Fizz Water

U. S. clubmen opened their mail, last week, with a start of surprise. They were used to advertisements of automobiles, investments, shaving soaps. But they were not used to elaborate, detailed advertisements of champagne. As everyone knows, bootleg champagne in the U. S, market is priced at $10--$15 a quart. These beguiling advertisements suggested the possibility of better-than-bootleg champagne for $2.30. Immediate reactions of cautious clubmen were: 1) It can't be legal; and 2) It can't be good. But the advertisement gave chapter and verse of the Volstead Act in defense of is legality, and as proof of its potability offered an iron-clad guarantee: "If you are not satisfied with the champagne you make, your money will be returned to you. "If you are not satisfied, we will send a man to destroy the champagne and he will give you a check. "If you spoil it through your own negligence, you get your money back. "If your idea of good champagne is peculiar, you get your money back. "If for any reason, or for no reason at all, you are not satisfied, you get your money back." Reassured by the brute force of guarantees, but still bewildered, serious clubmen sought the facts about the new, post-prohibition, U. S. champagne industry.

Fast ripening, full of promise, Catawbas and Concords hang heavy on the vines all up and down the steep, terraced hillsides cf New York's Finger Lakes region. Heavy hang the Zinfandels in the dry wine districts of California. So beautiful are the vineyards, so luscious is the fruit, that thousands of motorists pause to comment: "Lucky grapegrowers. It should be a bumper year." But the owners of the vineyards walk through them with sour faces, wondering, specifically, whether or not to tear up each fertile vine by the roots, and allow sheep to graze over the hillsides. What ignorant tourists do not know, what grapegrowers consider daily, is that U. S. vineyards in 1928 will yield over 100,000 carloads of fruit, almost twice as much as the public can conceivably consume as table fruit, raisins, grape juice or wine. Grapegrowers know the reason for such appalling overproduction. For a decade before prohibition, the price of grapes in California ranged between $10 and $20 a ton. But when manufacture and importation of wines stopped together, foreign-born, wine-loving citizens began to demand grapes which could be made into wine in their own homes. California prices jumped to $200 and $300 a ton. California growers, full of optimism, trebled their acreage, overestimated the demand. Production increased from 1,000,000 tons in 1919 to 2,400,000 tons in 1927. But without organization and sound selling, almost half this vast production must be destroyed as useless. Very acute is the depression in the grape industry. One grapegrower, scion of a long line of U. S. vintners, foresaw the crash, strove desperately to avert it. Portly, florid Paul Garrett, owner of many a vineyard in New York, North Carolina, California, long has led the nation's grapegrowers through the chaos which prohibition made of their business. He loves grapes, vineyards, wherever he sees them. When vineyardists of Northern California began, in 1919, to tear up their vines and substitute other fruits, Grapegrower Garrett felt a personal sense of injury. He hastened to California, bought where and when he could, saved the vineyards from destruction. Years before the Eighteenth Amendment became an immediate issue at Washington, Grapegrower Garrett allied himself with the drys, fought for wine as the drink of temperance, moved his headquarters from state to state as local prohibition spread across the U. S. It was Grape-grower Garrett who went to Washington in 1919 to fight for the lives of the vintners. Day after day he sat in the Anti-Saloon League offices, waiting for a chance to drill a hole in the forbidding wall of the Volstead Act. Boldly, he pleaded the cause of the vintners with the League chiefs, headed by the arch-dry Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. Did they realize that the Volstead Act made it a felony to allow cider or grape juice to ferment in one's own home? They paused, considered, revised the fateful Section 29, the section of "pains and penalties," teeth of the Volstead Act. They added a clause--a hole in the Volstead wall: The penalties provided in this Act against the manufacture of liquor without a permit shall not apply to the manufacture of Cider and Wine by a person exclusively for use in his own home. But such Cider and Wine may not be sold or transported except to a holder of a permit io manufacture vinegar. Difficulties of course arose. "Wine" had to yield to "Fruit Juices." At once, Grapegrower Garrett returned to the fray. What did "non-intoxicating" mean? One-half of one per cent? The drys reassured him. It meant non-intoxicating in fact. And the courts have sustained the definition, ruling that Section 29 is either an exemption from the rest of the Volstead act or a meaningless provision.* Next month, industrious laborers will move from vine to vine, picking the finest bunches of 14 different kinds of grapes. Heaped in vats, grapes must not be crushed by heavy instruments, or skins and seeds will be bruised, will give a bitter taste to the juice of the fruit. Most satisfactory of all pressing devices is the human foot and many a European vineyard is the scene of an annual Bacchanal, peasants dancing barefoot in the winepresses. But Grapegrower Garrett spurns even this artificial method of extracting juice, permits nothing savoring of a Bacchanal among the sturdy farmer-folk of upstate New York. His grapes, piled high, yield of their own weight what grapegrowers call the "first press," the unforced stream of juice which has the most perfect flavor. Run into a cold vacuum, the fruit juice loses at least two parts of its composition. All water is withdrawn, leaving the concentrated essence of grape.* In 5-gallon cans (not hogsheads) is stored the potential champagne until it is ready to be barrelled and shipped, unfermented essence of grape, to the consumer. The consumer may add water, drink it at once as a soft beverage. Or he may add water, allow it to become wine. Expert champagne tasters have pronounced Grapegrower Garrett's product as fine as vintage champagnes. His hope is that through the manufacture of fine, non-intoxicating wines in the home, the problem of prohibition, the reign of the bootleggers, may be ended. Grapegrower Garrett has developed the thesis that by-products of alcohol, not alcohol itself, cause intoxication. He would like to teach the U. S. to make a wine free of all poisonous byproducts. Such a wine, he believes, can be made from his Virginia Dare concentrate. And such a wine is extolled in the advertisement of the Virginia Dare Vineyards, Inc. (Penn Yan, N. Y.), which U. S. clubmen read last week. Grapegrower Garrett is 65. For 51 years he has thought of little but grapes. In his home on the banks of Lake Keuka, N. Y., framed by his Virginia Dare Vineyards, he ponders how to perfect grapes, how to blend grapes, how to sell grapes. His recreations are vigorous. He has four great hunters which he rides hard and well. His speed boat is the fastest on Lake Keuka. Dear to his heart is a battle, of words or of fists. He once caught a workman stealing wine from a bucket. Furious, he cuffed the thief's hatted head for 20 minutes, then went into his house to find a hat to replace the one he had ruined. As he loves a fistfight, so he yearns for battles in the Washington arena. The slightest hint that trouble is brewing for the vintners and Grapegrower Garrett rushes to Congress, injects his pugnacious, generous personality into the issue. The antecedents of Grapegrower Garrett's intense interest in grapes date back to 1836, when the foundations of U. S. vineyards were laid by one Sidney Weller in Halifax, N. C., and by Nicholas Longworth, Sr., father of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, along the banks of the Ohio River. Grapegrower Garrett looks at least as far into the future, sees the U. S. once more a temperance nation.

* In the U. S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, Judge Edwin Yates Webb, in the case of the U. S. v. Isner, declared he had been a member of the Congress which passed the Volstead act, recalled well the debates on the subject, knew that it was the intention of Congress to define "non-intoxicating" at "non-intoxicating in fact."

* Also withdrawn are the "anti-ferments." In his laboratory, Grapegrower Garrett has made champagne from his concentrate in five days. Under ordinary conditions of temperature, the concentrate can become champagne in from three to six weeks.