Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling WinesVizetelly, Henry
History
Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines
Vizetelly, Henry
Champagne (Wine); Sparkling wines; Wine and wine making
The vaults, which are reached by a winding stone staircase, are
spacious, and consist of a series of parallel and uniform galleries hewn
in the chalk without either masonry supports or facings. Among the solid
piles of bottles which here hem us in on all sides are a considerable
number of magnums and imperial pints reserved for particular
customers--the former more especially for certain military messes, at
which the brand of Binet fils and Co. is held in deserved esteem. We
tasted here--in addition to several choice sparkling wines, including a
grand _vin brut_, vintage 1865--a still Ay of the year 1870, and some
still Bouzy of 1874. The former, a remarkably light and elegant wine,
was already in fine condition for drinking, while the latter, which was
altogether more vinous, deeper in colour, and fuller in body needed the
ripening influence of time to bring it to perfection. Through their
agents, Rutherford, Drury, and Co., Messrs. Binet fils and Co. achieved
a great success in England with their still Sillery, vintage 1857, and
subsequently with their superb creaming _vin brut_, vintage 1865, of
which we have just spoken, and which is still to be met with at London
clubs of repute.
Some short distance from and parallel with the Rue de la Justice is the
Rue Jacquart, where Messrs. Charles Farre and Co., of whose
establishment at Hautvillers we have already spoken, have their offices
and cellars. We enter a large courtyard, where several railway vans are
being laden with cases of wine from the packing-hall beyond, and in the
tasting-room adjoining find wine being tested prior to bottling, to
ascertain the amount of saccharine it contains. This was accomplished by
reducing a certain quantity of wine by boiling down to one-sixth, when
the saccharometer should indicate 13° of sugar to ensure each bottle
containing the requisite quantity of compressed carbonic acid gas.
Messrs. Farre’s cellars, comprising eighteen parallel galleries disposed
in two stories, are both lofty and commodious, and are mainly of recent
construction, the upper ones being solidly walled with masonry, while
those below are simply excavated in the chalk. Here, as elsewhere, one
performed a lengthened promenade between piles after piles of bottles of
the finer vintages and a seemingly endless succession of racks, at which
workmen were engaged in dislodging the sediment in the wine by the dim
light of a tallow candle. It was here that we were assured the more
experienced of these men were capable, when working with both hands, of
shaking the enormous number of 50,000 bottles a day, or at the rate of
seventy to the minute.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account