1879 Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines

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Clumnpagne ancl Other Spwrlcling Wines.

slightly tilted, others, again, almost standing on their h eads, while some, which through over-inflation have come to grief, litter the floor and crunch beneath our feet. Tablets are hung against each st~ck of wine indicating its age, and from time to time a bottle is held up before the light to show us how the sediment commences to form, or explain how it eventually works its way down the neck of the bottle, and finally settles on the cork. Suddenly we are startled by a loud report resembling a pistol-shot, which reverberates through the vaulted chamber, as a bottle close at hand explodes, dashing out its heavy bottom as neatly as though it had been cut by ·a diamond, and dislocating the necks and pounding in the sides of its immediate neighbours. The wine trickles down, and eventually finds its way along the sloping sides of the slippery floor to the narrow gutter in the centre. . Ventilating shafts pass from one tier of cellars to the other, enabling the temperature in a certain measure to be regulated, , and thereby obviate an excess of breakage. M. Werle estimates that the loss in this respect during the first eighteen months of a cuvee amounts to 7 per cent., but subsequently is considerably less. In 1862 one champagne manufacturer lost as much as 45 per cent. of his wine by breakages. The Olicquot cu1•ee is made in the cave of St. William, where 120 hogsheads of wine are hauled up by means of a crane and dis barged into the vat daily as long as the operation lasts. The tvrage or bottling of the wine ordinarily commences in the middle of May, and occu– pies fully a month. M. Werle's private residence is close to the establishment in the Rue du Temple, and here he has collected a small gallery of high-class modern pa.intings by French and other artists, including Meissonnier's "Card-players," Delaroche's "Beatrice Cenci on her way to Execution," Fleury's "Charles V. picking up the brush of Titian," various works by the brothers Scheffer, Knaus's highly-characteristic genre picture, "His Highness on a Journey," and several fine portraits, among which is one ot Madame Clicquct, painted by Leon Coignet, whi:in she was