1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

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Champagne and Othe1· Sparkling Wines.

propounded the theory that the wines of Burgundy were preferable to those of the Champagne, and that the latter were irritating to the nerves and conducive to gout. The faculty of medicine at B.eims naturally rose in arms at this insolent assertion. They seized theii· pens and poured forth a deluge of French and Latin in defence of the wines of their province, eulogising alike their purity, thefr brilliancy of colour, their exquisite flavour and per– fume, their great keeping powers, and, in a word, their general super~ority to the Burgundy growths. The partisans of the latter were equally prompt in rallying in their defrmce, and the faculty of medicine of Beaune, having put their learned periwigs together, enunciated their v:iews and handled their opponents without mercy. The dispute spread to the entire medical pro– fession, and the champions went on pelting each other with pamphlets in prose and tractates in verse, until in 1778-long after- the bones of the original disputants were dust and their lancets rust-the faculty of Paris, to whom the matter was referred, gave a final and formal decision in favour of the wines o( the Champagne. ' Meanwhile an entirely new. kind of wine, which was to carry the name of the province producing it to the uttermost c0rners of the earth, had been introduced. On the picturesque slopes of the Marne, about,fifteen miles from Reims, and some four or five miles from Epernay, stands the little hamlet of Hautvil.lers, which, in pre-revolutionary days, was a.mere dependency upon a spacious abbey dedicated to St. Peter. Here the worthy monks of the order of St. Benedict h d live_d in peace and prosperity for several hundred years, carefully cultivating the acres of vineland extending around the abbey, and religiously exacting a tithe of all the other wine pressed in their district. The revenue of the community thus depending in no small degree upon the vin– tage, it wa.s natural that the post of " celerer" should be one of impqrlance. It haippened that about the year 1688 this office was conferred upon a worthy monk named Perignon. Poets and roasters, we know, aire born, and not made ; and the monk in question seems to have been a heaven-born cellarman, with a