1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

The Origin of Champagne. 11 barred, to the speedy expulsion of the detested English from the soil of France. · The vin d'.Ay-vi?tum Dei as Dominicus Baudoin punningly styled it-was, according to old P aulmier, the ordinary drink of the kings and princes of his day. It fostered bluff King Hal's fits of passion and the tenth Leo' s artistic extravagance; con– soled Francie I. for the field of Pavia, and solaced his great rival in his retirement at St. Just. All of them had their commis– sioners at .Ay to secure the best wine for their own consumption. Henri Quatre, whose venclangeoir is still shown in the village, h eld the wine in such honour that he was wont to style himself the Seigneur d'Ay, just as J ames of Scotland was known as the Gudeman of Ballangeich. When his son, Louis XIII., was crowned, the wines of the Champagne were the only growths allowed to grace the board at the royal banquet. Freely too did they flow at the coronation feast of the Grand ·Mona·rque, when the crowd of assembled courtiers, who quaffed them in his honour, hailed them as the finest wines of the day. But the wines which drew forth all these encomiums were far from resembling the champagne of modern times. They were not, as has been asserted, all as red as burgundy and as flat as port; for at the close of the sixteenth century some of them were of a fauve or yellowish hue, and of the intermediate tint between red and white which the French call clairet, and which our old writers translate as the " complexion of a cherry" or the " colour of a partridge's eye." But, as a rule, the wines of the Cham– pagne up to this period closely r esembled those prqduced in the adjacent province, where Charles the Bold had once held sway; a resemblance, no doubt, having much to do with the great medical controversy regarding their respective merits which arose in 1652. In that year a young medical student, hard press'ed for the subject of his inaugural thesis, and in the firm faith that

"None but 11 clever dialectician Can hope to become a good physiciim, And that logic plays an important part In the mystery of the healing art,"