The plantations were first made by creole workmen, who were paid by the day. Afterwards, as immigration from Europe increased, long-term contracts came into vogue, in virtue of which the colonist received the bare land and undertook to have it planted with vines at the end of three, four, or five years. The owner supplied the material, and at the end of the contract the colonist received a few _centavos_ for each vine, or sold the whole or part of the first harvest. On account of these contracts there were always a great many foreigners in the districts where vineyards were in course of formation. The proportion is now less at Mendoza than at San Rafael, where colonization is more recent. Whenever they could, the owners left to the colonists, not only the business of planting the vines, but the upkeep of adult vineyards. In those cases the colonist receives a fixed sum per hectare (100 piastres, for instance), and has to dig, prune, irrigate, etc. A large number of these agricultural workers and small contractors have saved a small capital, and purchased land of their own. This they have planted, and they thus form a new class of working owners. While the _vinatores_ were multiplying vineyards, the _bodegueros_ were transforming the methods of making wine. The weakness of imperfectly fermented wines, which turn sour and evaporate quickly, was all the worse for the growers of the colonial period because transport was slow, and there was no protection against the sun, which cooked the _algarroba_ casks or the leather bottles on the backs of the mules. The vineyard-owners often preferred to distil their wine and export brandy, flavoured with aniseed, to the Andean tablelands or the coast. The climate and the risks of transport had brought into existence an astonishing variety of methods of treating the must. Sometimes it was concentrated by boiling until it became a thick syrup (_arrope_), something like, apparently, the thick wines of the Mediterranean in former times. At other times the must was cooked without thickening it, to prevent immediate fermentation, as is done with the _chicha_ in Chile to-day; or sour wines were mixed with boiled must and ashes of the shoots, which masked the acidity.