Messrs. Lauteren’s cellars for sparkling wines extend mainly under an old monastery, and comprise a succession of large vaulted galleries connected by narrow passages with arched entrances. Here are stacked some 800,000 bottles of wine in varying conditions of maturity. Messrs. Lauteren bottle their wines in August, instead of fully two months earlier according to the usual practice, in the belief that the system they pursue is more conducive to perfect effervescence, besides being attended with less breakage, owing to the newly-bottled wine escaping the heat of the summer. All the arrangements at this establishment are very complete. There is a place for everything, and everything is to be found in its place. Adjoining the courtyard, where new bottles are stacked beneath open ornamental sheds, are the tasting-room and the apartment where the operations of disgorging, dosing, and re-corking are performed. The liqueur added by the firm to their sparkling wines is kept in bottle from three to five years before being used. In the tasting-room we were shown a variety of sparkling hocks and moselles, the former with all the distinguishing characteristics of fine Rhine wine, the older samples having gained considerably in softness. A dry Cabinet specimen submitted to us exhibited a fine bouquet and much delicacy of flavour. The moselles we found particularly interesting, made as they were of genuine wines from some of the best vineyards of the Moselle district. The largest German sparkling wine establishment is at Hochheim, which, although, situated on the banks of the Main, and several miles distant from its confluence with the Rhine, has curiously enough supplied us with a generic name under which we inconsistently class the entire produce of the Rhine vineyards. Behind the Hochheim railway station there rises a long low slope, planted from base to summit with vines, a portion of which are screened on the north by a plain-looking church and a weather-stained deanery. The vines thus sheltered yield the famous Dom Dechanei, the finest Hochheimer known. Some short distance off in a westerly direction are the extensive premises of the Hochheim Sparkling Wine Association, whose brands are well known in England. The firm of Burgeff and Co., whose business the association acquired in 1858 and subsequently considerably extended, was founded in 1837. At this establishment all the arrangements are of the most perfect character. The bottles are cleaned by a machine employing ten persons, and turning out several thousand bottles a day. All the bottles moreover, before being used, have their strength tested by an ingenious apparatus which subjects them to three or four times the pressure they are likely to undergo when filled with wine. Pumps, bottle-washing machine, and the revolving casks in which the sugar is dissolved for the liqueur, are all moved by steam, and the association even manufactures the gas used for lighting up the establishment.