Possibly; but how about the inferior stuff which we used to sample, occasionally, in our salad days, when our green judgment led us to pass our early mornings in riotous junketings in the now staid and peaceful region of the Haymarket, S.W.? Much later than those days I have sampled alleged champagne—“extra sec,” it was called, though “extra sick” would have been more appropriate—on a race-course, in order to fitly celebrate some famous victory. But in my riper years, the victory (when it occurs) is honoured in more staid and seemly fashion. I was never nearer death by poison than one Friday morning in the ancient city of York, {129} after indulging somewhat freely in the “sparkling” proffered me on the previous day in a booth on Knavesmire. Do what I would—and I walked ten miles, went for a scull on the river Ouse, and then swallowed hot mustard-and-water—the distressing sensations, the great wave of depression which seemed to have swamped the heart, would not quit the body, until—and the idea came as a bolt from the blue—I had summoned up sufficient strength of mind to enter the coffee-room of the principal hotel, and demand a pint of Pommery. It was not a hair of the dog which had bitten me; the mangy brute from the attention of whose fangs I was suffering was no sort of relation to the highly-bred terrier who rooted out the anguish from my soul. And that small pint was so successful that another went the same way. And by that time I had been inspired with nerve enough to face a charging tiger, unarmed.
Many learned people, including one section of the medical profession, incline to the belief that consumption of champagne offers direct encouragement to gout. But there is no such idea amongst those employed in the cellars of Moet et Chandon, Geisler, Mum, Pommery, and other large firms. Not that these workmen are allowed to drink as much of their own foaming productions as they have a mind to. As a matter of fact the wine supplied to the ouvriers is the thin red stuff of the district, resembling inferior Burgundy, and not of a very elevating nature. It is not particularly attractive, this life of labour, for nine or ten hours a day, in a damp, cold {130} cellar some fifty yards below the level of the street pavements, with occasionally bottles bursting to right and left of you. These cellars are cut out of the calcareous rock, and were, many of them, inherited from the Romans; and champagne is such a sensitive, exacting sort of wine that it must be stored in the very bowels of the earth, where all is peace and quietude, and where neither motion nor vibration can reach the maturing vintages.
At least that is what they tell visitors; although the only time I have visited champagne cellars could hardly be called a peaceful experience, owing to the almost continuous bombardment of bursting bottles. And it is said that as a rule at least 10 per cent of the stored wine is wasted in this way; whilst in seasons of early and unusual heat the percentage may rise to as much as 20, and even 25.
Sparkling champagne—and we are not concerned with the still wine—is the result of a peculiar treatment during fermentation. During the winter months the wine is racked-off, and fined with isinglass; and in the early spring it is bottled and tightly corked. In order to collect the sediment in the necks of the bottles these are placed at first in a sloping condition, with the corks downward, for a term. In the second year this sediment requires to be disgorged, or dégagé-ed. This feat can only be learnt by long practice, and even then there be workmen who cannot be safely trusted to shift the sediment, without shifting a too-large proportion of the wine itself. {131}
May I confess to the belief that I should never make a good, reliable, valuable disgorger?
Of course there is art, or knack, in it. The degager takes a bottle, cuts the string of the cork, expels the sediment—occasionally without spilling more than a drop or two—and passes the bottle to his neighbour, who fills it up with a liqueur, composed of sugar-candy dissolved in cognac, and flavoured, and with some bright, clarified wine. The bottle is then recorked, by machinery, wired, labelled, and sent about its business.
The fermentation being incomplete at the first bottling of the wine, the carbonic acid gas generated in a confined space—this part comes unadorned, out of a book—exerts pressure on itself, and it thus remains as a liquid in the wine. When this pressure is removed it expands into gas, and thus communicates the sparkling property to champagne. Hence the bombardments.
How do I know all this? I once paid a visit to the cellars of Pommery et Cie. ; and my dearest friend asked subsequently what sort of writ of ejectment had to be drawn up to rid them of my presence and thirst. But all joking apart the time was well spent, and the industry is deserving of all the encouragement which it receives. The head cellarman is, literally a host in himself, an old gentleman of aristocratic mien, and portly—or, rather, champagne-ly—presence; and one of the formulae to be gone through before quitting the premises is to drink a glass of the very best with that charming old gentleman, who I hope still flourishes amid his bottles and his {132} disgorgers. And when it is added that there are usually upwards of 15,000,000 bottles in the cellars at one time, the old heresy as to the district being unable to supply sufficient wine save for Russian consumption is at once exploded.
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.