1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

Champagne and Othe1· Sparlcling Wines.

54

to remove the wine to a lower temperature when this is practica.ble. A manufacturer of the pre-scientific days of the last century relates how one year, when the wine was rich and strong, he only p~·eserved 120 out of 6,000 bottles; and it is not long since that 120,000 out of 200,000 were destroyed in the cellars 'of a well– known champagne firm. Over-knowing purchasers still affect to select a wine which has exploded in the largest proportion as being well up to the mark as regards its effervescence, and profess to make inquiries as to its performances in this direction. It is evident that in spite of the t eachings of science the bursting of champagne bottles has. not yet been reduced to a minimum, for whereas in some cellars it averages 7 and 8 per cent., in others it ra,rely exceeds 2t or 3. In the month of Oc– tober, the first and severest breakage being over, the newly– bottled ~e is definitively stacked in the cellars in piles from two to half-a-dozen bottles deep, from six to seven feet high, and frequently a hundred feet or upwards in length. Usually the bottles remain in their horizontal position for ahout eighteen or twenty months, though some firms, who pride themselves

upon shipping perfectly ma– tured wines, leave them thus for double this space of time. All this while the temperature to which the wine is exposed is, as far as practicable, care– fully regulated; for the risk of breakage, though greatly diminished, is never entirely at an end. By this time the fermen– tation is over; but in the in– t erval, commencing from afew days after the bottling of the wine, a loose dark-brown sedi– ment has been forming which has now settled on the lower