1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines.

194

vintaged, and various wines of recent years; large metal chan– d eliers - fantastically adorned with innumerable coloured bottles and glasses, and designed to light up the cellars on festive occa– sions-her eand there descending from the arched roof. Eventually you a rrive at a gallery where huge casks are poised on massive wooden frames in double tiers one above the other. These cellars are . said to be capable of holding upwards of 500 casks, but at the time of our visit there were scarcely half th::i.t number, and only a mere fraction of these were filled with wine. The cellars no longer contain any of that archaic wine vintaged in 1546, for which they were formerly celebrated. Indeed, all the historic vintages, once their boast, were removed some years ago to Munich and deposited in the Royal cellars there. Of the -ancient ornamental tuns holding their t en thousand gallons each, which the Wurzburg cellars formerly contained, only a single one r ema.ins, constructed in the year 1784. This tun, carved on the front with the Bavarian arms, is about the dimensions of a fair-sized apartment, and being no longer filled with wine, a Diogenes of the period might take up his abode in it with per– fect comfort. Herr Michael Opprnann, who has succeeded to the establishment founded by bis father, prepares several varieties of white sparkling Franconian wine, with two kinds of red, and also sparkling hocks and rnoselles. The first-named wines are vintaged in the best viJ:leyards of Lower Franconia, in the . valley of the Main, and the Baden Oberland, the finer qualities b eing principally produced from the black clevener grape, usually vintaged the first or second week in October. The white grape vintage occurs some fortnight or more later, and the wine is bottled either late in the spring or during the coming summer. Its after-manipulation differs in no r espect from that pursued with r eference to champagne. Herr Oppmann, whose wines h ave met with favourable r ecognition at various foreign and h ome E xhibitions, prepares both sweet and dry varieties. Their chief market is Germ.any, although they are exported in fair quantities to Belgium, England, and Northern Europe. Another sparkling wine establishment was founded at