In the Napa and Sonoma valleys, in the foot-hills of the Sierra, at Anaheim and elsewhere in the southern country, you may find many men cultivating the grape and making wine in all soberness.

But everywhere, and in my own experience nearly as often, you will see the proprietor, or his sons or his hired men, bearing the marks of strong drink; and too often, if you come unexpectedly, you will see some poor wretch in the wine-house who about four o'clock is maudlin.
[Illustration: POINT ARENA LIGHT-HOUSE.] Seeing all this, I advise no new settler in the State to make wine.
He runs too many risks with children and laborers, even if he himself escapes.
In giving this advice, I do not mean to be offensive to the great body of wine growers in California, which numbers in its list a great many able, careful, and sober men, who are doing, as they have done, much and worthily for the prosperity of the State and for the production of good wine, and whose skill and enterprise are honorable to them.

But the best and most thoughtful of these men will bear me out when I say that wine growing and making is a business requiring eminent skill and great practical good sense, and that not every one who comes to California with means enough to plant a vineyard ought to enter this business or can in the long run do so safely or profitably.
Fortunately, no one need make wine, though every man may raise grapes; for it is now a fact, established by sufficient and practical trial, that raisins, equal in every respect to the best Malaga, can be made in California from the proper varieties of grapes, and can be sold for a price which will very handsomely pay the maker, and with a much smaller investment of capital and less skill than are required to establish a wine-cellar and make wine.

The vineyard owners already complain that they can not always readily sell their crude wine at a paying price; but the market for carefully-made raisins is, as I am told by the principal fruit dealers in San Francisco, open and eager.

To make wine requires uncommon skill and care, and to keep it so that age shall give it that merit which commands a really good price demands considerable capital in the necessary outlay for casks.