1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

150

Champagne and Othe:r Sparkling Wines.

The blending having been satisfactorily accomplished, the wine is stored in casks, never perfectly filled, yet with their bungholes tightly closed, and slowly continues its fennentation, eating up its sugar, purging itself, and letting fall its lees. Three months later it is fined. It is rarely kept in the wood for more than a year, though sometimes the superior qualities r emain for a couple of years in cask. Occasionally it is even bottled in the spring following the vintage; still, as a rule, the bottling of sparkling saumur takes place during the ensuing summer months, when the temperature is at the highest, as this insures to it .a greater degree of effervescence. At the· time of bottling its saccharine strength is raised to a given degree by the addition of the finest sugar-candy, and hence– forward the wine is subjected to precisely the same treatment as is pursued with regard to champagne. It is in a broad but sombre gallery of the more ancient vaults-the roughly-hewn walls of which are black from the combined action of alcohol and carbonic acid gas-that the processes of disgorging the wine of its sediment, adding the sp:up., filling up the bottles with wine to replace that which gushes out when the disgorging operation is performed, together with the re-corking, stringing, and wiring of the .bottles, are carried on. The one or two adjacent shafts impart very little light, but a couple of resplendent metal reflectors, which at a. distance one might fancy to be some dragon's flaming eyes, combined with the lamps placed near the people at work, effec- tually illuminate the spot. Another considerable map.ufacturer of sparkling saumur is M. Louis Duvau a1nc, owner of the chateau of Varrains, in the village of the same name, at no great distance from the Coteau de Saumur. His cellars adjoin the chfLteau, a picturesque but somewhat neglected structure of the last century, with sculptured medallions in high relief above the lower windows, and florid vases surmounting the mansards in the roof. In front is a. large rambling court shaded with acacia and lime trees, and surrounded by outbuildings, prominent among which is a pie-