In the fifteenth century the Cyprian vines were selected for the now
celebrated vineyards of Madeira; nothing can better exemplify the
standard of industry and consequent prosperity than the vine, when we
regard the identical plant in the hands of the Portuguese and in its
original home in Cyprus under the Turkish administration. The first
historical notice of the vine occurs when Noah, stranded upon Mount
Ararat, took advantage, upon the first subsidence of the waters, to
plant a vineyard; and, according to the curt biblical description, it
grew, produced, and the wine intoxicated the proprietor, all within a
few days. It may not have occurred to the wine trade that this biblical
fact proves that the consumption of wine had been among the first
assumed necessities of the human race; if Noah's first impulse upon
landing suggested the cultivation of the vine, he was restoring to the
world a plant that had been considered so absolutely important that he
must have provided himself with either buds or cuttings in great
quantities when he selected his animals for the Ark BEFORE the Deluge.
If this is true, the use of wine must have been pre-historical, and its
abuse historical; the two purposes having continued to the present day.
It may therefore be acknowledged that no custom has been so universal
and continuous as the drinking of wine from the earliest period of human
existence. The vine is a mysterious plant; it is so peculiarly sensitive
that, like a musical instrument which produces harmony or discord at the
hands of different performers, the produce of the same variety is
affected by the soil upon which the plants are grown. Thus ten thousand
young vines may be planted upon one mountain, all of the same stock; but
various qualities of wine will be produced, each with a special
peculiarity of flavour, according to the peculiarities of soil. The same
estate, planted with the same vines, may produce high class wines and
others that would hardly command a market, if the soil varies according
to the degrees of certain localities. It would now be impossible to
produce Madeira wine in Cyprus, although the plants might be imported
and cultivated with the greatest attention. When the vines were shipped
from Cyprus and planted in Madeira during the rule of the Venetians, it
must not be supposed that those vines had ever produced wine of the
well-known Madeira flavour and quality; that flavour was the result of
some peculiarity in the soil of the new country to which the vines had
been transplanted, and there can be little doubt that the rich and
extremely luscious variety known in Cyprus as "Commanderia" was the
parent vine of the Madeira vineyards.
It is well known that the costly experiments of a century at the Cape of
Good Hope have verified the fact that the vine is the slave of certain
conditions of soil, which impart to this extremely delicate and
sensitive plant a special flavour that is incorporated with the wine,
and can never be eradicated.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 156 of 274
Words from 80923 to 81440
of 143016
