1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

The Spadcling Wines of the Soicth of France.

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Xeeping the wine for a few years is said maperially to improve its quality, to the sacrifice, however, of its effervescent properties. M. de Saint-Prix informed us that he manufactured every year a certain quantity of sparkling Cote-Rotie, Chateau-Grille, .and H ermitage. The principal markets for the Saint-Peray sparkling wines-the production of which falls considerably short of a million bottles per annum-are England, Germany, Russia, Holland, and Belgium. The other side of the RhOne is fruitful in minor sparkling wines, chief amongst v;i;J:i.ich is the so-cwlled Clairette de Die, made .at the town of that name, a place of some splendour, as existing .antiquities show, in the days of the Roman dominion in Gaul. Later on, Die was the scene of constant struggles for supremacy between its counts and bishops, one of the latter having been

massacred by the populace in front of the cathedral door– way - ever since known by the sin- ister appellation of

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., •-r , - the Porte Rouge- - 1 11 ff' - ;'!:.~:~li":.~~ ~- _:: _, 1J devastated the '

town inthetrouble– some times of the Reform. Clairette

de Die is made principally from the blanquetteormalvoisievariety ()f grape,which, after the stalks have been removed, is bothtrodden with the feet and pressed. The must is run off immediately into casks, and four-and-twenty hours later it is racked into other casks, a similar operation being performed every two or three days for the period of a couple of months, when the fer– mentation having subsided the wine is fined and usually bottled in the following March. Newly-made Clairette de Die is a sweet sparkling wine, but it loses its natural effervescence after a. M