1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

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Champagne and Othe:r Sparlding Wines.

fashioned cumbersome type. They are forthwith placed beneath. the press and ·usually subjected to five separate squeezes, the· must from the first three being r eserved for sparkling wine, while that from the two latter, owing to its being more or less. deeply tinted, only serves for table wine. The must is at once run off into casks in order that it may not ferment . on the grape-skins and imbibe any portion of their colouring matter. Active fermentation speedily sets in and lasts for a fortnight or three weeks according to whether the temperature chances to be high or low. The vintaging of the white grapes takes place about a fort– night later than the black grapes, and is commonly a compound operation, the best and ripest bunches being first of all gathered just as the berries begin to get shrivelled and show symptoms of approaching rottenness. It is these selected grapes that yield the best wine. The second gathering, which follows shortly after the firnt, includes all the grapes remaining on the vines, and yields a wine lJerceptibly inferior in quality. The grapes on their arrival at the press-house are generally pressed immediately and the must is run off into tuns to ferment . At the commencement these tuns are filled up every three or four days to replace the fermenting must which has flowed over; afterwards any waste is made good at the interval of a week, and then once a fortnight, the bungholes of the casks being securely closed towards the end of the year, by which time the first fermentation is over. It should be noted that th~ Saumur sparkling wine manu– facturers draw considerable supplies of the white wine required to impart lightness and effervescence to their vin prepare from the Vouvray vineyards. Vouvray borders the Loire a few miles· from the pleasant city of Tours, which awakens sinister recollec– tions of truculent Louis XL, shut up in his fortified castle of Plessis-lez-Tours, around which Scott has thrown the halo of bi& genius · in his novel of Qiwntin Durward. On proceeding to Vouvray from Tours we skirt a succession of poplar-fringed meadows stretching eastward in th~ direction of Amboise along: