The vintaging of the white grapes takes place about a fortnight later than the black grapes, and is commonly a compound operation, the best and ripest bunches being first of all gathered just as the berries begin to get shrivelled and show symptoms of approaching rottenness. It is these selected grapes that yield the best wine. The second gathering, which follows shortly after the first, includes all the grapes remaining on the vines, and yields a wine perceptibly inferior in quality. The grapes on their arrival at the press-house are generally pressed immediately, and the must is run off into tuns to ferment. At the commencement these tuns are filled up every three or four days to replace the fermenting must which has flowed over; afterwards any waste is made good at the interval of a week, and then once a fortnight, the bungholes of the casks being securely closed towards the end of the year, by which time the first fermentation is over. It should be noted that the Saumur sparkling wine manufacturers draw considerable supplies of the white wine, required to impart lightness and effervescence to their _vin préparé_, from the Vouvray vineyards. Vouvray borders the Loire a few miles from the pleasant city of Tours, which awakens sinister recollections of truculent Louis XI., shut up in his fortified castle of Plessis-lez-Tours, around which Scott has thrown the halo of his genius in his novel of _Quentin Durward_. A succession of vineyard slopes stretch from one to another of the many historic châteaux along this portion of the Loire, the romantic associations of which render the Touraine one of the most interesting provinces of France. Near Tours, besides the vineyards of Saint-Cyr are those of Joué and Saint-Avertin; the two last situate on the opposite bank of the Cher, where the little town of Joué, perched on the summit of a hill in the midst of vineyards, looks over a vast plain known by the country-people as the Landes de Charlemagne, the scene, according to local tradition, of Charles Martel's great victory over the Saracens. The Saint-Avertin vineyards extend towards the east, stretching almost to the forest of Larçay, on the borders of the Cher, where Paul Louis Courier, the famous vigneron pamphleteer of the Restoration, noted alike for his raillery, wit, and satire, fell beneath the balls of an assassin. A noticeable cru in the neighbourhood of Tours is that of Cinq Mars, the ruined château of which survives as a memorial of the vengeance of Cardinal Richelieu, who, after having sent its owner to the scaffold, commanded its massive walls and towers to be razed '_à hauteur d'infamie_,' as we see them now.