Mr. Downing - There is much experience, and the hest of all sense, common sense, in your remarks in your Dec. No., on the cultivation of the foreign grape in the open ground. But you say "Mr. Long worth has tried it on a small scale." Had you expended as large a sum as I have done on this wild goose chase, for twenty years, if a Jerseyman, you would deem it a large scale. There never was a year, for twenty years, that I did not collect foreign grape roots from some of our eastern cities. I also imported over 5,000 grape roots from Madeira, of all their best wine grapes. As many from the middle part of France, and from Germany. All lived, and were cultivated for a few years, and finally discarded. As a last trial, I imported 6,000 roots, composed of 24 varieties of grapes, from the mountains of Jura, in the north part of France, where the vine region suddenly ends. Their vineyards arc for months covered with snow. My success was no better than with vines from a warmer latitude. Grafting a foreign grape on wild stock, as you truly observe, does not render the graft more hardy. I have had the grafts to grow with great vigor, but occasionally they were killed, even down to the native stock.

We must look to our native grapes and seedlings from them, and to a cross with the best foreign, for our supply. In our latitude, even for the table, few foreign grapes can surpass the Herbemont, Ohio, Missouri, and some others recently introduced.

I hope to send you a sample of sparkling Catawba manufactured by Mr. Fournay, as it has now been in the bottle nearly two years. Those heretofore sold, were bottled by my former manufacturer. Two reasons lead me to believe my sparkling wine will compare favorably with the best French Champaign. It is better flavored, because it is made from the Catawba wine, only. In Champaign, three or four kinds of wine are mixed together, as they say, because the one possesses the aroma and flavor, another the effervescence, another the strength. If true, the wine cannot be as well flavored, or as healthy, as it would be from a grape containing all these requisites, which the Catawba does. A second reason is, that no wine made from a mixture of three or four kinds, can be as healthy to the stomach as where made from a single variety. If the Champaign manufacturers were allied, even in the forty-second degree, to Yankees or Jerseymen, I should suspect a stronger reason for the mixture - i. e.: the wine of fine aroma and flavor costs $1 per gallon. The others, from 50 cents down to 25 cents per gallon.

My opinion of the healthy character of the sparkling wine, made from one variety of grape, is confirmed in a letter I received a few days since, from a physician of Boston, whose name will give credence to the principle wherever it is known.

He says, "From some trials made of your Champaign wine, I am induced to believe