sings GiroflÉ, in Lecocq’s opera; and although the sparkling liquor therein is described in the text as “punch”—which does not sparkle much as a rule—I have no doubt whatever that what Lecocq, or his librettist meant, was the grateful liquid which is described in different circles of society as “fiz,” “Simpkin” (the nearest approach a Mahomedan table-servant can make to “champagne”), “a bottle,” “golden pop,” and “the Boy.”

Here let me interpolate the commonly-received {127} interpretation of the last-named title. At a shooting party, a stout urchin of some fifteen summers was specially told off to carry the liquid refreshment for the shooters, which took the form of Perrier JouËt in magnums. And so frequent were the calls of “Boy!” that morning, that the youth threw up his situation before noon.

D’you believe it? Not a word of it? Same here. At least I never attended a “shoot” at which the gunners steadied their nerves by the aid of choice vintages—before luncheon, at all events; and I don’t mean to begin now. Champagne was probably called “the Boy” because of its free, happy, joyous, loose-and-careless char­ac­ter­is­tics. The sparkle represents youth, and the froth irresponsibility; whilst the whole -- but never mind about the whole, just now.

The Champagne district, as some people know, lies on the chalk hills which surround the valley of the Marne. The townlets of Epernay, Ay, and ChÂteau Thierry owe their prosperity to these seductive wines, and Rheims has attained world-wide celebrity, as much from being the centre of the champagne industry as from being the seat of the premier ecclesiastic of France, the Archbishop of Paris. So far, guide-book.

The champagne-vines are short and stunted, the grapes being small, but most prolific of juice. A third, and even a fourth, crushing will yield a very delicious wine, to an uneducated palate; and this is the inferior liquor which is sold to tourists in Rheims at the equivalent of one shilling and fivepence per large bottle. It is a sweet—what {128} connoisseurs call a “lady’s” wine, which an expert would not taste a second time; and its aftermath, its effect on the imbiber the following day, is somewhat distressing. Somehow, notwithstanding the import duties, champagne—I am alluding now to the superior brands—is almost as cheap in London as in the best hotels in Rheims; but the experiment of drinking it in the land of its birth is not as risky as on alien shores. At least so say the natives of the district, who maintain that although work in the cellars is not the pleasantest in the world—the strong smell, which is even intoxicating, giving the workmen a distaste for the sparkling wine—it is quite possible for an outsider to drink a quantity of champagne of undoubted quality without feeling any bad after-effects.

“You may, in fact,” it was told me on the spot, “drink four bottles of Pommery ’84, and feel all the better for it next day.”

Possibly; but how about the inferior stuff which we used to sample, occasionally, in our salad days, when our green judgment led us to pass our early mornings in riotous junketings in the now staid and peaceful region of the Haymarket, S.W.? Much later than those days I have sampled alleged champagne—“extra sec,” it was called, though “extra sick” would have been more appropriate—on a race-course, in order to fitly celebrate some famous victory. But in my riper years, the victory (when it occurs) is honoured in more staid and seemly fashion. I was never nearer death by poison than one Friday morning in the ancient city of York, {129} after indulging somewhat freely in the “sparkling” proffered me on the previous day in a booth on Knavesmire. Do what I would—and I walked ten miles, went for a scull on the river Ouse, and then swallowed hot mustard-and-water—the distressing sensations, the great wave of depression which seemed to have swamped the heart, would not quit the body, until—and the idea came as a bolt from the blue—I had summoned up sufficient strength of mind to enter the coffee-room of the principal hotel, and demand a pint of Pommery. It was not a hair of the dog which had bitten me; the mangy brute from the attention of whose fangs I was suffering was no sort of relation to the highly-bred terrier who rooted out the anguish from my soul. And that small pint was so successful that another went the same way. And by that time I had been inspired with nerve enough to face a charging tiger, unarmed.

Many learned people, including one section of the medical profession, incline to the belief that consumption of champagne offers direct encouragement to gout. But there is no such idea amongst those employed in the cellars of Moet et Chandon, Geisler, Mum, Pommery, and other large firms. Not that these workmen are allowed to drink as much of their own foaming productions as they have a mind to. As a matter of fact the wine supplied to the ouvriers is the thin red stuff of the district, resembling inferior Burgundy, and not of a very elevating nature. It is not particularly attractive, this life of labour, for nine or ten hours a day, in a damp, cold {130} cellar some fifty yards below the level of the street pavements, with occasionally bottles bursting to right and left of you. These cellars are cut out of the calcareous rock, and were, many of them, inherited from the Romans; and champagne is such a sensitive, exacting sort of wine that it must be stored in the very bowels of the earth, where all is peace and quietude, and where neither motion nor vibration can reach the maturing vintages.

At least that is what they tell visitors; although the only time I have visited champagne cellars could hardly be called a peaceful experience, owing to the almost continuous bombardment of bursting bottles. And it is said that as a rule at least 10 per cent of the stored wine is wasted in this way; whilst in seasons of early and unusual heat the percentage may rise to as much as 20, and even 25.

Sparkling champagne—and we are not concerned with the still wine—is the result of a peculiar treatment during fermentation. During the winter months the wine is racked-off, and fined with isinglass; and in the early spring it is bottled and tightly corked. In order to collect the sediment in the necks of the bottles these are placed at first in a sloping condition, with the corks downward, for a term. In the second year this sediment requires to be disgorged, or dÉgagÉ-ed. This feat can only be learnt by long practice, and even then there be workmen who cannot be safely trusted to shift the sediment, without shifting a too-large proportion of the wine itself. {131}

May I confess to the belief that I should never make a good, reliable, valuable disgorger?

Of course there is art, or knack, in it. The degager takes a bottle, cuts the string of the cork, expels the sediment—occasionally without spilling more than a drop or two—and passes the bottle to his neighbour, who fills it up with a liqueur, composed of sugar-candy dissolved in cognac, and flavoured, and with some bright, clarified wine. The bottle is then recorked, by machinery, wired, labelled, and sent about its business.

The fermentation being incomplete at the first bottling of the wine, the carbonic acid gas generated in a confined space—this part comes unadorned, out of a book—exerts pressure on itself, and it thus remains as a liquid in the wine. When this pressure is removed it expands into gas, and thus communicates the sparkling property to champagne. Hence the bombardments.

How do I know all this? I once paid a visit to the cellars of Pommery et C^ie.; and my dearest friend asked sub­se­quent­ly what sort of writ of ejectment had to be drawn up to rid them of my presence and thirst. But all joking apart the time was well spent, and the industry is deserving of all the encouragement which it receives. The head cellarman is, literally a host in himself, an old gentleman of aristocratic mien, and portly—or, rather, champagne-ly—presence; and one of the formulae to be gone through before quitting the premises is to drink a glass of the very best with that charming old gentleman, who I hope still flourishes amid his bottles and his {132} disgorgers. And when it is added that there are usually upwards of 15,000,000 bottles in the cellars at one time, the old heresy as to the district being unable to supply sufficient wine save for Russian consumption is at once exploded.

In fact some twenty-five millions of gallons of champagne are produced, annually, in the district. Of course not all of it is of the finest growth, and some of it a connoisseur would reject with scorn. In order to smash another old fallacy it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that champagne is not made from gooseberries—at all events in countries where grapes grow. And the reason for this is that gooseberry juice is far scarcer, and therefore more expensive than grape juice. Some few dozens may be made in England, but to make sufficient gooseberry champagne to be profitable would require more berries than are grown in the country. It would, in fact, require hundreds of tons of the fruit to pay the man­u­fac­turer.

Lest my readers should be wearied of the subject of French wines, I shall not particularize as to the burgundies, but confine myself to the clarets of the country which are by far the more popular wines in England—even when they are artificially man­u­fac­tured, in Spain, and elsewhere.

“The wines that be made in Bordeaux,” wrote Gervase Markham, in the middle of the seventeenth century, “are called Gascoyne wines, and you shall know them by their hazel hoopes, and the most be full gadge, and sound wines.”

Evidently adulteration’s artful aid was but little employed in those days. {133}

“See that in your choice of Gascoine wines,” continues Gervase, in his minute direction to the overwrought “housewife,” “that your Clarret wines be faire coloured, and bright as a Rubie, not deepe as an Ametist; for though it may shew strength, yet it wants neatnesse. If your Clarret wine be faint, and have lost his color, then take a fresh hogshead with his fresh lees which was very good wine, and draw your wine into the same, then stop it close and tight, and lay it a foretake for two or three daies that the lees may run through it, then lay it up till it be fine, and if the colour be not perfit, draw it into a red wine hogshead ... and if your Clarret wine have lost his colour, take a pennyworth of Damsens --” ha! what is this?

“Or else blacke Bullesses, as you see cause, and stew them with some red wine of the deepest colour, and make thereof a pound or more of sirrup, and put it into a cleane glasse, and after into the hogshead of Clarret wine; and the same you may likewise doe unto red wine if you please.”

Ahem! Evidently they did know something about adulteration in the seventeenth century.

It is a common idea that only a very few clarets are entitled to the prefix “ChÂteau.” The truth is very different. The district on the south bank of the Gironde simply teems with chÂteaux, of a kind. For miles you cannot go a few hundred yards in any direction without seeing or passing two or three; each with its vineyards and cellars and special labels, and more or less unblemished reputation. There is ChÂteau {134} Latour, and there is (or may be) the ChÂteau Smith. Did I choose to buy a cottage in that district, grow my own grapes, and make my own wines, I should be fully entitled to label them “ChÂteau Gubbins,” and incur no penalty by so doing.

But please do not pick the ripe grapes, although you may be sorely tempted by the sight of dozens of bunches separated from the vines by their sheer weight, and lying in the furrows. Plenty of people do commit this sort of theft, for there be hundreds of the rough element who visit the MÉdoc country. The “Hooligans” and gamins of Bordeaux drift here at picking-time just as the poor of London drift into the county of Kent during the hopping season. They are not loved, but they have to be endured. Somebody must pick the grapes, and after all a few depredations will not ruin the grower any more than do the strawberry-pickers in the south of England “break” the growers, by adopting their usual plan: “three in the mouth, one in the basket.”

The claret-cellars are not nearly as far beneath the earth as are those in the region about Rheims. Nor are they as amusing. There is no “pop, pop” down here, no danger of wounds and lacerations from flying splinters of glass. The principal objects of interest are the cobwebs which are piled up all over the place like dusky curtains. It is not well to sample too many glasses which may be offered you of the wine of the country. For the samples are taken from the new, immature wine, and are suggestive of {135} pains and disturbances below the belt. The head cellarman, portly and urbane like his brother of Rheims, will watch your face closely as you taste his novelties, and will invariably ask your opinion of it. But the wise visitor will not be too opinionative on the subject. I have noticed that the man who says the least is accounted the most knowing, whether he be inspecting the contents of a cellar, or of a stable. And believe me, there is as much rubbish talked about wine as about horses. Still, in sampling new champagne you may praise indiscriminately, without being accounted an absolute dunce; whilst with claret it is altogether different. The wine varies exceedingly with the vintage; and none but an expert and accomplished palate may dare to say what is good, what is bad, and what is mediocre.

Is it necessary to state that claret was not drunk, on ordinary occasions, by the Ancient Britons? I trow not. And I fancy the wines of the noble old Romans partook more of the nature of burgundies than clarets. In England the wines of MÉdoc have never been fully appreciated until during the latter half of the present century, when the taste for port began to die out, with the good port itself. And as I writhe, occasionally, in the throes of gout, I bethink me of the merciless law delivered unto Moses, which provides that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon their descendants, even unto the third and fourth generation. For the good old three-and-four-bottle men of eighty years ago, and farther back than that, certainly laid {136} the foundations for much of the trouble at this end of the century. Still there be doctors who actually recommend port wine as a gout-fuge. And it is certainly safer to drink a little good port—matured in the wood, and innocent of beeswing—an you be a podagric subject, than some of the clarets which, thanks to the enterprise of the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone, are within the reach of the slenderest purse.

Do not smoke whilst drinking claret, or port, either. Nothing destroys the flavour of red wine so effectually as the flavour of a cigar.

One of the greatest “sells” ever experienced by an expectant party of claret judges—of whom I posed as one—was after this fashion. Our host had inherited a pipe of ChÂteau Lafitte ’64, which had been duly bottled off. We had enjoyed a nice plain little dinner—a bit of crimped cod, a steak, and a bird—in order the better to taste the luscious wine. After dinner bottle number one made its appearance; and as they sipped, and prepared to sing hymns of praise, the jaws of the guests fell. And a great cry uprose: “Pricked!”