As new-blown rose
Or pink.
With gifts that ease
And charms that please,
Come, dear one, fain I’d drink!’[193]
Despite the success achieved by the vin mousseux, merchants, owing to the excessive breakage of the bottles—of the cause of which and of the means of stopping it they were equally ignorant—often saw their hopes of fortune fly away with the splintered fragments of the shattered glass.[194] The following passages from the MS. notes of the founder of one of the first houses of Reims, written in 1770, would imply some knowledge of the fact that a liquoreux wine was likely to lead to a destructive casse, and also that the importance of the trade in sparkling Champagne was far greater during the first half of the eighteenth century than is usually supposed.[195] The MS. in question says: ‘In 1746 I bottled 6000 bottles of a very liquoreux wine; I had only 120 bottles of it left. In 1747 there was less liqueur; the breakage amounted to one-third of the whole. In 1748 it was more vinous and less liquoreux; the breakage was only a sixth. In 1759 it was more rond, and the breakage was only a tenth. In 1766 the wine of Jacquelet was very rond; the breakage was only a twentieth.’[196]
The writer then proceeds to recommend, as a means of preventing breakage, that the wine should not be bottled till the liqueur had almost disappeared, and that, if necessary, fermentation should be checked by well beating the wine. But as at that epoch there was really no means of effectually testing this disappearance, and as the beating theory was an utterly fallacious one, the followers of his precepts remained with the sad alternative of producing in too many instances either mousses folles and their inevitable accompaniment of disastrous breakage, or wine so mature as to be incapable of continuing its fermentation in bottle, and producing mousse at all.[197]
It is therefore evident that much of the sparkling wine drunk at the commencement of the last century was what we should call crémant, or, as it was then styled, sablant,[198] as otherwise the breakage would have been something frightful. Bertin du Rocheret plainly indicates after 1730 a difference between the fiercely frothing kinds, to which the term saute bouchon or pop-cork was applied, and wine that was merely mousseux.[199] The price of the former is the highest, ranging up to 3 livres 6 sols, whilst that of the bon mousseux does not exceed 50 sols, the difference in the two being no doubt based to a certain extent on the loss by breakage.[200]
Hence, too, a partiality for weak sour growths for making vin mousseux, as, although science could give no reason, experience showed that with these the breakage would be less than with those of a saccharine nature.[201] Thus Bertin writes in 1744 that the vineyards of Avize, planted for the most part in 1715, and almost entirely with white grapes, only produced a thin wine, with a tartness that caused it to be one of the least esteemed in the district; but that ‘since the mania for the saute bouchon, that abominable beverage, which has become yet more loathsome from an insupportable acidity,’ the Avize wines had increased in value eightfold.[202] To this acidity the Abbé Bignon refers in a poem of 1741, in which, protesting against the partiality for violently effervescing wines, he says:
‘Your palate is a cripple