1903 The Flowing Bowl by Edward Spencer

132 THE FLOWING BOWL disgoi'gers. And when it is added that there are usually upwards of 15,000,000 bottles in the cellars at one time, the old heresy as to the district being unable to supply sufficient wine save for Russian consumption is at onceexploded. In fact some twenty-five millions of gallons of champagne are produced, annually, in the district. Of course not all of it is of the finest growth, and some of it a connoisseur would reject with scorn. In order to smash another old fallacy it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that champagne is not made from gooseberries—at all events in countries where grapes grow. And the reason for this is that gooseberry juice is far scarcer, and therefore more expensive than grape juice. Some few dozens may be made in England, but to make sufficient gooseberry champagne to be profitable would require more berries than are grown in the country. It would, in fact, require hundreds of tons of the fruit to pay the manufacturer. Lest my readers should be wearied of the subject of French wines, I shall not particularize as to the burgundies, but confine myself to the clarets of the country which are by far the more popular wines in England—even when they are artificially manufactured, in Spain, and elsewhere. "The wines that be made in Bordeaux," wrote Gervase Markham, in the middle of the seventeenth century, " are called Gascoyne wines, and you shall know them by their hazel hoopes, and the most be full gadge, and sound wines." Evidently adulteration's artful aid was but little employed in those days.