Other light wines are sung of in John Oldham’s Works (1684):—
Let wealthy merchants when they dine,
Run o’er their witty names of wine:
Their chests of Florence and their Mont Alchine,
Their Mants, Champaigns, Chablees, Frontiniacks tell;
Their aums of Hock, of Backrag, and Mosell.
No wonder that the doctors complained that their efforts would be fruitless to patch up constitutions so utterly weather-beaten by heat and wet, as we find from Sir Charles Sedley’s The Doctor and his Patients, where it is told of the family Æsculapius:—
One day he called ‘em all together,
And, one by one, he asked ‘em whether
It were not better by good diet
To keep the blood and humours quiet,
With toast and ale to cool their brains
Than nightly fire ‘em with Champains.
And whilst these wines were injurious to their bodies they failed to give any real or permanent relief to their minds, as even the licentious tragedian of the period, Etheridge, admitted:—
At the plays we are constantly making our court,
And when they are ended we follow the sport
To the Mall and the Park,
Where we love till ‘tis dark;
Then Sparkling Champagne
Puts an end to their reign;
It quickly recovers
Poor languishing lovers;
Makes us frolic and gay, and drowns all our sorrow;
But alas! we relapse again on the morrow.[158]
We obtain an incidental estimate of the market price of French wine from the Tatler, No. 147, where we read:—
Upon my coming home last night, I found a very handsome present of French wine left for me, as a taste—of 216 hogsheads which are to be put to sale at 20l. a hogshead, at Garraway’s coffee-house, in Exchange Alley.
These wines were sold by the candle—i.e. the property was put up by the auctioneer, an inch of candle was lighted, and the last bidder when the light went out was the purchaser.
English vineyards were still here and there attempted. Thus Evelyn (Diary, 1655) ‘went to see Col. Blount’s subterranean warren, and drank of the wine of his vineyard, which was good for little.’