It was on one of those occasional sunshiny days in the early part of October[379] when we first visited Ay—the vineyard of ‘golden plants,’ the unique premier cru of the Wines of the River—and the various adjacent vinelands. The road lay between two rows of closely-planted poplar-trees reaching almost to the village of Dizy, whose quaint gray church-tower, with its gabled roof, is dominated by the neighbouring vine-clad slopes, which extend from Avenay to Venteuil, some few miles beyond Hautvillers, the cradle, so to speak, of the vin mousseux of the Champagne. The vineyards of Dizy, the upper soil of which is largely mixed with loose stones, have chiefly a southern or western aspect, and, excepting in the case of the precipitous height suggestively styled ‘Grimpe Chat,’ their incline is generally a gentle one. In these vineyards, which rank among the premiers crus of the Champagne, a quantity of wine from white grapes is regularly made.
From Dizy the road runs immediately at the base of vine-clad slopes, broken up occasionally by a conical peak detaching itself from the mass, and tinted from base to summit with richly-variegated hues, among which deep purple, yellow, green, gray, and crimson by turns predominate. On our right hand we pass a vineyard called Le Léon, which tradition asserts to be the one whence Pope Leo the Magnificent, the patron of Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, drew his supply of Ay wine. The village of Ay lies immediately before us at the foot of the slopes of vines, with the tapering spire of its ancient church rising above the neighbouring hills and cutting sharply against the bright blue sky. The vineyards, which spread themselves over a calcareous declivity, have mostly a full southern aspect, and the predominating vines are those known as golden plants, the fruit of which is of a deep purple colour. After these comes the plant vert doré, and then a moderate proportion of the plant gris, white varieties of grapes being no longer cultivated as formerly.[380]
DIZY AND ITS VINEYARD SLOPES.
The Ay vineyards are mentioned in a charter of Edmund of Lancaster, son of our Henry II. and guardian of Jehanne, heiress of Henri le Gros, Count of Champagne, dated 1276, and confirming the right of the Abbey of Avenay to four hogsheads of wine from the terroir of Ay.[381] If faith, however, may be placed in monkish legends, their existence dates back to the sixth century, at which epoch St. Tresain, the patron saint of Avenay and a contemporary of St. Remi, emigrated to the Champagne from Scotland. Having given away all he possessed in charity, he became perforce a swineherd at Mutigny, a village on the summit of the hill overlooking Ay, Mareuil, and Avenay. One day the vine-growers of Ay, hearing that St. Remi was at Ville-en-Selve, sought him out, and clamorously accused St. Tresain of neglecting to look after his pigs, which had devastated the vineyards on the slopes, and so caused great loss to the community. When called upon for his defence, St. Tresain acknowledged that he was wont to listen in the church-porch to the celebration of mass, and to forget on these occasions all such sublunary matters as swine. St. Remi, finding him so deeply religious, not only forgave him his negligence and relieved him from his porcine charge for the future, but appointed him parish priest of Mareuil and Mutigny, the inhabitants of which, it is to be hoped, received more attention from him than his pigs had done. St. Tresain, although his promotion was brought about by the complaint of the men of Ay, retorted on the latter in a vindictive and unsaintly spirit, for he ill-naturedly cursed them, and declared that after thirty years of age not one of them or their posterity should prosper temporally or spiritually—a prophecy which, if it affected the vine-growers of that epoch, has proved harmless enough in the case of their descendants.[382]
At Ay we visited the pressoir of the principal producer of vin brut, who, although the owner of merely five hectares, or about twelve and a half acres of vines, expected to make as many as 1500 pièces of wine that year, mainly of course from grapes purchased from other growers.[383] On our way from Ay to Mareuil, along the lengthy Rue de Châlons, we looked in at the little auberge at the corner of the Boulevard du Sud, and found a crowd of coopers and others connected in some way with the vintage, taking their cheerful glasses round. The walls of the room were appropriately enough decorated with capering bacchanals squeezing bunches of purple grapes and flourishing their thyrsi about in a very tipsy fashion. All the talk—and there was an abundance of it—had reference to the yield of this particular vintage and the high rate the Ay wine had realised. Eight hundred francs the pièce of 200 litres, equal to 44 gallons, appeared to be the price fixed by the agents of the great Champagne houses, and at this figure the bulk of the vintage was disposed of before a single grape passed through the winepress.[384]
The Mareuil vinelands, which include the vineyard bequeathed some six hundred years ago by Canon John de Brie to the chapter of Reims cathedral, and possibly those vineyards bestowed in 1208 on the Abbey of Avenay by Alain de Jouvincourt, cover the slopes of two coteaux, the first a continuation of the Côte d’Ay, and the second a detached spur, known as the Mont de Fourche, overlooking the Marne canal. Owing to the steepness of the slopes and to the roads through the vineyards being impracticable for carts, the grapes were being conveyed to the press-houses in baskets slung across the backs of mules and donkeys, most of which, on account of their known partiality for the ripe fruit, were muzzled while thus employed. The wine yielded by the Mareuil vineyards possesses body and vinosity, and while of course regarded as inferior to that of Ay, found a ready market the year of our visit at from five to six hundred francs the pièce. Prior to the French Revolution, the produce of the winepresses of the Seigneurs of Mareuil and the Abbess of Avenay were almost as renowned as the best growths of Ay. The reputation of the wine was then shared by the inhabitants of the village; the popular local diction, ‘Les gens d’Ay, les messieurs de Mareuil, et les crottés d’Avenay,’ referring to the days when the first was inhabited by enriched wine-growers, the second by people of some position, and the third merely by peasants, simply from its being cut off, in a great measure, from outside intercourse through the badness of its approaches. It was not until after 1776, when the seigneurie of Louvois was purchased from the Marquis de Souvré by Madame Adelaïde, aunt of Louis XVI., that the road from Epernay to Louvois, which passes through Mareuil and Avenay, was, if not constructed, at any rate rendered practicable, in order to facilitate the visits of the princess to her new acquisition. These roads exist, though no traces remain of the ancient fort of Mareuil on the bank of the Marne, taken from the English in 1359 by Gaucher de Chatillon, captain of Reims, and alternately occupied by Leaguers and Royalists during the War of Religion in the sixteenth century. Nor does there seem any chance of identifying either the ‘vineyard called la Gibaudelle, lying next the vineyard of Oudet, surnamed Leclerc,’ in the territory of Mareuil, which Guillaume de Lafors and Marguerite his wife bestowed upon the Abbey of Avenay in 1273, or those from which, in the fourteenth century, Archbishop Richard Pique of Reims used to draw ten muids or hogsheads of wine annually for ‘droits de vinage.’