In fact some twenty-five millions of gallons of champagne are produced, annually, in the district. Of course not all of it is of the finest growth, and some of it a connoisseur would reject with scorn. In order to smash another old fallacy it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that champagne is _not_ made from gooseberries—at all events in countries where grapes grow. And the reason for this is that gooseberry juice is far scarcer, and therefore more expensive than grape juice. Some few dozens may be made in England, but to make sufficient gooseberry champagne to be profitable would require more berries than are grown in the country. It would, in fact, require hundreds of tons of the fruit to pay the manufacturer. Lest my readers should be wearied of the subject of French wines, I shall not particularize as to the burgundies, but confine myself to the clarets of the country which are by far the more popular wines in England—even when they are artificially manufactured, in Spain, and elsewhere. “The wines that be made in Bordeaux,” wrote Gervase Markham, in the middle of the seventeenth century, “are called Gascoyne wines, and you shall know them by their hazel hoopes, and the most be full gadge, and sound wines.” Evidently adulteration’s artful aid was but little employed in those days. {133} “See that in your choice of Gascoine wines,” continues Gervase, in his minute direction to the overwrought “housewife,” “that your Clarret wines be faire coloured, and bright as a Rubie, not deepe as an Ametist; for though it may shew strength, yet it wants neatnesse. If your Clarret wine be faint, and have lost his color, then take a fresh hogshead with his fresh lees which was very good wine, and draw your wine into the same, then stop it close and tight, and lay it a foretake for two or three daies that the lees may run through it, then lay it up till it be fine, and if the colour be not perfit, draw it into a red wine hogshead . . . and if your Clarret wine have lost his colour, take a pennyworth of Damsens⸺” ha! what is this? “Or else blacke Bullesses, as you see cause, and stew them with some red wine of the deepest colour, and make thereof a pound or more of sirrup, and put it into a cleane glasse, and after into the hogshead of Clarret wine; and the same you may likewise doe unto red wine if you please.” Ahem! Evidently they did know something about adulteration in the seventeenth century.