"You were just on the point," said I, "of mentioning a method of distinguishing good wine from bad." "Well," replied he, "those fellows there, on the other side of the Bay of Biscay, have methods innumerable. After all, taste, judgment, and experience must decide. The Oporto wine-merchants, who know what they are about, use a sort of silver saucer, with its centre bulging upwards. In this saucer they make the wine spin round. My plan is different." "I should like to know it," said I. "Well, sir," said he, "mix with water--two-thirds water to one-third wine. Then try it." "Well?" "If there is any bad taste in the wine, the mixing brings it out. Did you never notice in London, even if the port or sherry seems passable alone, when you water it the compound is truly horrid, too nauseous to drink?" "The fact is, though a moderate man, I am not very fond of watering wine." "The fact is," continued Gingham, "there is very little good wine to be got in London, always excepting such places, for instance, as the Chapter. When you return, after having tasted wine in the wine countries, you will be of my opinion. Much that you get is merely poor wine of the inferior growths, coloured, flavoured, and dressed up with bad brandy for the London market. That sort comes from abroad. And much that you get is not wine at all, but a decoction; a vile decoction, sir; not a drop of wine in its composition. That sort is the London particular." I felt that I was receiving ideas. "Now, sir," said Gingham, "my cold-water test detects this. If what you get for wine is a decoction, a compound, and nothing but a compound, no wine in it, then the water--about two-thirds to one-third--detects the filthy reality. Add a lump or two of sugar, and you get as beastly a dose of physic as was ever made up in a doctor's shop." "Just such a dose," I replied, "as I remember getting, now you mention it, as I came down here by the fast coach, at an inn where I asked, by way of a change, for a glass of cold white-wine negus. The slice of lemon was an improvement, having done duty before in a glass of gin punch." "Shouldn't wonder," said Gingham. "And if what you buy for port or sherry be not absolutely a decoction, but only inferior wine made up, then the water equally acts as a detective. For the dilution has the effect of separating, so to speak, the respective tastes of the component parts--brings them out, sir; and you get each distinct. You get, on the one hand, the taste of the bad brandy, harsh, raw, and empyreumatic: and you get, on the other hand, the taste of the poor, paltry wine, wretched stuff, the true _vinho ordinario_ flavour, that makes you think at once of some dirty roadside Portuguese _posada_, swarming with fleas." "But what if you water really good wine?" "Why, then," said Gingham, "the flavour, though diluted, is still the flavour of good wine." "I should like," said I, "to be knowing in wines."