged roughly at the bottom with a sort of compact limestone, trodden, and the juice conveyed in the same kind of tub ("Comporte") I have mentioned before to the [chaise?] or fermenting departt. where it is poured into 50 gall. Hhds. which are fitted within two or three inches of the bung.  The whole days work is distributed equally into the number

Current Status: 
Completed