The pressure of the grapes is a curious part of the process in an age of mechanical improvement like the present. It is performed by men treading among the fruit with their naked feet. 'The wine-press, or cuvier de pressoir , consists, in the majority of cases, of a massive shallow tub, varying in size from four square feet to as many square yards. It is placed either upon wooden trestles, or on a regularly built platform of mason-work, under the huge rafters of a substantial outhouse. Close to it stands a range of great butts, their number more or less, according to the size of the vineyard. The grapes are flung by tub and caskfuls into the cuvier. The treaders stamp diligently amid the masses, and the expressed juice pours plentifully out of a hole level with the bottom of the trough into a sieve of iron or wicker-work, which stops the passage of the skins, and from thence drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the moment of our arrival, the cuvier for a brief space empty. The treadersbig, perspiring men, in shirts and tucked-up trousersspattered to the eyes with splatches of purple juice, lean upon their wooden spades,
and wipe their foreheads. But their respite is short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is heard, and immediately the wagon is backed up to the broad open window, or rather hole in the wall, above the trough. A minute suffices to wrench out tub after tub, and to tilt their already half-mashed clusters splash into the reeking pressoir . Then to work again. Jumping with a sort of spiteful eagerness into the mountain of yielding, quivering fruit, the treaders sink almost to the knees, stamping, and jumping, and rioting in the masses of grapes, as fountains of juice spurt about their feet, and rush bubbling and gurgling away. Presently, having, as it were, drawn the first sweet blood of the new cargo, the eager trampling subsides into a sort of quiet, measured dance, which the treaders continue, while, with their wooden spades, they turn the pulpy remnants of the fruit hither and thither, so as to expose the half-squeezed berries in every possible way to the muscular action of the incessantly moving feet. All this time, the juice is flowing in a continuous stream into the tubs beneath. When the jet begins to slacken, the heap is well tumbled with the wooden spades, and, as though a new force had been applied, the juice-jet immediately breaks out afresh. It takes, perhaps, half or three quarters of an hour thoroughly to squeeze the contents of a good-sized cuvier, sufficiently manned.' In defence of this primitive process, it is alleged that no mechanical wine-press could perform the work with the same perfection as the human foot; and as for the impurities the juice may acquire from any want of cleanliness in the operations, these, and every other atom of foreign matter, are thrown to the surface in the act of fermentation.
The expressed juice is now carried away in tubs, and flung into the fermenting vats. Our author saw the vats in the Château Margaux cellars the day after they had been filled, and heard, deep down, 'perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the influence of the working spirit; and now and then a hiss and a low bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil.' In a little while, it would have been impossible to breathe an atmosphere thus saturated with carbonic acid gas; and the superintendents can only watch the process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great metempsychosis. 'Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when all the doors are locked and barredfor the atmosphere about the vats is deathas if nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful naturefenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by the invisible halo of stifling gas?'
The vintagers naturally claim our attention next. A portion of them are, of course, the peasantry of the village and neighbourhood; but a country like France, swarming with poor who are not mendicants, has of course a floating population, that surges almost instinctively upon every spot where there is pleasant work to do. The vintage not merely affords this work, but being attended with all sorts of jollity, the crowds it collects have a peculiarly vagabond character. You see at a glance that they are there upon a spree, and submit to the labour, not as anything they like, or are accustomed to, but as a mere passport to the fun. They are in France what the Irish harvesters and the Kent hop-pickers are in England, although always preserving the peculiarities, that distinguish the former country, giving even her vagabondage a melodramatic look, just as if they were 'made up' for the occasion. 'The gendarmerie,' says our author, 'have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a rigid application of the maxim, that la propriété c'est la vol . Where these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers among them from all parts of Francefrom the Pyrenees and the Alpsfrom the pine-woods of the Landes and the moors of Brittany. They unite in bands of a dozen or a score men and women, appointing a chief, who bargains with the vine-proprietor for the services of the company, and keeps up some degree of order and subordination, principally by means of the