1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

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Oha?1V]_Jagne a"!d Other Sparlcling Wines.

The grim Berliner and the gay Viennese both acknowledge its enlivening influence. It sparkles in crystal goblets in the great capital of the North, and the Moslem wipes its creamy foam from his beard beneath the very shadow of the mosque of St. Sophia ; for the Prophet has only forbidden the use of wine, and of a surety-Allah be praised !-this strangely-sparkling delicious liquor, which gives to the true believer a foretast e of the joys of Paradise, cannot be 'Yiue. ·At the diamond-fields of South Africa and the diggings of Australia the brawny miner who has hit upon a big bit of crystallised carbon, or a nugget of virgin ore, strolls to the " saloon" and shouts for champagne. The mild Hindoo imbibes it quietly, but approvingly, as he watches the evolutions of the Nautch girls,- and his partiality for it has already enriched the Anglo·Bengalee vocabulary and London slang with the word " simkin." It is transported on camel-backs across the deserts of Central Asia, and in frail canoes up the mighty Amazon. The two-sworded Daimio calls for it in the tea-gardens of Yokohama, and the New Yorker, when not rinsing his stomach by libations of iced-water, imbibes it freely at Delmonico's. Wherever civilised man has set his foot--at the base of the Pyramids and at the summit of the Cordilleras, in the mangrove swamps of Ashantee and the gulches of the Great Lone Land, in the wilds of the Amoor and on the desert isles of the Pacific-he has left traces of his pre– sence in the shape of the empty~l>ottles that were once full of the sparkling vintage of the Champagne.