1954 King Cocktail Shake Again with Eddie

CHAMPAGNE

Champagne is a sparkling white wine made from grapes grown within the former boundaries of the ancient province of Champagne. The quantity available each year is limited, and no wine, other than the produce of a limited number of particularly favoured vineyards, may be sold under the name of Champagne. The better the blending, the better the Champagne—and there are two reasons why it should be blended. The first is that the wines from different vineyards, although similar in type, are different in style, and it is only by judicious blending that individual wines are improved and their individual qualities merged into a more harmonious whole. The second reason is that the quantity of wine made each year from individual vineyards is so small that shippers must blend the wine of a number of vineyards in order to have " Cuvees." A Champagne Cuvee is a blend of wines from different vine yards within the officially delimited Champagne area and made either in any one year, or, mostly in one year and partly in previous years. A " Vintage " Champagne is one bearing on both its cork and label the date of the particular year when the grapes were gathered, from which most, if not the whole, of the Cuvee was made. There are two sorts of sparkling wines—wines with carbonic acid gas pumped into them are cheaper, but the better, more expensive wines, produce their own carbonic acid gas through the natural process of fermentation. Any and every natural wine that is bottled before its power of fermentation is over, that is whilst it contains sugar and ferments and not too much alcohol, will become sparkling; its sugar will be transformed into alcohol and carbonic gas by fermentation and the carbonic acid gas, being unable to

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