Champagne.
The French make four varieties of champagne, viz.: Non-Mousseux, Cremant, Mousseux, and Grand-Mousseux. The first is fully fermented wine, fined, drawn into bottles, and allowed to rest a long time. Cremant is moderately sparkling. Mousseux throws out its cork with an audible report and begins gently to overflow. Grand-Mousseux pops out the cork with a loud noise and overflows with much foam, as it has the pressure of five atmospheres. A sound, rather dry champagne is said to be one of the best of remedies for impaired digestion.
Good and Poor Champagne.
Good champagne throws up for a long time after being opened a continuous stream of small, sparkling bubbles of gas:
“Each sunset ray, that mixed by chance
With the wine’s diamond, showed
How sunbeams may be taught to dance.”
Even after hours of exposure, when it has lost all its excess of carbonic acid, good champagne still retains the characteristic flavor of true wine, while an inferior sparkling wine becomes, after exposure, almost as insipid as a mixture of sugar and water. The best are made from the first pressings of the grape. Those made from a third, fourth or fifth pressing require the addition of sugar and are cloying and far inferior in flavor. Imitation champagnes are made by sweetening any ordinary still wines or cider and charging them with carbonic acid gas.
MALT LIQUORS.
Malt liquors, properly so called, should be made only of malted barley, hops, yeast and water, but other materials are also used. Porter is a beer of a high percentage of alcohol and made from malt dried at a high temperature, which gives it its dark color. Ale is pale beer with considerable alcohol and made of pale malt, with more hop extract than porter.