CHAMPAGNE.
itLITTLE work on the Champagne country, just published in America by Mr. Tomes, late United States' Vice-Consul at Rheims, contains a great deal of information which might advantageously be better known in England, where as much good champagne is drunk as in any country, while one is really tempted to say in one's haste that all the bad champagne produced must come here. We dare say that scarcely one in a score even of those who can tell good champagne from downright bad know to what the difference is due, or know anything of the history of the select body of manufacturers who, in little more than a century, have raised the yin mousseux to its present proud position. Up till 1700, the chalky vineyards of Champagne produced only ordi- nary red and white still wines, of a kind something intermediate between claret and Burgundy, one or two varieties of which still retain a great reputation amongst gourmets of the higher order. About this time, however, there flourished a certain Dom
Perpignon, a jovial old monk of the Abbey of Hautvillers, near Rheims. He appears to have been receiver of the tithes, which consisted largely of wine, and he also took charge of the vineyards owned by the abbey. He must have had a natural taste for wine from the first, and when in old age he lost his eye-
sight, that strange provision of nature by which the deprivation of one sense is frequently followed by enhanced acuteness of the remainder, seems to have endued him with preternatural powers of gustatory analysis. The mixing of different vintages to secure a certain standard of flavour, so essential to the manu- facture of modern champagne, was even then practised, and up to his death, at the age of eighty, Dom Perpignon's verdict as to what grapes and what vintages should be mingled to form the representative wine of the year was taken as final. Amongst his experiments, he finally—whether by accident or from the result of anxious thought—hit upon the process for converting the juice of the grape into effervescing wine. Further, it appears that the saintly man, finding that the oiled flax previously used for closing the necks of wine flasks was inapplicable to the new compound, cast about for a substitute, and invented corks. At first, of course, the secret was kept for the exclusive benefit of the worthy monks, but before long a few bottles found their way to Court, and kings, princes, and. Court ladies stamped with their approval the exhilarating compound. In 1780, Moet and Chandon, the-first of the great champagne houses, sold about 6,000 bottles in the year. The Revolution could not have been favourable to champagne, and its soldiers did not spare the Abbey where Dom Perpignon and his brethren had drunk the first batch of the wine. Since then, however, the demand for champagne of any and every kind has gone on increasing with marvellous rapidity. Rheims has grown into a city of 60,000 inhabitants. The sober, steady woollen traders, who clustered round the old cathedral, are rapidly being improved off the face of the earth by the brilliant and ambitious million- aires of the new dispensation of champagne.
The country actually producing grapes used in making champagne is limited to little more than 40,000 acres, owned by about 16,000 proprietors, thus giving an average of only two acres and a half to each owner. All these small landowners, however, are men sufficiently prosperous and intelligent to make the best of their vineyards, and champagne being, above all things, essentially a mixed wine, the great variety of flavour thus secured in the grape gives the purchasers unlimited selection for the purposes of manufacture. The mixture of different juices, or mole as it is technically called, constitutes the great distinctive feature of champagne manufac- ture from that of other wines. Each one of the great Rheims firms has a particular standard of flavour, which it is their great object to maintain unaltered from year to year, and great are the experience and delicacy of taste required to secure every vintage the right proportions of the different kinds of grape. Previous to the more delicate env& required to attain any special phase of flavour, there is the great foundation step of mixing the right proportion of must obtained from red grapes, which gives strength, body of flavour, and endurance to the product, with that obtained from.tjse white grape of Epernay, by which the effervescing proper- ties are contributed. This having been done, the mixture is fer- mented, stored in the vast excavations in the chalk which honey- comb subterranean Rheims, and left till the following January, when the next great step, the testing for sugar, takes place. The two great essentials of a good champagne wine are, 12 per cent. of alcohol and twenty grammes of sugar in each litre. Now, as these are never naturally attained in this period of the wine, the deficiency of sugar is first supplied by the right quantity of the purest sugar-cane, the least admixture of any sugar but that of
the cane invariably spoiling the wine. In April comes the bot- tling, and then follows immediately the second and most critical period of fermentation. If the previous treatment of the wine has been in any way faulty, now the bad results manifest them- selves. If the state of the wine is such that carbonic acid gas is too largely developed, then breakage, by bursting of the bottles, becomes a most expensive item, 25 per cent. of the bottles being occasionally lost thus. If, on the other hand, the breakage does not reach 10 per cent., it is a sure sign that the wine will fail through want of effervescence. As the popular and vicious taste in champagne is plenty of noise and froth, the latter is, perhaps, the greater danger. For the next two or three years the great thing to be attended to is the temperature, and the bottles are continually removed up and down, according to the season, from the ground-floor cellier, to the upper or lower cave, some of the latter being far down in the depths of the chalk. The next operation is the "disgorging," or momentary withdrawal of the cork, to get rid of the sediment that has accumulated in the neck of the bottle. There only remains one step more. The cork is once more taken out, a certain portion of wine allowed to escape, and the bottle filled up with the " liqueur," consisting of cognac, sugar-candy, and still white wine in proportions varying accord- ing to its destination—whether meant to gratify the Russian taste for strength and sweetness, the French for lightness and delicacy, or the English for strength. Champagne being thus a wine depending entirely on individual experience and skill in its manu- facture, the struggle between the different firms to get their brands into public favour becomes most desperate. New firms frequently give as much as 30 per cent. commission to energetic commis voyageurs. One man, who made a frantic effort to establish a reputation in America, actually went so far as to open fountains flowing with his best wine, but the puffing so defeated its object that the name had subsequently to be changed to get a bottle sold. The house of Louis Roederer only obtained eminence after an expenditure which had nearly ruined it. Madame Clic- quot suddenly sprang to fortune and renown through the sacking of her cellars in 1815 by a party of Russians, who carried home the taste for her wine, which has since been made exclu- sively for Russian taste and consumption. Two of the partners in the firm now are the Mayor of Rheims, Werld, formerly a German adventurer, and Baron de Sachs, his nephew. .._One of the Clicquot family married a Count Chevignd-Mortemarts, and lives near Rheims in ultra-aristocratic style. Unluckily the family cypher—" C." and " M." intertwined—also stands for " Cham- pagne Moneseux," a coincidence which forms the subject of a standing joke at Rheims. The Emperor has befriended M. Werle to a very great extent, and he holds a high position among the Imperialist nouveaux riches. Clioquot is not an uncommon name at Rheims, and consequently the greatest vigilance has been requisite to prevent any namesake steal- ing a share of the celebrity of the brand. Roederer is not a common name, and a capitalist in search of a taking brand woe hunted up with great trouble a waiter of the name at Strasbourg as a partner. The original firm managed to subject him to legal compulsion to affix the date of his establishment to every detail of his business—bottle, cork, invoice, &c. Mr. Tomes men- tions as a curious fact that almost every firm in Rheims is either partially or entirely in the hands of Germans. Werle, Mumm, Roederer, Piper, Hiedsieck are all Germans, and even the French houses have almost invariably German managers—a decided evi- dence of Teutonic geist.
It is gratifying to be told that none even of the worst cham- pagne made in the Champagne country proper, or its vicinity, contains actually poisonous ingredients. That is at all events something. Much of it is simply a sweet frothy mixture, which no skill can work up into a good champagne, and is accordingly sold at gigantic profits by a host of minor manufacturers. The really bad and deleterious compositions come mainly from that head-quarters of knavery, Hamburg, which, like the conjuror's magic bottle, can turn out any kind of wine at the shortest notice from the same material.
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