‘Roman newspapers,’ said an intelligent Roman to Caper, ’were invented to conceal the news.’

The first thing that a foreigner does on entering Rome is to originate a derogatory name for the juice of the grape native to the soil, the vino nostrale.  He calls it, if red wine, red ink, pink cider, red tea; if white wine, balm of gooseberries, blood of turnips, apple-juice, alum-water, and slops for babes; finally ... if not killed off with a fever, from drinking the adulterated foreign wines, spirits, and liqueurs sold in the city, he takes kindly to the Roman wines, and does not worry his great soul about them.

The truth is, that while other nations have done every thing to improve wine-making, Italy follows the same careless way she has done for centuries.  Far more attention was bestowed on the grape, too, in ancient times than now; and we read that vineyards were so much cultivated, to the neglect of agriculture, that, under Domitian, an edict forbade the planting of any new vineyards in Italy.

One brilliant morning, in October, Caper, who was then living in a town perched atop of a conical mountain, descended five or six miles on foot, and passed a day in a vineyard, in order to see the vintage.  The vines were trained on trees or on sticks of cane, and the peasant-girls and women were busy picking the great bunches of white or purple grapes, which were thrown into copper conche or jars; these conche, when filled, were carried on the head to a central spot where they were emptied on fern leaves, placed on the ground to receive them.  And from these piles, the wooden barrels of the mules returning from the town were filled with the grapes which were carried up there to be pressed.

The grape-crop had been so affected by the malattia or blight, that the yield being small, the fruit to an extent was not pressed in the vineyards, and the juice only brought up to the town in goat-skins as usual; but the fruit itself was carried up, by those having the proper places, and was pressed in tubs in the cantine or rooms on the ground-floor, where the wine is kept.  Across the huge saddles of the mules, they swung a couple of truncated cone-shaped barrels, and filled them with grapes; these were tumbled into tubs, ranged in the cantina, good, bad and indifferent fruit all together; and when enough were poured in, in jumped the pistatore d’uve or grape-presser, with bare legs and feet, and began pressing and stamping, until the juice ran out in a tolerable stream.  This juice was then poured into a headless hogshead, and when more than half-full, they piled on the grapeskins and stones and stems that had undergone the pressure, until the hogshead was full to the top.  A weight was then placed over all.  In twenty days, fermentation having taken place, they drew from the hogshead the new wine, which was afterward clarified with whites of eggs.

In this rough-and-ready way, the common wine is made.  Without selection, all grapes, ripe, unripe, and rotten, sweet and sour, are mashed up together, hurriedly and imperfectly pressed, and the wine is sent to market, to sell for what it will bring.  Having thus seen it made, let us see it disposed of.