By Danube or Guadalquivir,
Nor on island nor cape,
That bears such a grape
As grows by the Beautiful River.
“Very good in its way
Is the Verzenay,
Or the Sillery, soft and creamy,
But Catawba wine
Has a taste more divine,
More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy.”
On Kelley’s Island, Erie county, also in the State of Ohio, a wine company, established in 1866, and trading principally in still wines, makes sparkling wines upon a considerable scale exclusively from the catawba variety of grape, which is cultivated in its highest perfection both on the islands of Lake Erie and along a narrow
slip of territory not two miles long bordering the southern shore of the lake, and also in the vicinity of Lake Keuka, near Hammondsport, N.Y. The Kelley Island Wine Company, as it is styled, presses the grapes between the middle of October and the end of November, and bottles from about the 20th May until the commencement of July in the year following. Its brands are Island Queen, Nonpareil, and Carte Blanche. Ninety-five per cent. of the wines are dry, and the tendency of the market is in favour of a still drier article. Shipments are principally confined to the United States, the great centre of the trade being St. Louis, on the Mississippi, which has its own sparkling wine establishments, and to-day disputes with Chicago the title of Queen of the West. The company keep some 100,000 bottles of sparkling wines in stock, and possess facilities for bottling five times that quantity whenever the demand might warrant such a step being taken. Of recent years, however, economy has been the rule in American society, and the market for native sparkling wines at any rate is to-day a reduced one.
At Hammondsport, south of Lake Keuka—in other words, Crooked Lake—and in the State of New York, the establishments of the Pleasant Valley and Urbana wine companies, devoting their attention to both still and sparkling wines, are installed. The region, which enthusiastic writers now term the Champagne of America, was colonised in 1793, and vines of the catawba and isabella varieties were first planted for the purpose of making wine in 1854. At the present time there are about 8,000 acres under cultivation with all the better species of vines. The produce from black and white grapes is mingled for the sparkling wines of the district. Of the former but two kinds are considered suitable, the concord and the isabella, both being varieties of the indigenous labrusca, or so-called foxy-flavoured grape. The concord is a hardy and productive plant, producing large and compact bunches of large round sweet grapes, yielding a wine of the obnoxious foxy flavour. The isabella is an equally hardy and productive variety, and its bunches are of good size, although not compact. Its berries,