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THE GEORGIA EXPERIMENT 51 goodness of it increases as the vines grow older."59 Not everyone was so hopeful as Stephens, or so tactful as Oglethorpe. Major James Carteret, who was also at Frederica when Stephens presented his Savannah wine, later told the trustees that "he had tasted the wine made at Savannah which Col. Stephens carry'd from thence to Col. Oglethorpe, which was sad stuff, and bitter, rather the juice of the stalk than of the grape."60 By the next year Stephens saw even more reason for encouragement. People were actually competing with each other in establishing vineyards, he told the trustees in January 1741.6l By May he was exulting in the flourishing condition of his own vineyard, in which "many of my vines, that had been of one or two years standing at most, made an agreeable prospect, by putting forth clusters of grapes in pretty good plenty, that had the appearance of coming to perfection."62 The yield from the new vineyards was not yet enough to produce any substantial measure of wine, so Stephens suggested that three or four growers might pool their grapes, "whereby they might probably attain to a cask of wine, more or less sufficient to make some judgment of what they might expect in time coming."63 By July, Stephens' eyes were gladdened by the sight of an actual vintage. James Balleu, a Frenchman from near Bordeaux, had had vines growing for the past three years at Savannah and was about to make wine from the crop. Stephens attended the occasion as an observer, and, he tells us, "had the satisfaction of seeing upwards of thirteen gallons press'd, and put into a cask for working; which from the richness of the juice, I should expect will become a wine of a good body, at a due age."64 That there really was visible activity in Savannah winegrowing, not just a fantasy of Stephens' hopefulness, is confirmed by Thomas Causton, whose survey of the "products of the colony of Georgia" made at the end of 1741, after noting the dereliction of De Lyon and the general difficulty of obtaining suitable cuttings, says that nevertheless "great progress has been made within this 3 years past." Winegrowing only needed "encouragement" in order to be established, and to this end he suggested a bounty of £100 "for the first pipe of wine which should be made in Georgia."65 At the same time, Stephens was writing to the trustees' accountant in London that he would soon send a full statistical survey of the wine industry in Georgia, which would show how reasonable it was to expect success in winegrowing and would "convince every body, that all we have said, is not an empty Chimera."66 The emphasis of the assertion suggests that Stephens had had to listen to loud and frequent doubts; and the skeptics were of course right. If Stephens ever prepared his promised statistical account, I have not found it. It could not have communicated much optimism to the trustees, for in the official defense of the colony prepared by their secretary in 1741, though it is said that the venture in winegrowing "shows a great probability of succeeding," it is prudently added that "this produce must be a work of time, and must depend upon an increase of the people."67 We know something of Stephens' own efforts as a viticulturist at this time; he, 52 FROM THE DISCOVERY TO THE REVOLUTION at any rate, was working in good faith and with good hope. As part of his compensation from the trustees, Stephens had been granted a plantation of 500 acres (the maximum allowable under the rule for Georgia), some thirteen miles south of Savannah at the mouth of the Vernon River, which he named Bewlie, after an estate in England to which he fancied he saw a resemblance.68 He seems to have planted grapes as soon as ground could be cleared, and his pleasures and troubles growing out of his vineyard at Bewlie make a major theme running through Stephens' journal . Early in 1742 Stephens, using cuttings taken from the Trustees' Garden in Savannah , made an extensive planting of vines under the direction of a man from the Swiss settlement at Purrysburgh (perhaps he was the Monsieur Rinck whom Stephens later called the most skillful vigneron in the colony).69 In April of 1742 Stephens was pleased to see that of the 900 vines he had planted...

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