A manufacturer of the pre-scientific days of the last century relates how one year, when the wine was rich and strong, he only preserved 120 out of 6000 bottles; and it is not long since that 120,000 out of 200,000 were destroyed in the cellars of a well-known Champagne firm. M. Mauméné, moreover, relates that in 1850 he was called in to consult about the checking of a casse, which had already reached 96 per cent.[413] Over-knowing purchasers affect to select a wine which has exploded in the largest proportion in the cellars, as being well up to the mark as regards its effervescence, and are in the habit of making inquiries as to its performances in this direction.
It is evident that, in spite of the teachings of science, the bursting of Champagne bottles has not yet been reduced to a minimum, for whereas in some cellars it averages 7 and 8 per cent, and rises to 15 when the pressure is unusually strong, in others it rarely exceeds 2 ½ or 3. The period between May and September is that in which the greatest destruction takes place. In the month of October, the first and severest breakage being over, the newly-bottled wine is definitively stacked in the cellars in piles from two to half a dozen bottles deep, from six to seven feet high, and frequently a hundred feet or upwards in length. Usually the bottles remain in their horizontal position, in which they gradually develop two essential qualities, that of effervescing well and that of travelling satisfactorily, for about eighteen or twenty months, though some firms, who pride themselves upon shipping perfectly matured wines, leave them thus for double this space of time. During this period the temperature to which the wine is exposed is, as far as practicable, carefully regulated; for the risk of breakage, though greatly diminished, is never entirely at an end.
By this time the fermentation is over; but in the interval, commencing from a few days after the bottling of the wine, a loose dark-brown sediment has been forming, which has now settled on the lower side of the bottle, and to get rid of which is a delicate and tedious task. As the time approaches for preparing the wine for shipment, the bottles are placed sur pointe, as it is termed—that is to say, slantingly in racks with their necks downwards, the inclination being increased from time to time to one more abrupt.[414] The object of this change in their position is to cause the sediment to leave the side of the bottle where it has gathered. Afterwards it becomes necessary to twist and turn it and coagulate it, as it were, until it forms a kind of muddy ball, and eventually to get it well down into the neck of the bottle, so that it may be finally expelled with a bang when the temporary cork is removed and the proper one adjusted. To accomplish this the bottles are sharply turned in one direction every day for at least a month or six weeks, the time being indefinitely extended until the sediment shows a disposition to settle near the cork. The younger the wine the longer the period necessary for the bottles to be shaken, new wine often requiring as much as three months. Only a thoroughly practised hand can give the right amount of revolution and the requisite degree of slope; and in some of the cellars men were pointed out to us who had acquired such dexterity as to be able at a pinch to shake with their two hands as many as 50,000 bottles in a single day, whilst 30,000 to 40,000 is by no means an uncommon performance.