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All this was explained to me by people who were the actual growers of the wine, or directors of La Chablisienne-the society which has undertaken an enterprise interesting to all students of co-operation, but even more interesting because it illustrates the Frenchman's feeling for excellence in his work.

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Since the reputation Chablis produced a demand for the wine beyond what the wine-field could furnish, it was not unnatural that merchants dealing in it should eke out the supply by admixture of the less good. Plenty of this was to be had in the surrounding districts. Such a practice does not stop at the limit of necessity, and finally it came to the point that a vigneron offering wine grown on the right soil and from the right plant had to take what the merchant would give-and this was often no more than five francs more on the feuillette than was given for ordinary stuff. (A feuillette is the standard cask used in Burgundy, and holds about 200 bottles.)

Now, it is not easy to grow wine at Chablis from the choice plant, which suffers easily from frost; and, what is more, if frost-nipped, it yields nothing at all that year: whereas the inferior gamay will shoot again and produce grapes. But the vignerons of Chablis refused to plant anything on their choice land but the choice vine. Rather than derogate from tradition, some threw their plots into ordinary tillage, for an

VOL. CCXXII.-NO. MCCCXLV.

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easier and safer return. Yet one of my friends told me how he had advised this course to a widowed kinswoman, and she refused with tears of anger. 'Je ne veux pas arracher mes vignes," she said. And it is a dreadful thing to do, beyond doubt. Yet the young people were leaving the countryside fast, seeing no chance for them; while, on the other hand, the bourgeois who owned plots and worked them by hired labour found the business unprofitable, and were offering their land for sale to the only people who could make it pay.

I found an absolute consensus of opinion that no vineyard in Chablis has a chance unless it is worked by the owner. Two of the leading vignerons took me out half a mile from the town to where the vineclad slope begins, and showed me plot after plot with sickly vines invaded by weeds. Here some journalier was in charge. Close by, marked off by no partition, were others luxuriantly in leaf, with the ground at their roots clean as a flower-bed in Kew. These were owned by men who took no account of time in their day's labour, because they tended their own vines. Yet even here it was pathetic to see the absence of grapes : sometimes not two clusters in half an acre. Last year had been bad, a half crop, but of very fine quality: this year would be a much smaller crop, and what comes of it is not likely to be good. At Chablis,

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you cannot count on a yield more than one in a year or two, they said: and even the special measures which have to be taken increase the risk. The Chablis grape is trained so that its clusters form low, near the ground, to get all that is possible of reflected heat from the soil and this in a wet year means rot.

But even in the worst year there are chances, and one of my two companions took me to his plot. It was perfectly cared for, yet not more so, apparently, than the rows beside it or above it; but it was heavy with clusters, which in the rows alongside were scarce, and at the top stopped off dead. In any year it would be a good yield; this year it was like a miracle, and the other people chaffed the lucky man about it, and wanted to know what kind of wish he had put on it. "Vous aurez fait un vou," they said: and, indeed, people have been burnt on less appearance of magic.

However, his luck is not his luck only; every such stroke of fortune helps the co-operators, for La Chablisienne must have wine to sell. Unlike many other of the combinations of petty wine-growers, they have decided to market their own wines; in no other way do they see a possibility of reestablishing the price but by offering for sale Chablis and nothing but Chablis. And since they only started in 1923, they have no great reserves in stock.

It seems that already they

have succeeded, by the test of figures, for the vigneron has received something like five times the previous price for his wines and they have succeeded also in getting a legal definition of what Chablis must be. The law as to appellations d'origine needed a special application in this case, for more than a dozen communes besides that of Chablis itself produce the true wine; and after litigation the French courts have decided that the term Chablis shall be legally applied to the produce of all these communes, but only to wine made from the pinot grape. This wine is classified broadly by the growers into Grand Chablis, Chablis, and Petit Chablis-the difference in quality proceeding mainly from the exposure of the vineyard towards the sun. But the whole stock of the co-operator's output each year is submitted to a committee of the growers, and each man's contribution is classed as first, second, or third, and he is paid accordingly. In each class the wine is blended. Grand Chablis means the best wines grown from the pinot on Kimmeridgian soil throughout this scattered group of communes.

There is, however, another technical name recognised by the law, Chablis Villages, which is applied to wines grown in the outlying vineyards of the district, which habitually sold their wines to the Chablis merchants, but which either are not stocked with pinot or have not the special clay. These

wines from the standpoint of the Chablis vigneron are not Chablis at all the description, though legal, is misleading.

Whether these spirited people will succeed in their attempt to dispense with the middleman I cannot say anyhow, my sympathies are with the actual grower of the grape, and it was good news to hear that La Chablisienne is establishing a representative in London from whom you can get the wine of Chablis, as the vignerons say, tel que Dieu nous l'a donné.

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But I should be the last to say that they are the only people who sell it. The Hôtel de l'Étoile had been mended to me by the authority of MM. Rouff and Curnonsky; but in the town itself I learnt that M. Briand habitually stops here on his journeys to and from Geneva. One meal in that establishment was enough to show cause. Its proprietor richly merits the testimonial from the Club des Cent which adorns the dining-room, and is flanked by a congratulatory letter from the Master Cooks of Paris. In that hotel I drank always the ordinaire, last year's Chablis, from a carafe and it was not supplied by La Chablisienne : but a cleaner, brighter, and more appetising table wine I have never met.

They say also in Chablis that all their wines bear transportation without need for any addition of alcohol.

These people will not vintage till the first or second week in

October. By that time the Côte d'Or will be through with it. In Santenay, on September 13th, my host, who was the mayor, instructed the garde champêtre (an impressive official) to publier, that is, to proclaim by beat of drum, the beginning of vintage-for the 16th. In old days this was binding on all no one would gather grapes before that sumNow it is ignored, and people begin as they choose : but the proclamation still holds good in its second part, which fixes a day for égrappillage, the licensed gleaning by poor people of overlooked clusters.

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Also, I suppose, it has a bearing on another matter. A countryman at Chablis, when we began to talk of sport, told me that they had two ouvertures: the first, like all France, on September 1st, but the second was the ouverture des vigaes. Until that day is fixed -presumably not until égrappillage as well as vintage is finished-no man may fire a shot within fifty metres of a vineyard

and since most of the surviving game finds its best corn among the vines, the second ouverture is more important than the first.

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THE GOONDAWINDI BRUMBIES.

BY L. ST CLARE GRONDONA.

IN the early days of pastoral enterprise in Australia, when, it is said, land was taken up by geographical parallels and compass bearings, long prior to the advent of the wire fence, it was not unusual for horses to stray into the bush and never to be seen again. Nowadays, excepting in extremely remote localities, practically all properties, however large, are enclosed by wire fencing; and the first development work is the subdivision of such stations, as they are called, by more wire fences.

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In my early twenties I spent some years on a large sheep and cattle station in North Queensland—a property with an area of upwards of 3000 square miles! It was then all fenced and subdivided into paddocks-every enclosed area of whatever size is a "paddock' in Australia-ranging from 5000 to 60,000 acres in extent: the smaller for sheep, and the larger for cattle. All such paddocks are named, and the one which was the scene of the incidents I write of was known by the euphonious aboriginal designation of "Goondawindi."

Goonda windi was about seventeen miles long and some seven across, and was distant from the station headquarters by some twenty miles. It was here that I had my first

experience with wild horses"brumbies," in local parlance. They were descended from animals which had strayed in the pre-fence days of perhaps fifty years ago.

Wending its way across Goondawindi was a section of the Great Dividing Range which extends for 1500 miles north and south, in a line roughly parallel to the eastern coastline, through Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland. But in Goondawindi it had ceased, æons past, to have the dignity other than in name of a mountain range, and was but a skeleton-in rocky, barren, cave-riddled hills, a couple of hundred feet high— of its former grandeur.

Flanking the western slopes of the range were the dense bendi scrubs, well-nigh impenetrable for a horseman, but into which the unencumbered brumbies could force their way if pursued. There were thought to be about a hundred of them in Goondawindi at the time of which I write. The grass they ate was not begrudged them, but they were occasionally a serious nuisance in another respect.

On all such large stations work among sheep or cattle is carried out from constantly moving base camps of half a dozen or more stockmen (the

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But if in the stillness of night a few wild horses approached, trouble was likely to ensue. If anything frightened them, the brumbies would snort and make off at a gallop, and some of the startled stockhorses would probably follow, and-well, the call of the wild had its way.

It was after one such incident that war was declared on the Goondawindi brumbies, though not for the first time. Like every good campaign it required careful planning in advance. Strategy bade that we should wait for the dry season. There were no running streams in Goondawindi, and we knew the whereabouts of pools in the vicinity of that part of the paddock which was frequented by the wild horses. There were about a dozen such waterholes, and, with one exception, we encircled them all with white calico tape-about two inches wide-stretched on stakes some five feet from the ground. Such

"tape "tape" was contrived by ripping up old tents and flys, of which there are always dozens available on a station. The stakes-about ten yards apart -were dabbed over with whitewash.

This encirclement of the pools interested the cattle in the paddocks hardly at all, and they were able to pass under the tapes without let or hindrance. But the nervous brumbies regarded the whitewashed stakes with acute suspicion, and, when they saw the tape, they decided to drink elsewhere. So that in due course they came to the water-hole which had no suspicious-looking contraptions around it. The tactics of the campaign had bidden that this should be about five miles from the bendi scrubs, with a long stretch of sparsely timbered country intervening, over which the brumbies usually grazed.

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Now horses, when approaching their watering-place, have the habit of stringing out in lines of single file, and so it was that, after a week or ten days, definite beaten tracks or "pads" commenced to be discernible through the open country from the favourite pastures closer to the bendi. When a stockrider-scout brought in this information we were able to carry on with our plans. Half a dozen of us went out to Goondawindi, and, selecting a site about a mile from the newly beaten line of pads, and to what was the prevailing windward, we erected a strong

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