1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

Sparkling Saumiw and Sparl,;ling Sauternes.

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At M . Duvau's we went through a complete scale of sparkling saumurs, commencing with the younger and less matured samples, and ascending step by step to wines a dozen .and more years old. Every year seemed to produce an improve– ment in the wine, the older varieties gaining greatly in delicacy :and softening very perceptibly in flavour. Another sparkling saumur manufactµrer of note is M . Alfred Rousteaux, to-day the sole proprietor of the well-known brand -0f Morlet and Rousteaux, a firm estahJ.ished for many years at S aint-Florent. M. Rousteaux's cellars here are excavated in the tufa cliff which rises behind the little suburban village, and are all on one level. The galleries, though somewhat winding and !irregular, are broad and roomy, and in them about 400,000 bottles of wine undergoing the necessary treatment are piled up in stacks or placecl sur pointe. The original firm had only been in existence a few years when they found that their Saint-Florent establishment was inadequate to the requirn- 111ents of a largely-increasing business,' and they started the branch establishment of La Perriere at Saint-Cyr, near Tours, but on the opposite bank of the Loire. H ere are a handsome r esidence and gardens, a spacious court, and con · venient celliers where the bottling of the wine is effected, together with extensive and well-constructed cellars in which a 1 I like quantity of wine to that contained in the cellars at Saint– Florent is stored. With his finer sparkling wines M. Rousteau..." mixes a certain proportion of wine from the Champagne dis– irict, and thus secures a degree of lightness unattainable when the cuvee is exclusively composed of Saumur vintages. At La Perriere l\L Rousteaux has a vineyard of upwards of sixty acres, ,yielding the best wine of the district, which is noted, by the way, for its ·excellent growths. Hereabouts a succession of vineyard slopes stretch from. one to another of the many historic chuteaux .along this portion of the Loire, the r omantic associations of which render the Touraine one of the most interesting provinces of France. Near Tours besides the vineyards of Saint-Cyr are those of Joue and Saint-Avertin; the two last situate on the opposite

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