But what I think impresses all visitors to this favoured spot more than anything else are the vineyards, especially if he be conversant with Continental grape-growing districts. This strong, red soil, bearing evidences of abundance of iron on every hand, seems to be the natural home of the grape, and to be free, to an amazing degree, from those insect pests which have made the lot of the French and Italian vignerons such a weary one. Every variety of grape seems to flourish here in such wonderful luxuriance and fecundity, and withal in such healthfulness of foliage and fruit, that the eye wearies of admiring their prolific masses. Quite unintentionally it so happened that I was invited to go and visit one of the youngest of the vineyards and its "winery," as it is called, in company with two gentlemen, proprietor and editor of a great newspaper out here. And I must confess that I was amazed at everything I saw. The wagon-loads of tiny but rich-tasting, luscious grapes, coming in from the adjacent vineyards, where they were being picked by a merry troop of boys and girls, the ceaseless elevator upon whose revolving shelves a burly, silent man hurled huge fork-loads of grapes, the drum above, in which those same grapes were separated from their stalks and crushed at the same time, the juice flowing one way, the stalks another, and the crushed skins another. All the swift process was mightily interesting, especially as contrasted with the old crude methods of the Continent, with their maximum of dirt. I thought of Macaulay's
"This year the must shall foam 'Neath the white(?) feet of laughing girls,"
and felt that this method was infinitely preferable. Then down below to where the great square backs full of juice were bubbling and boiling in the throes of fermentation, and I elicited information about the hastening of that wonderful process by the addition of special cultures _à la_ Pasteur, for your Australian wine-grower is nothing if not scientific. Here is a flood of claret, here one from the Sauvignon grape, here the Muscat, here port, but all busy, and none allowed to waste an unnecessary moment in the preliminary processes, however long they may have to lie and mature afterwards. And I was especially interested in seeing how the tint of the grape was reproduced in the wine, so that a very slight acquaintance and a keen eye for colour would be sufficient to name the particular grape from which any given back-full had been crushed.