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On the Suitableness of Warm Climates for Wine Making. February 15, 1837 Climate and soil have ever been the two environmental conditions that determine most materially the character of wine. Too much cold, too much rain, or too much heat diminish the possibility of producing a vintage. Having grown up in the north of France, Herbemont knew about the limitations that cold and frost impose on viticulture. Living in the American South, he learned that humidity, not heat, was the great bane of wine making. Here, Herbemont digested the writings of André Julien about the geography of viticulture to show that it is practiced in the tropics in various parts of the world. Published in Farmers’ Register 5, no. 11 (March 1837). Columbia, S. C. February 15th, 1837 To the Editor of the Farmers’ Register Dear Sir: I have read with much pleasure in your most valuable Farmers’ Register, (No. 10) the extracts from “an essay on the climate of the United States,” and feel disposed to make a few observations on some parts of it.1 I shall not try my hand at explaining the causes why the eastern portions of our continent are much colder than the same parallels of latitude on the western coast of Europe. These, I thought, were matters pretty well settled, so far as we can see into them. The causes of the various winds are more unknown, at least to me, and therefore I shall say nothing about them. The author’s views relative to the culture of the vine in the United States, come somewhat more within the narrow limits of my studies and experience. It is but too true that “the efforts made at different periods, and in various parts of the country, to attain this object, have hitherto been so unsuccessful, as to introduce a very general belief, that there is something 1. Ruffin had encountered a copy of the anonymous tract written two decades previously and reprinted extracts in his journal: An Essay on the climate of the United States, or, An inquiry into the causes of the difference in climate between the Eastern side of the continent of North America and Europe: With practical remarks on the influence of climate on agriculture, and particularly the cultivation of the vine (Philadelphia: Hopkins & Earle, 1809). 239 in our soil or climate, so unfriendly to the vine, that it can never be cultivated with success.” This unfriendliness, it appears to me, is more in the climate than in the soil; and yet, although climate cannot be corrected by us, the soil can be in some degree, and we might do pretty well, if it were not that much too great quantities of rain fall in this country, during the summer mouths, particularly in the southern states. In a dry summer, we have good grapes and a tolerable crop, which might be very good in a soil sufficiently calcareous. It would be a most strange anomaly, that the vine could not be cultivated in a country which has, perhaps, more than any other on the face of the earth, indigenous vines growing almost every where, and in very great variety. Although we may, among this variety, find several that may be introduced into cultivation with great advantage in the cultivator, yet, I would not that our efforts be limited to the native kinds, alone—for the cultivated ones of Europe and other parts of the earth, offer advantages which never have been yet obtained from the native one. The exotic kinds, many of them grow very well in our country, and even more luxuriantly than in most parts of Europe. It is so true, that for a long time, I attributed the rot in the grapes to that very luxuriance of the vines; but, the having planted some, with equal want of success, in very poor sand land, has much weakened that opinion. I still hope that the remedy, at least a partial one, might be found in calcareous earths. The author of the pamphlet, whose review I am considering, seems like many other writers on the subject, to think it an insurmountable object to the making of wine, that the grapes ripen in the hot summer months, and thereby, the fermentation going on too violently, the wine becomes acid. I have made wine when the thermometer was 90 deg. and upwards, and my wine has never turned acid in consequence of it.2 I certainly never have experienced any difficulty on this...

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