The Early Vineyards of the Champagne-- Their Produce esteemed by
Popes and Kings, Courtiers and Prelates-- Controversy regarding the
rival Merits of the Wines of Burgundy and the Champagne-- Dom
Perignon's happy Discovery of Sparkling Wine-- Its Patrons under
Louis Quatorze and the Regency-- The Ancient Church and Abbey of
Hautvillers-- Farre and Co.'s Champagne Cellars-- The Abbey of St.
Peter now a Farm-- Existing Remains of the Monastic Buildings-- The
Tombs and Decorations of the Ancient Church-- The Last Resting-Place
of Dom Perignon--The Legend of the Holy Dove-- Good Champagne the
Result of Labour, Skill, Minute Precaution, and Careful Observation.
Strong men, we know, lived before Agamemnon; and strong wine was made in
the fair province of Champagne long before the days of the sagacious Dom
Perignon, to whom we are indebted for the sparkling vintage known under
the now familiar name. The chalky slopes that border the Marne were
early recognised as offering special advantages for the culture of the
vine. The priests and monks, whose vows of sobriety certainly did not
lessen their appreciation of the good things of this life, and the
produce of whose vineyards usually enjoyed a higher reputation than that
of their lay neighbours, were clever enough to seize upon the most
eligible sites, and quick to spread abroad the fame of their wines. St.
Remi, baptiser of Clovis, the first Christian king in France, at the end
of the fifth century left by will, to various churches, the vineyards
which he owned at Reims and Laon, together with the "vilains" employed
in their cultivation. Some three and a half centuries later we find
worthy Bishop Pardulus of Laon imitating Paul's advice to Timothy, and
urging Archbishop Hincmar to drink of the wines of Epernay and Reims for
his stomach's sake. The crusade-preaching Pope, Urban II., who was born
among the vineyards of the Champagne, dearly loved the wine of Ay; and
his energetic appeals to the princes of Europe to take up arms for the
deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre may have owed some of their eloquence
to his favourite beverage.
The red wine of the Champagne sparkled on the boards of monarchs in the
Middle Ages when they sat at meat amidst their mailclad chivalry, and
quaffed mighty beakers to the confusion of the Paynim. Henry of Andely
has sung in his _fabliau_ of the "Bataille des Vins," how, when stout
Philip Augustus and his chaplain constituted themselves the earliest
known wine-jury, the _crûs_ of Espernai, Auviler, Chaalons, and Reims
were amongst those which found most favour in their eyes, though nearly
a couple of centuries elapsed before Eustace Deschamps recorded in verse
the rival merits of those of Cumières and Ay. King Wenceslaus of
Bohemia, a mighty toper, got so royally drunk day after day upon the
vintages of the Champagne, that he forgot all about the treaty with
Charles VI., that had formed the pretext of his visit to France, and
would probably have lingered, goblet in hand, in the old cathedral city
till the day of his death, but for the presentation of a little account
for wine consumed, which sobered him to repentance and led to his abrupt
departure. Dunois, Lahire, Xaintrailles, and their fellows, when they
rode with Joan of Arc to the coronation of Charles VII., drank the same
generous fluid, through helmets barred, to the speedy expulsion of the
detested English from the soil of France.
The vin d'Ay--_vinum Dei_ as Dominicus Baudoin punningly styled it--was,
according to old Paulmier, the ordinary drink of the kings and princes
of his day. It fostered bluff King Hal's fits of passion and the tenth
Leo's artistic extravagance; consoled Francis I. for the field of Pavia,
and solaced his great rival in his retirement at St. Just. All of them
had their commissioners at Ay to secure the best wine for their own
consumption. Henri Quatre, whose _vendangeoir_ is still shown in the
village, held the wine in such honour that he was wont to style himself
the Seigneur d'Ay, just as James of Scotland was known as the Gudeman of
Ballangeich. When his son, Louis XIII., was crowned, the wines of the
Champagne were the only growths allowed to grace the board at the royal
banquet. Freely too did they flow at the coronation feast of the Grand
Monarque, when the crowd of assembled courtiers, who quaffed them in his
honour, hailed them as the finest wines of the day.
But the wines which drew forth all these encomiums were far from
resembling the champagne of modern times. They were not, as has been
asserted, all as red as burgundy and as flat as port; for at the close
of the sixteenth, century some of them were of a _fauve_ or yellowish
hue, and of the intermediate tint between red and white which the French
call _clairet_, and which our old writers translate as the "complexion
of a cherry" or the "colour of a partridge's eye." But, as a rule, the
wines of the Champagne up to this period closely resembled those
produced in the adjacent province, where Charles the Bold had once held
sway; a resemblance, no doubt, having much to do with the great medical
controversy regarding their respective merits which arose in 1652. In
that year a young medical student, hard pressed for the subject of his
inaugural thesis, and in the firm faith that
"None but a clever dialectician
Can hope to become a good physician,
And that logic plays an important part
In the mystery of the healing art,"
propounded the theory that the wines of Burgundy were preferable to
those of the Champagne, and that the latter were irritating to the
nerves and conducive to gout. The faculty of medicine at Reims naturally
rose in arms at this insolent assertion. They seized their pens and
poured forth a deluge of French and Latin in defence of the wines of
their province, eulogising alike their purity, their brilliancy of
colour, their exquisite flavour and perfume, their great keeping powers,
and, in a word, their general superiority to the Burgundy growths. The
partisans of the latter were equally prompt in rallying in their
defence, and the faculty of medicine of Beaune, having put their learned
periwigs together, enunciated their views and handled their opponents
without mercy. The dispute spread to the entire medical profession, and
the champions went on pelting each other with pamphlets in prose and
tractates in verse, until in 1778--long after the bones of the original
disputants were dust and their lancets rust--the faculty of Paris, to
whom the matter was referred, gave a final and formal decision in favour
of the wines of the Champagne.
Meanwhile an entirely new kind of wine, which was to carry the name of
the province producing it to the uttermost corners of the earth, had
been introduced. On the picturesque slopes of the Marne, about fifteen
miles from Reims, and some four or five miles from Epernay, stands the
little hamlet of Hautvillers, which, in pre-revolutionary days, was a
mere dependency upon a spacious abbey dedicated to St. Peter. Here the
worthy monks of the order of St. Benedict had lived in peace and
prosperity for several hundred years, carefully cultivating the acres of
vineland extending around the abbey, and religiously exacting a tithe of
all the other wine pressed in their district. The revenue of the
community thus depending in no small degree upon the vintage, it was
natural that the post of "celerer" should be one of importance. It
happened that about the year 1688 this office was conferred upon a
worthy monk named Perignon. Poets and roasters, we know, are born, and
not made; and the monk in question seems to have been a heaven-born
cellarman, with a strong head and a discriminating palate. The wine
exacted from the neighbouring cultivators was of all qualities--good,
bad, and indifferent; and with the spirit of a true Benedictine, Dom
Perignon hit upon the idea of "marrying" the produce of one vineyard
with that of another. He had noted that one kind of soil imparted
fragrance and another generosity, and discovered that a white wine could
be made from the blackest grapes, which would keep good, instead of
turning yellow and degenerating like the wine obtained from white ones.
Moreover, the happy thought occurred to him that a piece of cork was a
much more suitable stopper for a bottle than the flax dipped in oil
which had heretofore served that purpose.
The white, or, as it was sometimes styled, the grey wine of the
Champagne grew famous, and the manufacture spread throughout the
province, but that of Hautvillers held the predominance. To Dom Perignon
the abbey's well-stocked cellar was a far cheerfuller place than the
cell. Nothing delighted him more than
"To come down among this brotherhood
Dwelling for ever underground,
Silent, contemplative, round and sound,
Each one old and brown with mould,
But filled to the lips with the ardour of youth,
With the latent power and love of truth,
And with virtues fervent and manifold."
Ever busy among his vats and presses, barrels and bottles, Perignon
alighted upon a discovery destined to be most important in its results.
He found out the way of making an effervescent wine--a wine that burst
out of the bottle and overflowed the glass, that was twice as dainty to
the taste, and twice as exhilarating in its effects. It was at the close
of the seventeenth century that this discovery was made--when the glory
of the Roi Soleil was on the wane, and with it the splendour of the
Court of Versailles. Louis XIV., for whose especial benefit liqueurs had
been invented, recovered a gleam of his youthful energy as he sipped the
creamy foaming vintage that enlivened his dreary _têtes-à-têtes_ with
the widow of Scarron. It found its chief patrons however, amongst the
bands of gay young roysterers, the future _roues_ of the Regency, whom
the Duc d'Orléans and the Duc de Vendôme had gathered round them, at the
Palais Royal and at Anet. It was at one of the famous _soupers_ d'Anet
that the Marquis de Sillery--who had turned his sword into a
pruning-knife, and applied himself to the cultivation of his paternal
vineyards on the principles inculcated by the celerer of St.
Peter's--first introduced the sparkling wine bearing his name. The
flower-wreathed bottles, which, at a given signal, a dozen of blooming
young damsels scantily draped in the guise of Bacchanals placed upon the
table, were hailed with rapture, and thenceforth sparkling wine was an
indispensable adjunct at all the _petits soupers_ of the period. In the
highest circles the popping of champagne-corks seemed to ring the knell
of sadness, and the victories of Marlborough were in a measure
compensated for by this happy discovery.
Why the wine foamed and sparkled was a mystery even to the very makers
themselves; for as yet Baume's aerometer was unknown, and the connection
between sugar and carbonic acid undreamt of. The general belief was that
the degree of effervescence depended upon the time of year at which the
wine was bottled, and that the rising of the sap in the vine had
everything to do with it. Certain wiseacres held that it was influenced
by the age of the moon at the time of bottling; whilst others thought
the effervescence could be best secured by the addition of spirit, alum,
and various nastinesses. It was this belief in the use and efficacy of
drugs that led to a temporary reaction against the wine about 1715, in
which year Dom Perignon departed this life. In his latter days he had
grown blind, but his discriminating taste enabled him to discharge his
duties with unabated efficiency to the end. Many of the tall tapering
glasses invented by him have been emptied to the memory of the old
Benedictine, whose remains repose beneath a black marble slab in the
chancel of the archaic abbey church of Hautvillers.
[Illustration:
THE VINEYARDS AND ABBEY OF HAUTVILLERS. (p. 14)]
[Illustration:
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF MESSRS. CHARLES FARRE & CO., AT HAUTVILLERS.
(p. 15)]
Time and the iconoclasts of the great Revolution have spared but little
of the royal abbey of St. Peter where Dom Perignon lighted upon his
happy discovery of the effervescent quality of champagne. The quaint old
church, scraps of which date back to the 12th century, the remnants of
the cloisters, and a couple of ancient gateways, marking the limits of
the abbey precincts, are all that remain to testify to the grandeur of
its past. It was the proud boast of the brotherhood that it had given
nine archbishops to the see of Reims, and two-and-twenty abbots to
various celebrated monasteries, but this pales beside the enduring fame
it has acquired from having been the cradle of the sparkling vintage of
the Champagne.
It was in the budding springtime when we made our pilgrimage to
Hautvillers across the swollen waters of the Marne at Epernay. Our way
lay for a time along a straight level poplar-bordered road, with verdant
meadows on either hand, then diverged sharply to the left and we
commenced ascending the vine-clad hills, on a narrow plateau of which
the church and abbey remains are picturesquely perched. Vines climb the
undulating slopes to the summit of the plateau, and wooded heights rise
up beyond, affording shelter from the bleak winds sweeping over from the
north. As we near the village of Hautvillers we notice on our left hand
a couple of isolated buildings overlooking a small ravine with their
bright tiled roofs flashing in the sunlight. These prove to be a branch
establishment of Messrs. Charles Farre and Co., a well-known champagne
firm having its head-quarters at Reims. The grassy space beyond, dotted
over with low stone shafts giving light and ventilation to the cellars
beneath, is alive with workmen unloading waggons densely packed with new
champagne bottles, while under a neighbouring shed is a crowd of women
actively engaged in washing the bottles as they are brought to them. The
large apartment aboveground, known as the _cellier_, contains wine in
cask already blended, and to bottle which preparations are now being
made. On descending into the cellars, which, excavated in the chalk and
of regular construction, comprise a series of long, lofty, and
well-ventilated galleries, we find them stocked with bottles of fine
wine reposing in huge compact piles ready for transport to the head
establishment, where they will undergo their final manipulation. The
cellars consist of two stories, the lowermost of which has an iron gate
communicating with the ravine already mentioned. On passing out here and
looking up behind we see the buildings perched some hundred feet above
us, hemmed in on every side with budding vines.
[Illustration:
THE PORTE DES PRESSOIRS, HAUTVILLERS.]
The church of Hautvillers and the remains of the neighbouring abbey are
situated at the farther extremity of the village, at the end of its one
long street, named, pertinently enough, the Rue de Bacchus. Passing
through an unpretentious gateway we find ourselves in a spacious
courtyard, bounded by buildings somewhat complex in character. On our
right rises the tower of the church with the remains of the old
cloisters, now walled-in and lighted by small square windows, and
propped up by heavy buttresses. To the left stands the residence of the
bailiff, and beyond it an 18th-century château on the site of the
abbot's house, the abbey precincts being bounded on this side by a
picturesque gateway tower leading to the vineyards, and known as the
"porte des pressoirs," from its contiguity to the existing wine-presses.
Huge barn-like buildings, stables, and cart-sheds inclose the court on
its remaining sides, and roaming about are numerous live stock,
indicating that what remains of the once-famous royal abbey of St. Peter
has degenerated into an ordinary farm. To-day the abbey buildings and
certain of its lands are the property of Messrs. Moët and Chandon, the
great champagne manufacturers of Epernay, who maintain them as a farm,
keeping some six-and-thirty cows there with the object of securing the
necessary manure for the numerous vineyards which they own hereabouts.
[Illustration]
The dilapidated cloisters, littered with old casks, farm implements, and
the like, preserve ample traces of their former architectural character,
and the Louis Quatorze gateway on the northern side of the inclosure
still displays above its arch a grandiose carved shield, with
surrounding palm-branches and half-obliterated bearings. Vine-leaves and
bunches of grapes decorate some of the more ancient columns inside the
church, and grotesque mediæval monsters, such as monkish architects
habitually delighted in, entwine themselves around the capitals of
others. The stalls of the choir are elaborately carved with cherubs'
heads, medallions and figures of saints, cupids supporting shields, and
free and graceful arabesques of the epoch of the Renaissance. In the
chancel, close by the altar steps, are a couple of black marble slabs,
with Latin inscriptions of dubious orthography, the one to Johannes
Royer, who died in 1527, and the other setting forth the virtues and
merits of Dom Petrus Perignon, the discoverer of champagne. In the
central aisle a similar slab marks the resting-place of Dom Thedoricus
Ruynart--obit 1709--an ancestor of the Reims Ruinarts, and little square
stones interspersed among the tiles with which the side aisles of the
church are paved record the deaths of other members of the Benedictine
brotherhood during the 17th and 18th centuries. Several large pictures
grace the walls of the church, the most interesting one representing St.
Nivard, Bishop of Reims, and his friend, St. Berchier, designating to
some mediæval architect the site the contemplated abbey of St. Peter was
to occupy. There was a monkish legend that about the middle of the 7th
century this pair of saints set out in search of a suitable site for the
future monastery. The way was long, the day was warm, and St. Nivard and
St. Berchier as yet were simply mortal. Weary and faint, they sat them
down to rest at a spot identified by tradition with a vineyard at Dizy,
belonging to-day to the Messrs. Bollinger, but at that period forming
part of the forest of the Marne. St. Nivard fell asleep with his head on
his companion's lap, and the one in a dream, and the other with waking
eyes, saw a snow-white dove--the same, firm believers in miracles
suggested, which had brought down the holy oil for the anointment of
Clovis at his coronation at Reims--flutter through the wood, and finally
alight on the stump of a tree.
In those superstitious times such a significant omen was not to be
disregarded, the site thus miraculously indicated was at once decided
upon, the high altar of the abbey church being erected upon the precise
spot where the tree stood on which the snow-white dove had alighted.
The celerer of St. Peter's found worthy successors, and thenceforward
the manufacture and the popularity of champagne went on steadily
increasing, until to-day its production is carried on upon a scale and
with an amount of painstaking care that would astonish its originator.
For good champagne does not rain down from the clouds, or gush out from
the rocks, but is the result of incessant labour, patient skill, minute
precaution, and careful observation. In the first place, the soil
imparts to the natural wine a special quality which it has been found
impossible to imitate in any other quarter of the globe. To the wine of
Ay it lends a flavour of peaches, and to that of Avenay the savour of
strawberries; the vintage of Hautvillers, though fallen from its former
high estate, is yet marked by an unmistakably nutty taste; while that of
Pierry smacks of the locally-abounding flint, the well-known _pierre à
fusil_ flavour. So on the principle that a little leaven leavens the
whole lump, the produce of grapes grown in the more favoured vineyards
is added in certain proportions to secure certain special
characteristics, as well as to maintain a fixed standard of excellence.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]