Upon my way to Puget Sound, I tarried sometime in the Columbia valley. It did not take long to discover here a rival to California. In some important respects this region appears to be a superior wine-producing country. There are serious climatic obstacles to be overcome in fermentation in California that do not appear in the Columbia valley, because the climate in the latter region is so much cooler that the sucrose stage may be maintained long enough to develop superior qualities, flavor and bouquet, before running into the acetic stage. As I studied the matter I discovered that I was becoming musically inclined; my song was "Hail Columbia, Land of the Vine." My mind, seizing the varied phases of the problem, carried me in imagination to that other great river, the Rhine, where for a thousand years romance, song and story have been associated with its vine-clad hills, where the finest wine of the world has so long been produced. If I should dare to allow myself to prophesy, I should predict great things in store for this favored region.

The Columbia river is much larger than the Rhine and the valley many times larger than the Rhine valley wherein the conditions for grape culture are present. There is but a narrow strip along the immediate shores of the Rhine where grapes may be grown, but here in this valley of the Columbia the climatic conditions are favorable wherever water for irrigation can be carried ; indeed, large portions of the valley do not require irrigation. California may, and indeed, probably will, have a monopoly of raisin production. The heat there is sufficient to dry raisins out of doors', and there is also more glucose or grape sugar produced in a hot than in a mild climate, but there are more flavoring extracts and bouquet in the grapes grown in a mild climate than in a hot one. The valley of the Columbia has been at no very remote period the bed of a lake, but it is now filled with the output of one or more volcanoes, and much volcanic ashes containing potash is distributed over these lands, thus making the soil more like the grape districts of Europe than those of California. I found upon inquiry that here and there men are abandoning wheat culture and going into that of grapes. The same facts had been so often observed by others that they are forcibly impressed upon my mind.

The climate of western Washington is too damp for Vitis vinifera ; the leaf mildews and the fruit fails to ripen, but the Columbia valley, east of the Cascades, should in the near future become the paradise of the vintner.