‘Phébus adonc va se désabuser
De son amour pour la docte fontaine,
Et connoîtra que pour bon vers puiser
Vin champenois vaut mieux qu’eau d’Hippocrène.’
[125] ] The father, Adam Bertin du Rocheret, was born in 1662, and died in 1736; his son, Philippe Valentin, the lieutenant criminel at Epernay, was born in 1693, and died in 1762. Both owned vineyards at Epernay, Ay, and Pierry, and were engaged in the wine-trade, and both left a voluminous mass of correspondence, &c., extracts from which have been given by M. Louis Perrier in his Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne. The Marshal was an old customer. At the foot of a letter of his of the 20th December 1705, asking for ‘two quartaux of the most excellent vin de Champagne, and a pièce of good for ordinary drinking,’ Bertin has written, ‘I will send you, as soon as the river, which is strongly flooded, becomes navigable, the wine you ask for, and you will be pleased with it; but as the best new wine is not of a quality to be drunk in all its goodness by the spring, I should think that fifty flasks of old wine, the most exquisite in the kingdom that I can furnish you with, together with fifty other good ones, will suit you instead of one of the two caques.’
[126] ] Tocane was a light wine obtained, like the best Tokay, from the juice allowed to drain from grapes slightly trodden, but not pressed. It had a flavour of verdeur, which was regarded as one of its chief merits, and would not keep more than six months. Though at one time very popular, and largely produced in Champagne, it is now no longer made. The wine of Ay enjoyed a high reputation as tocane.
[127] ] Louis Perrier’s Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne.
[128] ] Letter of Dom Grossart.
[129] ] Louis Perrier’s Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne.
[130] ] Ample details of the systems of viticulture and wine-making pursued in the Champagne at the commencement of the eighteenth century are to be found in the anonymous Mémoire published in 1718. These are reproduced to a great extent in the Spectacle de la Nature of Noel Antoine Pluche, a native of Reims, who composed this work (published in 1732) for the benefit of the son of Lord Stafford, to whom he was tutor. The Abbé Pluche, after being professor of humanity and rhetoric at the University of Reims, was about to enter into holy orders, but being denounced as an opponent of the Bull Unigenitus, abandoned all ideas of preferment, and devoted himself to private tuition and the composition of his great work, the Spectacle de la Nature. This last is a perfect encyclopædia, in the form of a series of dialogues, recalling those in Mrs. Barbauld’s Evenings at Home, the interlocutors being the Count, the Countess, the Chevalier, and the Prior; and the style may be best judged from the following extracts from the contemporary translation of Mr. Samuel Humphries.