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_. On proceeding to Vouvray from Tours we skirt a succession of poplar-fringed meadows stretching eastward in the direction of Amboise along the right bank of the Loire; and after a time a curve in the river discloses to view a range of vine-clad heights extending some distance beyond the village of Vouvray. Our route lies past the picturesque ruins of the abbey of Marmoûtier and the Château des Roches--one of the most celebrated castles of the Loire--the numerous excavations in the soft limestone ridge on which they are perched being converted as usual into houses, magazines, and wine-cellars. We proceed through the village of Rochecorbon, and along a road winding among the spurs of the Vouvray range, past hamlets, half of whose inhabitants live in these primitive dwellings hollowed out of the cliff, and finally enter the charming Vallée Coquette, hemmed in on all sides with vine-clad slopes. Here a picturesque old house, half château half homestead, was pointed out to us as a favourite place of sojourn of Balzac, who speaks of this rocky ridge as “inhabited by a population of vine-dressers, their houses of several stories being hollowed out in the face of the cliff, and connected by dangerous staircases hewn in the soft stone. Smoke curls from most of the chimneys which peep above the green crest of vines, while the blows of the cooper’s hammer resound in several of the cellars. A young girl trips to her garden over the roofs of these primitive dwellings, and an old woman, tranquilly seated on a ledge of