RAISINS

are grapes allowed to ripen and dry upon the vine. The best come from the south of Europe, as from Roque vaire in Provence, Calabria, Spain, and Portugal. Fine raisins are also imported from Smyrna, Damascus, and Egypt. Sweet fleshy grapes are selected for maturing into raisins, and such as grow upon the sunny slopes of hills sheltered from the north winds. The bunches are pruned, and the vine is stripped of its leaves, when the fruit has become ripe; the sun then beaming full upon the grapes, completes their saccharification, and expels the superfluous water. The raisins are plucked, cleansed, and dipped for a few seconds in a boiling lye of wood ashes and quicklime, at 12 or 13 degrees of Baumé’s areometer. The wrinkled fruit is lastly drained, dried, and exposed in the sun upon hurdles of basket-work during 14 or 15 days. The finest raisins are those of the sun, so called; being the plumpest bunches, which are left to ripen fully upon the vine, after their stalks have been half cut through. The amount of raisins imported for home consumption was, in the year 1836, 156,495 cwts.; in 1837, 152,635 cwts.