After visiting some of the vineyards, we drove to one of the great packing establishments in Fresno. These packing houses are nearly always in the cities and towns, because there help can be easily obtained. The packing house that we visited employs four hundred people, mostly girls and women.
The raisins are first placed on wooden or metal frames the size of a raisin box. These are called forms, and the packers are paid according to the number of forms filled. When these are filled, the raisins are carefully transferred to the boxes.
A box of raisins weighs twenty pounds, but there are half boxes and quarter boxes put up also. A paper is placed on the bottom of each box, and over the raisins another is placed. On top of this there is a fancy paper on which the name of the packer is stamped.
In most establishments there are three grades of raisins, Imperial Clusters, London Layers, and the loose and imperfect stems.
Sometimes a second crop of grapes is gathered a little later in the fall. Of course these do not dry so well because the days are shorter, it is cooler, and rains sometimes occur. On this account they are dipped in lye and then rinsed in water. The lye cracks the skin, and so the juice evaporates more quickly. These are called Valencia raisins. There is not a very good market for these, so that people do not dip them so commonly now as they used to.
We saw the machine where the raisins are stemmed. They pass from a hopper into a space between two woven-wire cylinders. The inner one revolves within the other. In this way the raisins are broken from the stems. They are then run through a fanning mill which cleans them, and they are finally graded by passing through screens having openings of different sizes.
Most of the seedless raisins are made from seedless grapes, but there are machines for removing the seeds from the grapes which contain them.
The superintendent of the packing house said that nearly all of the raisins that we import come from Spain, and that they are exported chiefly from the city of Malaga.
The purple and other wine grapes are taken to the wineries and sold by the ton, to be made into wine.
There are many other things that I should like to write about, but my letter is a pretty long one now, so I will close.