Note 127 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 3)

Wine is almost the only liquor which people above the vulgar are used to drink. They make a kind of spruce beer of the top of the white fir127, which they drink in summer; but the use of it is not general; and it is seldom drank by people of quality. Thus great sums go annually out of the country for wine; as they have no vines here, of which they could make a liquor that is fit to be drank. The common people drink water; for it is not yet customary here to brew beer of malt; and there are no orchards large enough to supply the people with apples for making cyder. Some of the people of rank, who possess large orchards, sometimes, out of curiosity, get a small quantity of cyder made. The great people here, who are used from their youth to drink nothing but wine, are greatly at a loss in time of war; when all the ships which brought wine are intercepted by the English privateers. Towards the end of the last war, they gave two hundred and fifty Francs, and even one hundred Ecus, for a barrique, or hogshead, of wine.