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
On leaving Messrs. Pommery’s we retrace our steps down the Avenue
Gerbert, bordered on either side with rows of plane-trees, until we
reach the treeless Avenue de Sillery, where Messrs. de Saint Marceaux
and Co.’s new and capacious establishment is installed. The principal
block of building is flanked by two advanced wings inclosing a
garden-court, set off with flowers and shrubs, and from the centre of
which rises a circular shaft, covered in with glass, admitting light and
air to the cellars below. In the building to the left the wine is
received on its arrival from the vineyard, and here are ranged hundreds
of casks replete with the choice _crûs_ of Verzenay, Ay, Cramant, and
Bouzy, while some thousands of bottles ready for labelling are stocked
in massive piles at the end of the packing-hall in the corresponding
wing of the establishment. Here, too, a tribe of workpeople are arraying
the bottles with gold and silver headdresses and robing them in pink
paper, while others are filling, securing, marking, and addressing the
cases or baskets to Hong-Kong, San Francisco, Yokohama, Bombay, London,
New York, St. Petersburg, Berlin, or Paris.
The wine in cask, stored in the left-hand wing, after having been duly
blended in a vast vat holding over 2,400 gallons, is drawn off into
bottles, which are then lowered down a shaft to the second tier of
cellars by means of an endless chain, on to which the baskets of bottles
are swiftly hooked. The workman engaged in this duty, in order to
prevent his falling down the shaft, has a leather belt strapped round
his waist, by means of which he is secured to an adjoining iron column.
We descend into the lower cellars down a flight of ninety-three broad
steps--a depth equal to the height of an ordinary six-storied house--and
find no less than four-and-twenty galleries excavated in the chalk,
without any masonry supports, and containing upwards of a million
bottles of champagne. The length of these galleries varies, but they are
of a uniform breadth, allowing either a couple of racks with wine _sur
pointe_, or stacks of bottles, in four rows on either side, with an
ample passage down the centre.
The upper range of cellars comprises two large arched galleries of
considerable breadth, one of which contains wine in wood and wine _sur
pointe_, while the other is stocked with bottles of wine heads downward,
ready to be delivered into the hands of the _dégorgeur_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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