1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

quite literally floated her way into a reigning position in the New York society of the century's turn by the serving of Niagaras of the very best sparkling wine and other people have done it since. It was ·Mamie Fish who abolished at her dinners as a tiresome bore the classic service of a variety of wines, each appropriate to its proper course, and served nothing but champagne from soup to dessert with the result that her guests often got to Opera before the end of the second act, an innovation which rocked society to its foundations: There is no food or time of the day and night when the service and consumption of champagne is not both appropriate and agree– able; a circumstance which attaches to no other beverage yet devised by vintners, brewers or distillers. With the close of hostilities in Europe the products of the great established champagne firms of Rheims and Epernay are again almost universally available in the brands always popular in the United States and England: Bollinger, Veuve Clicquot, Mumm's, Perrier Jouet, Krug, Charles Heidsick, Louis Roederer, Moet and Chandon, Lanson, and a few others of the first importance. The vintages of '33 ~nd '37 will undoubtedly dominate the market for many years to come, but connoisseurs, knowing that wine of vintage quality often is bottled as an undated wine to protect the market, is never impressed by a vintage wine of second quality when he finds on the card such numbers as Krug's Private Cuvee, Bollinger Brut or Perrier·Jouet Dry England. The sans annee wine is often a very superior product indeed with the added inducement that it is usually a couple of dollars cheaper than the vintage years whose prices are jealously and zealously main– tained at high levels by shippers, dealers and restaurateurs alike. Aside from champagnes, NewYork's taste in table wines runs almost exclusively to claret and Burgundy and the German wines of the Rhine. Bordeaux (claret) generally is regarded as less pre·

92: Stork Club Bar Book