When the period of the vintage arrives, the cares of the proprietors and the labours of the cultivators and makers increase. The bunches are picked and spread out for some days on mattings; the unripe grapes, which have less substance and spirit, are separated, and are exposed longer to the sun, by which they improve. If the berries be over-ripe, then the saccharine prevails, and there is a deficiency of tartaric acid. The selected grapes are sprinkled with lime, by which the watery and acetous particles are absorbed and corrected. A nice hand is requisite in this powdering, which, by the way, is an ancient African custom, in order to avoid the imputation of Falstaff, “There is lime in this sack.” The treading out the fruit is generally done by night, because it is then cooler, and in order to avoid as much as possible the plague of wasps, by whom the half-naked operators are liable to be stung. On the larger vineyards there is generally a jumble of buildings, which contain every requisite for making the wine, as well as cellars into which the must or pressed grape juice is left to pass the stages of fermentation, and where it remains until the following spring before it is removed from the lees. “When the new wine is racked off, all the produce of the same vineyard and vintage is housed together, and called a _partido_ or lot. [Sidenote: MANUFACTURE OF SHERRY.] The vintage, which is the all-absorbing, all-engrossing moment of the year, occupies about a fortnight, and is earlier in the Rota districts than at Xerez, where it commences about the 20th of September; into these brief moments the hearts, bodies, and souls of men are condensed; even Venus, the queen of neighbouring Cadiz, and who during the other three hundred and fifty-one days of the year, allies herself willingly to Bacchus, is now forgotten. Nobles and commoners, merchants and priests, talk of nothing but wine, which then and there monopolises man, and is to Xerez what the water is at Grand Cairo, where the rising of the Nile is at once a pleasure and a profit. When the vintage is concluded, the custom-house officers take note in their respective districts of the quantity produced on each vineyard, to whom it is sold, and where it is taken to; nor can it be resold or removed afterwards, without a permit and a charge of a four per cent. ad valorem duty. It need not be said, that in a land where public officers are inadequately paid, where official honesty and principle are all but unknown, a bribe is all-sufficient; false returns are regularly made, and every trick resorted to to facilitate trade, and transfer revenue into the pockets of the collectors, rather than into the Queen’s treasury; thus are defeated the vexations and extortions of commerce-hampering excise, to hate which seems to be a second nature in man all over the world. Commissioners excepted. In the first year a decided difference takes place in these new wines; some become _bastos_ or coarse, others sour