1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

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Champagne and Othe!i' Spa?'lcling Wines. ·

there is an extra dry variety, the Imperial, and the Royal Rose. At Vienna a diploma of merit was awarded to these wines, for which a considerable market is found throughout the United States and in the West Indies and South America. The Urbana Wine Company produces excellent sparkling wines of singular lightness and of delicate though distinctive flavour. In our judgment the drier varieties are greatly to be preferred. The prices of all the American sparkling wines are certainly high, being almost equivalent to the price of first-class champagnes taken at R eims and Epernay. In California the manufacture of sparkling wines is carried <>n with considerable success, and at the Vienna Exhibition the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society of San Francisco was awarded a medal for progress for the excellent samples it sent there. The society was originally organised by Colonel Haraszthy, the pioneer in recent times of Californian viticulture. It com– menced manufacturing sparkling wines with the assistance of €Xperienced workmen fromlEpernay and Ay; but the endeavours, ·extending over some three or four years, were attended with but indifferent success, very few ciivrfes proving of fair quality, whilst with the majority the wine had to be emptied from the bottles and distilled into brandy. The son of Colonel Haraszthy subse– quently succeeded, in conjunction with Mr. Isidor Landsberger, <>f San Francisco, in discovering the cause of these failures, and for ten years past the wine has been constantly improving in quality owing to the increased use of foreign grapes, which yield a vin brut with a delicate bouquet and flavour approaching in character to the finer champagnes. The wine is perfectly pure, no flavouring extracts or spirit being employed in the composi– tion of the liqueur, which is composed merely of sugar-candy ·dissolved in fine old wine. A French connoisseur pronounces sparkling Sonoma to be the best of ~American sparkling wines, "clean and fresh ta,sting, with the flavour of a middle-class Ay growth, as well as remarkably light and delicate, and possessed ·of considerable effervescence." The Sonoma valley vineyards produce the lightest wines of all the Californian growths, some