. . . Priske, open the first of those bottles,
yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.
Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine
such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of
all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it
lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting
mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.
Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the
blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down
below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in
hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a
state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos;
dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone
jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left
to stand for the space of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until
the water scarcely cover the mass. Let stand again for two days, and
then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new
moon.
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