1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

35

The Vineyards of the M01mta·in.

of which are merely laid lightly over the holes, and in the course of twelve days the wine begins to ferment. It now rests until the end of the year, when it is drawn off into new casks and delivered to the buyer, invariably one or other of the great cham– pagne houses, who willingly pay an exceptionally high price for it. The second and third pressures of the grapes yield an inferior wine, and from the husks and stalks eau-cle-vie, worth about five shillings a gallon, is distilled. The wine known as Sillery sec is a full, dry, pleasant-flavoured, and somewhat spirituous amher-coloured wine. Very little of it is made now-a-days, and most that is comes from the adjacent vineyards of Verzenay and l\failly, and is principally reserved by the growers for their own consumption. One of these candidly admitted to me that the old reputation of the wine had exploded, and that better white Bordeaux and Burgundy wines were to be obtained for less money. In making dry Sillery, which locally is esteemed as a valuable tonic, it is essential that the grapes should be subjected to only slight pressure, while to have it in perfection it is equally essential that the wine should be kept for ten years in the wood according to some, and eight years in bottle according to others, to which circumstance its high price is in all probability to be attributed. In course of time it forms a deposit, and has the disadvantage common to all the finer still wines of the Champagne district of not travelling well. Beyond Sillery the vineyards of Verzenay unfold themselves, spreading over the extensive slopes and stretching to the sum– mit of the steep height to the right, where a windmill or two is perched. Everywhere the v:intagers are busy detaching the grapes with their little hook-shaped sm·pettes, the women all wearing projecting, close-fitting bonnets, as though needlessly careful of their anything but blonde complexions. Long carts laden with baskets of grapes block the naITow roads, and donkeys, duly muzzled, with baskets slung across their backs, toil up and down the steeper slopes. Half way up the principal hill, backed by a dense wood and furrowed with deep trenches, whence soil bas been removed for manuring the vineyards, is the