From the INTRODUCTION .
Addressing a meeting of total abstainers, at Manchester, a short time ago, the Bishop of Lincoln deplored the fact that teetotalism was making no headway. The common sense of the race is asserting itself and condemns with equal justice all excesses; intemperance in drink is universally deprecated and the intemperance in speech and statement of total abstinence advocates, "whose antagonism to alcohol has fossilized into superstition," is equally condemned by all sober-minded people.
The immense majority of brain-workers, in this as in all other civilized countries, drink wines and spirits, and there must be many who would like to know something more reliable about alcohol than what is to be found in the numerous publications issued by total abstinence associations. There has not been any comprehensive work upon wines and spirits published in England for many years, and the Committee of the Wine Trade Club have decided to issue a series of text-books to supply the public as well as wine-merchants with authentic facts and figures about wines and spirits.
The present volume is the first of these text-books; it consists of six chapters which correspond to the six lectures dehvered by the Wine Trade Club at Vintners' Hall during the winter of 1911 — 1912. It may be said to form an introduction to the study of the subject ; it contains a strictly correct but very short description of the history of the wine trade in England and general information on the growing of vines, the art of wine-making, the science of distillation and the effects of alcohol upon the human body. Some will be satisfied with the superficial knowledge gained from the following pages, but many more may be induced thereby to take a keener interest than hitherto into a branch of commerce the study of which offers a larger and more varied field of research than any other.
The next volumes will deal exhaustively with the different wines of the world at the historical and technical points of view. One volume of the series will deal with the botanical, scientific, chemical, medical, and political aspects of the question, whilst another volume will be entirely devoted to spirits.
A.L.S., Christmas, 1912.