1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

The ReVnis Establishments.

some thousands of bottles ready for labelling are stocked in massive piles at the end of the packing-hall in the corresponding wing of the !OlStablishment. Here, too, a tribe of workpeople are arraying the bottles with gold and silver headdresses and robing them in pink paper, while others are filling, securing, marking, and addressing the cases or baskets to Hong-Kong, San Francisco 1 Yokohama, Bombay, London, New York, St. Petersburg, Berlin, or Paris. . The wine in cask, stored in the left-hand wing, after having been duly blended in a vast vat holding over 2,,400 gallons, is drawn off into bottles, which are then lowered down a shaft to the second tier of cellars by means of an endless chain, on to which the baskets of bottles are swiftly hooked. The 'workman engaged in this duty, in order to prevent his falling down the shaft, has a leather belt strapped round his waist, by means of which he is secured to an adjoining iron column. We descend into the lower cellars down a flight of ninety-three broad steps– a depth equal to the height of .an ordinary six-storied house– and find no less than four-and-twenty galleries excavated in the chalk, without any masonry supports, and containing upwards of a million bottles of champagne. The length of these galleries varies, but they are of a uniform breadth, allowing either a couple of racks with wine sur pointe, or stacks of bottles, in fo1;1r rows on either side, with an ample passage down the centre. The upper range of cell11rs comprises two large arched galleries of considerable breadth, one of which contains wine in wood and wine sur pointe, while the other is stocked with bottles of wine heads downward, ready to be delivered into the hands of the degorgeu1·. MM. de St. Marceaux and Co. have the honour of supplying the King of the Belgians, the President of the French Republic, and several Gennan potentates, with an exceedingly delicate champagne known as the Royal St. Marceaux. The same wine is popular in Russia a.nd other parts of Europe, just as the Dry Royal of the firm is much esteemed in the United States.

,