1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

The Vintage in the Vineyards of the Riv 15r.

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Chalons, we looked in at the little auberge at the corner of the Boulevard du Sud, where we fonnd a crowd of coopers and others connected in some way with the vintage t aking ·their cheerful glasses round. The walls · of the room were appropriately enough decorated with capering bacchanals squeezing l1nnches of purple grapes and fl.ourishing their thyrsi about in a very tipsy fashion. All the talk-and there was an abundance of it-had reference to the yield of this. particular vintage and the high rate the Ay wine had realised. Eight hundred francs the piece of two hundred litres, equal to forty-four gallons, appeared to be the price fixed by the agents of the great champagne houses, and at this figure the bulk of the vintage was disposed of before a single grape passed through the wine-press. At .Mareuil, which is scarcely more than a mile from Ay, owing to the steepness of the slopes and to the roads through the vineyards being impracticable for carts, the grapes were being conveyed to the press-houses in baskets slung across the backs of mules and donkeys, who, on account of their known partiality for the ripe fruit, were most of them muzzled while thus employed. The vin lYrut here, inferior of course to that of Ay, found a ready market at from five to six hundred francs the piece. From Mareuil we proceeded to Avenay, a tumbledown! little. village in the direction of Reims, and the vineyards of which were of greater repute ~n the 13th century than they are to-day. Its best wine, extolled by Saint Evremond, the epicurean Frenchman, who emigrated to the gay court of Charles II. at Whitehall to escape a gloomy cell in the Bastille, is vintaged up the slopes of Mont Hurle. At Avenay we found the yield had been little more than the third of an average one, and that the wine from the first pressure of the grapes had been sold for five hundred francs the piece. Here we tasted some very fair still i·ed wine, made from the same grapes as champagne, remarkably deep in colour, full of qody, and with that slight sweet bitterish fl.avour characteristic of certain of the better-class growths of the south of France. On leaving Avenay we ascended the hills to Mutig-ny, and wound