Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1903-10-24
We GET GOOD LABELS
Suspicion is Strong the Out
side of Bottle is Best.
ABOUT FRENCH WINES
ESPECIALLY OF. THOSE KEPT IN
SUNNY FRANCE.
Foreign and Domestic Tastes in Spark
ling Liquids Con-
trasted.
ABOUT FRENCH WINES
Special Correspondence Of The Evening Star

Special Correspondence OF Inc Evening otdE
REIMS, France, October IS. 1903.
An Englishman who says he knows lot
about French wineS-the manager of the
spirits department of the British army and
naval stores-has declared that Americans
drink only la bells. Dr. H. w. Wiley, chief
of the bureau of chemistry of our govern
rents Agricultural Department, picking up
this statement among other useful data
OH his recent trip to Europe, does not
cutie agree with it in his report, but admits
that 1.-The vintage champagne of France
is not exported to America, unless in ex-
ceptional cases.
We Americans have one good quality,
although it be ambitious. 1t is to want the
best. Have we been losing something that
We ought to get? That is the question.
Champagne as wine that pops and
srar1les has only existed since the year
1858, though it was always called the wine
of kings. From ST. Rem, baptiser of
Clovis to Henry VIII of England, by way
of august drinkers like Pope Urban II,
King Wenceslaus of Bohemia, Dunois, who
rode with Joan of Arc, and Leo X of the
renaissance, the great ones of the earth
have loved the special wine of this Marine
district, although it was in those days as
red the Burgundy and fiat as port
Invention of Champagne
AT the Close VI liit SlAteeItli CSuluis,
however, this wine began to be of a lighter
pink or cherry color, as the French call it,
"clairet" Fifteen miles from Reims there
was a wealthy Benedictine abbey, part of
whose revenue depended on the wine
grown in the district. In 1858 their master
of the cellar was the monk Dom Perignon.
He invented the champagne that pops and
sparkes and he notably changed its color.
l get all this information from a wealthy
citizen of ReimS who has drunk his own
vintage wine for half a century.
Dom Perignon began by mixing cham
payne wines of different slopes" explained
this citizen of ReimS. who owns a vine
yard 'One soil gives fragrance, another
generosity a third corrects the color, and
so on. Dom Perignon found that he could
even get white wine from black grapes
Moreover, it occurred to him that plugs of
cork would stop the bottles better than
fax dipped in OIL then universally in use
His wine grew famous. because of its white
color, when that of his neighbors ranged
from pink and 'clairet' at best to dark
red; but it was yet fiat or STILL like Bur
gundy or Bordeaux of this day
How did he hit upon the sparkle?" l
asked.
Probably by accident. The invention of
the cork helped it; the deep cellars of the
abbey favored it, and Dom Perignon may
have checked the active fermentation and
converted it into a latent fermentation by
the chance removal of a cask to a told
temperature
Wine That Would Pop.
"At any rate, he found wine that would
burst from its bottle and overflow the
glass, twice dainty in taste and ex-
hliarating effect if 1t had come to per-
lection naturally" said my man of ,Reims.
Louis XIV. got comfort from it in his
declining years: but it was among the
young sports of the succeeding regency that
1t took its first real vogue, so much so
that the young Marquis de Sillery went
back to his estates and made a fortune
manufacturing the first mark in the
world, the 'Sillery,' to which he was not
ashamed to give his noble name
why it foamed was a mystery to it's
makers, because the connection between
sugar and carbonic acid was undreamed of
They followed the formula of Dom Perig-
non, now become great man. Some
thought to aid it by adding spirits, alum
and other drugs, and it was the growth of
this practice that led to a temporary re-
action along in Ills. In 1716 the Marechal
de Montesquiou-d Artagnan, in a letter to
his factor, wrote:
Sparkle or No Sparkle.
In regard to making my wine sparkling,
many people ike it to foam and sparkle
and l shall not object to it, so long as it's
quality is not injured. But 1 would
rather have excellent wine than sparkling
wine AS would any one else! Later he
wrote:
81 see now how wrong I was to permit
my four hogsheads to be made sparkling.
Henceforth do not speak of it. l wish my
champagne to be clear, fine, and to have a
great deal of the perfume of champagne"
Quite apart from the question of
sparkling or not sparkling, here was
vintage champagne, such as Dr. Wiley
of our Agricultural Department and the
manager of the whisky cellars of the Brit
ish army and navy stores declare to be too
good for America. 1t was not called "vin-
tage champagne" then, nor is it now, in
France, the term doubtless being invented
by some clever salesman for the English;
but we know what DR.. Wiley means be-
cause he tells u.s. Vintage champagne is
produced from one particular growth from
a certain locality" Old-fashioned folks,
who liked the fiat pink or red champagne
of their ancestors. had no motive to follow
the mixing formulas of Dom Perignon in