The Sparkling Wines of the Loire often palmed off as Champagnes--
The Finer qualities Improve with Age-- Anjou the Cradle of the
Plantagenet Kings-- Saumur and its Dominating Feudal Château and
Antique Hôtel de Ville-- Its Sinister Rue des Payens and Steep
Tortuous Grande Rue-- The Vineyards of the Coteau of Saumur--
Abandoned Stone Quarries converted into Dwellings-- The Vintage in
Progress-- Old-fashioned Pressoirs-- The Making of the Wine-- The
Vouvray Vineyards-- Balzac's Picture of La Vallée Coquette-- The
Village of Vouvray and the Château of Moncontour-- Vernou with its
Reminiscences of Sully and Pépin-le-Bref-- The Vineyards around
Saumur-- Remarkable Ancient Dolmens-- Ackerman-Laurance's
Establishment at Saint-Florent-- Their Extensive Cellars, Ancient
and Modern-- Treatment of the Newly-Vintaged Wine-- The Cuvée--
Proportions of Wine from Black and White Grapes-- The Bottling and
Disgorging of the Wine and Finishing Operations-- The Château of
Varrains and the Establishment of M. Louis Duvau aîné-- His Cellars
a succession of Gloomy Galleries-- The Disgorging of the Wine
accomplished in a Melodramatic-looking Cave-- M. Duvau's Vineyard--
His Sparkling Saumur of Various Ages-- Marked Superiority of the
more Matured Samples-- M. Alfred Rousteaux's Establishments at
Saint-Florent and Saint-Cyr-- His convenient Celliers and extensive
Cellars-- Mingling of Wine from the Champagne with the finer
Sparkling Saumur-- His Vineyard at La Perrière-- M. E. Normandin's
Sparkling Sauternes Manufactory at Châteauneuf-- Angoulême and its
Ancient Fortifications-- Vin de Colombar-- M. Normandin's Sparkling
Sauternes Cuvée-- His Cellars near Châteauneuf-- High recognition
accorded to the Wine at the Concours Régional d'Angoulême.
After the Champagne Anjou is the French province which ranks next in
importance for its production of sparkling wines. Vintaged on the banks
of the Loire, these are largely consigned to the English and other
markets, labelled Crême de Bouzy, Sillery and Ay Mousseux, Cartes Noires
and Blanches, and the like, while their corks are branded with the names
of phantom firms, supposed to be located at Reims and Epernay. As a rule
these wines come from around Saumur, but they are not necessarily the
worse on that account, for the district produces capital sparkling
wines, the finer qualities of which improve greatly by being kept for a
few years. One curious thing shown to us at Saumur was the album of a
manufacturer of sparkling wines containing examples of the many hundred
labels ticketed with which his produce had for years past been sold. Not
one of these labels assigned to the wines the name of their real maker
or their true birthplace, but introduced them under the auspices of
mythical dukes and counts, as being manufactured at châteaux which are
so many "castles in Spain," and as coming from Ay, Bouzy, Châlons,
Epernay, Reims, and Verzenay, but never by any chance from Saumur.
[Illustration:
THE VINEYARDS OF THE COTEAU DE SAUMUR. (p. 141)]
Being produced from robuster growths than the sparkling wines of the
Department of the Marne, sparkling saumur will always lack that
excessive lightness which is the crowning grace of fine champagne, still
it has only to be kept for a few years instead of being drunk shortly
after its arrival from the wine-merchant for its quality to become
greatly improved and its intrinsic value to be considerably enhanced. We
have drunk sparkling saumur that had been in bottle for nearly twenty
years, and found the wine not only remarkably delicate, but, singular to
say, with plenty of effervescence.
To an Englishman Anjou is one of the most interesting of the ancient
provinces of France. It was the cradle of the Plantagenet Kings, and
only ten miles from Saumur still repose the bones of Henry, the first
Plantagenet, and Richard of the Lion Heart, in the so-called Cimetière
des Rois of the historic abbey of Fontevrault. The famous vineyards of
the Coteau de Saumur, eastward of the town and bordering the Loire,
extend as far as here, and include the communes of Dampierre, Souzay,
Varrains, Chacé, Parnay, Turquant, and Montsoreau, the last-named within
three miles of Fontevrault, and chiefly remarkable through its seigneur
of ill-fame, Jean de Chambes, who instigated his wife to lure Boissy
d'Amboise to an assignation in order that he might more surely poignard
him. Saumur is picturesquely placed at the foot of this bold range of
heights near where the little river Thouet runs into the broad and rapid
Loire. A massive-looking old château perched on the summit of an
isolated crag stands out grandly against the clear sky and dominates the
town, the older houses of which crouch at the foot of the lofty hill and
climb its steepest sides. The restored antique Hôtel de Ville, in the
pointed style, with its elegant windows, graceful belfry, and florid
wrought-iron balconies, stands back from the quay bordering the Loire.
In the rear is the Rue des Payens, whither the last of the Huguenots of
this "metropolis of Protestantism," as it was formerly styled, retired,
converting their houses into so many fortresses to guard against being
surprised by their Catholic adversaries. Adjacent is the steep tortuous
Grande Rue, of which Balzac--himself a Tourangeau--has given such a
graphic picture in his _Eugénie Grandet_, the scene of which is laid at
Saumur. To-day, however, only a few of its ancient carved timber houses,
quaint overhanging corner turrets, and fantastically-studded massive oak
doors have escaped demolition.
The vineyards of the Coteau de Saumur, yielding the finest wines, are
reached by the road skirting the river, the opposite low banks of which
are fringed with willows and endless rows of poplars, which at the time
of our visit were already golden with the fading tints of autumn.
Numerous fantastic windmills crown the heights, the summit of which is
covered with vines, varied by dense patches of woodland. Here, as
elsewhere along the banks of the Loire, the many abandoned quarries
along the face of the hill have been turned by the peasants into cosy
dwellings by simply walling-up the entrances while leaving, of course,
the necessary apertures for doors and windows. Dampierre, the first
village reached, has many of these cave-dwellings, and numbers of its
houses are picturesquely perched up the sides of the slope. The holiday
costumes of the peasant women encountered in the neighbourhood of Saumur
are exceedingly quaint, their elaborate and varied head-dresses being
counterparts of _coiffures_ in vogue so far back as three and four
centuries ago.
Quitting the banks of the river, we ascend a steep tortuous road shut in
on either side by high stone walls--for hereabouts all the best
vineyards are scrupulously inclosed--and finally reach the summit of the
heights, whence a view is gained over what the Saumurois proudly style
the grand valley of the Loire. Everywhere around the vintage is going
on. The vines are planted rather more than a yard apart, and those
yielding black grapes are trained, as a rule, up tall stakes, although
some few are trained espalier fashion. Women dexterously detach the
bunches with pruning-knives and throw them into the _seilles_--small
squat buckets with wooden handles--the contents of which are emptied
from time to time into baskets--the counterpart of the chiffonnier's
_hotte_, and coated with pitch inside so as to close all the crevices of
the wickerwork--which the _portes-bastes_ carry slung to their backs.
When white wine is being made from black grapes for sparkling saumur the
grapes are conveyed in these baskets forthwith to the underground
pressoirs in the neighbouring villages before their skins get at all
broken in order that the wine may be as pale as possible in colour.
The black grape yielding the best wine in the Saumur district is the
breton, said to be the same as the carbinet-sauvignon, the leading
variety in the grand vineyards of the Médoc. Other species of black
grapes cultivated around Saumur are the varennes, yielding a soft and
insipid wine of no kind of value, and the liverdun, or large gamay, the
prevalent grape in the Mâconnais, and the same which in the days of
Philippe-le-Hardi the _parlements_ of Metz and Dijon interdicted the
planting and cultivation of. The prevalent white grapes are the large
and small pineau blanc, the bunches of the former being of an
intermediate size, broad and pyramidal in shape, and with the berries
close together. These have fine skins, are oblong in shape, and of a
transparent yellowish-green hue tinged with red, are very sweet and
juicy, and as a rule ripen late. As for the small pineau, the bunches
are less compact, the berries are round and of a golden tint, are finer
as well as sweeter in flavour, and ripen somewhat earlier than the fruit
of the larger variety.
We noticed as we drove through the villages of Champigny and
Varrains--the former celebrated for its fine red wines, and more
especially its crû of the Clos des Cordeliers--that hardly any of the
houses had windows looking on to the narrow street, but that all were
provided with low openings for shooting the grapes into the cellar
where, when making red wine, they are trodden, but when making white
wine, whether from black or white grapes, they are invariably pressed.
Each of the houses had its ponderous porte-cochère and low narrow portal
leading into the large inclosed yard at its side, and over the high
blank walls vines were frequently trained and pleasantly varied their
dull grey monotony.
The grapes on being shot into the openings just mentioned fall through a
kind of tunnel into a reservoir adjacent to the heavy press, which is
invariably of wood and of the old-fashioned cumbersome type. They are
forthwith placed beneath the press and usually subjected to five
separate squeezes, the must from the first three being reserved for
sparkling wine, while that from the two latter, owing to its being more
or less deeply tinted, only serves for table wine. The must is at once
run off into casks in order that it may not ferment on the grape-skins
and imbibe any portion of their colouring matter. Active fermentation
speedily sets in and lasts for a fortnight or three weeks according to
whether the temperature chances to be high or low.
The vintaging of the white grapes takes place about a fortnight later
than the black grapes, and is commonly a compound operation, the best
and ripest bunches being first of all gathered just as the berries begin
to get shrivelled and show symptoms of approaching rottenness. It is
these selected grapes that yield the best wine. The second gathering,
which follows shortly after the first, includes all the grapes remaining
on the vines, and yields a wine perceptibly inferior in quality. The
grapes on their arrival at the press-house are generally pressed
immediately and the must is run off into tuns to ferment. At the
commencement these tuns are filled up every three or four days to
replace the fermenting must which has flowed over; afterwards any waste
is made good at the interval of a week, and then once a fortnight, the
bungholes of the casks being securely closed towards the end of the
year, by which time the first fermentation is over.
It should be noted that the Saumur sparkling wine manufacturers draw
considerable supplies of the white wine required to impart lightness and
effervescence to their _vin préparé_ from the Vouvray vineyards. Vouvray
borders the Loire a few miles from the pleasant city of Tours, which
awakens sinister recollections of truculent Louis XI., shut up in his
fortified castle of Plessis-lez-Tours, around which Scott has thrown the
halo of his genius in his novel of _Quentin Durward_. On proceeding to
Vouvray from Tours we skirt a succession of poplar-fringed meadows
stretching eastward in the direction of Amboise along the right bank of
the Loire; and after a time a curve in the river discloses to view a
range of vine-clad heights extending some distance beyond the village of
Vouvray. Our route lies past the picturesque ruins of the abbey of
Marmoûtier and the Château des Roches--one of the most celebrated
castles of the Loire--the numerous excavations in the soft limestone
ridge on which they are perched being converted as usual into houses,
magazines, and wine-cellars. We proceed through the village of
Rochecorbon, and along a road winding among the spurs of the Vouvray
range, past hamlets, half of whose inhabitants live in these primitive
dwellings hollowed out of the cliff, and finally enter the charming
Vallée Coquette, hemmed in on all sides with vine-clad slopes. Here a
picturesque old house, half château half homestead, was pointed out to
us as a favourite place of sojourn of Balzac, who speaks of this rocky
ridge as "inhabited by a population of vine-dressers, their houses of
several stories being hollowed out in the face of the cliff, and
connected by dangerous staircases hewn in the soft stone. Smoke curls
from most of the chimneys which peep above the green crest of vines,
while the blows of the cooper's hammer resound in several of the
cellars. A young girl trips to her garden over the roofs of these
primitive dwellings, and an old woman, tranquilly seated on a ledge of
projecting rock, supported solely by the thick straggling roots of the
ivy which spreads itself over the disjointed stones, leisurely turns her
spinning-wheel regardless of her dangerous position." The picture
sketched by the author of _La Comédie Humaine_, some forty years ago,
has scarcely changed at the present day.
At the point where the village of Vouvray climbs half-way up the
vine-crested ridge the rapid-winding Cise throws itself into the Loire,
and on crossing the bridge that spans the tributary stream we discern on
the western horizon, far beyond the verdant islets studding the swollen
Loire, the tall campaniles of Tours Cathedral, which seem to rise out of
the water like a couple of Venetian towers. Vouvray is a trim little
place, clustered round about with numerous pleasant villas in the midst
of charming gardens. The modern château of Moncontour here dominates the
slope, and its terraced gardens, with, their fantastically-clipped trees
and geometric parterres, rise tier above tier up the face of the
picturesque height that overlooks the broad fertile valley, with its
gardens, cultivated fields, patches of woodland, and wide stretches of
green pasture which, fringed with willows and poplars, border the
swollen waters of the Loire. Where the river Brenne empties itself into
the Cise the Coteau de Vouvray slopes off towards the north, and there
rise up the vine-clad heights of Vernou, yielding a similar but inferior
wine to that of Vouvray. The village of Vernou is nestled under the
hill, and near the porch of its quaint little church a venerable elm
tree is pointed out as having been planted by Sully, Henry IV.'s able
Minister. Here, too, an ancient wall, pierced with curious arched
windows, and forming part of a modern building, is regarded by popular
tradition as belonging to the palace in which Pépin-le-Bref, father of
Charlemagne, lived at Vernou.
The communes of Dampierre, Souzay, and Parnay, in the neighbourhood of
Saumur, produce still red wines rivalling those of Champigny, besides
which all the finest white wines are vintaged hereabouts--in the
Perrière, the Poilleux, and the Clos Morain vineyards, and in the
Rotissans vineyard at Turquant. Wines of very fair quality are also
grown on the more favourable slopes extending southwards along the
valley of the Thouet, and comprised in the communes of Varrains, Chacé,
St. Cyr-en-Bourg, and Brézé. The whole of this district, by the way,
abounds with interesting archæological remains. While visiting the
vineyards of Varrains and Chacé we came upon a couple of
dolmens--vestiges of the ancient Celtic population of the valley of the
Loire singularly abundant hereabouts. Brézé, the marquisate of which
formerly belonged to Louis XVI.'s famous grand master of the
ceremonies--immortalized by the rebuff he received from Mirabeau--boasts
a noble château on the site of an ancient fortress, in connection with
which there are contemporary excavations in the neighbouring limestone,
designed for a garrison of 500 or 600 men. Beyond the vineyards of
Saint-Florent, westward of Saumur and on the banks of the Thouet, is an
extensive plateau partially overgrown with vines, where may be traced
the remains of a Roman camp. Moreover, in the southern environs of
Saumur, in the midst of vineyards producing exclusively white wines,
is one of the most remarkable dolmens known. This imposing structure,
perfect in all respects save that one of the four enormous stones which
roof it in has been split in two, and requires to be supported, is no
less than 65 feet in length, 23 feet in width, and 10 feet high.
[Illustration:
DOLMEN AT BAGNEUX, NEAR SAUMUR.]
At Saint-Florent, the pleasant little suburb of Saumur, skirting the
river Thouet, and sheltered by steep hills formed of soft limestone,
offering great facilities for the excavation of extensive cellars, the
largest manufacturer of Saumur sparkling wines has his establishment.
Externally this offers but little to strike the eye. A couple of
pleasant country houses, half hidden by spreading foliage, stand at the
two extremities of a spacious and well-kept garden, beyond which one
catches a glimpse of some outbuildings sheltered by the vine-crowned
cliff, in which a labyrinth of gloomy galleries has been hollowed out.
Here M. Ackerman-Laurance, the extent of whose business ranks him as
second among the sparkling wine manufacturers of the world, stores
something like 10,000 casks and several million bottles of wine.
At the commencement of the present century, in the days when, as Balzac
relates in his _Eugénie Grandet_, the Belgians bought up entire vintages
of Saumur wine, then largely in demand with them for sacramental
purposes, the founder of the Saint-Florent house commenced to deal in
the ordinary still wines of the district. Nearly half a century ago he
was led to attempt the manufacture of sparkling wines, but his efforts
to bring them into notice failed, and he was on the point of abandoning
his enterprise when an order for one hundred cases revived his hopes,
and led to the foundation of the present vast establishment. As already
mentioned, for many miles all the heights along the Loire have been more
or less excavated for stone for building purposes, so that every one
hereabouts who grows wine or deals in it has any amount of cellar
accommodation ready to hand. It was the vast extent of the galleries
which M. Ackerman _père_ discovered already excavated at Saint-Florent
that induced him to settle there in preference to Saumur. Extensive,
however, as the original vaults were, considerable additional
excavations have from time to time been found necessary; and to-day the
firm is still further increasing the area of its cellars, which already
comprise three principal avenues, each the third of a mile long, and no
fewer than sixty transverse galleries, the total length of which is
several miles. One great advantage is that the whole are on the ordinary
level.
[Illustration:
THE CELLARS OF M. ACKERMAN-LAURANCE AT SAINT-FLORENT.
LABELLING AND PACKING SPARKLING SAUMUR. (p. 150.)]
Ranged against the black uneven walls of the more tortuous ancient
vaults which give access to these labyrinthine corridors are thousands
of casks of wine--some in single rows, others in triple tiers--forming
the reserve stock of the establishment. As may be supposed, a powerful
vinous odour permeates these vaults, in which the fumes of wine have
been accumulating for the best part of a century. After passing beneath
a massive stone arch which separates the old cellars from the new,
a series of broad and regularly-proportioned galleries are reached,
having bottles stacked in their tens of thousands on either side.
Overhead the roof is perforated at regular intervals with circular
shafts, affording both light and ventilation, and enabling the
temperature to be regulated to a nicety. In these lateral and transverse
galleries millions of bottles of wine in various stages of preparation
are stacked.
We have explained that in the Champagne it is the custom for the
manufacturers of sparkling wine to purchase considerable quantities of
grapes from the surrounding growers, and to press these themselves, or
have them pressed under their own superintendence. At Saumur only those
firms possessing vineyards make their own _vin brut_, the bulk of the
wine used for conversion into sparkling wine being purchased from the
neighbouring growers. On the newly-expressed must arriving at
M. Ackerman-Laurance's cellars it is allowed to rest until the
commencement of the ensuing year, when half of it is mixed with wine in
stock belonging to last year's vintage, and the remaining half is
reserved for mingling with the must of the ensuing vintage. The blending
is accomplished in a couple of colossal vats hewn out of the rock, and
coated on the inside with cement. Each of these vats is provided with
200 paddles for thoroughly mixing the wine, and with five pipes for
drawing it off when the amalgamation is complete. Usually the _cuvée_
will embrace 1,600 hogsheads, or 80,000 gallons of wine, almost
sufficient for half a million bottles. A fourth of this quantity can be
mixed in each vat at a single operation, and this mixing is repeated
again and again until the last gallon run off is of precisely the same
type as the first. For the finer qualities of sparkling saumur the
proportion of wine from the black grapes to that from white is generally
at the rate of three or four to one. For the inferior qualities more
wine from white than from black grapes is invariably used. Only in the
wine from white grapes is the effervescent principle retained to any
particular extent; but, on the other hand, the wine from black grapes
imparts both quality and vinous character to the blend.
The blending having been satisfactorily accomplished, the wine is stored
in casks, never perfectly filled, yet with their bungholes tightly
closed, and slowly continues its fermentation, eating up its sugar,
purging itself, and letting fall its lees. Three months later it is
fined. It is rarely kept in the wood for more than a year, though
sometimes the superior qualities remain for a couple of years in cask.
Occasionally it is even bottled in the spring following the vintage;
still, as a rule, the bottling of sparkling saumur takes place during
the ensuing summer months, when the temperature is at the highest as
this insures to it a greater degree of effervescence. At the time of
bottling its saccharine strength is raised to a given degree by the
addition of the finest sugar-candy, and henceforward the wine is
subjected to precisely the same treatment as is pursued with regard to
champagne.
It is in a broad but sombre gallery of the more ancient vaults--the
roughly-hewn walls of which are black from the combined action of
alcohol and carbonic acid gas--that the processes of disgorging the wine
of its sediment, adding the syrup, filling up the bottles with wine to
replace that which gushes out when the disgorging operation is
performed, together with the re-corking, stringing, and wiring of the
bottles, are carried on. The one or two adjacent shafts impart very
little light, but a couple of resplendent metal reflectors, which at a
distance one might fancy to be some dragon's flaming eyes, combined with
the lamps placed near the people at work, effectually illuminate the
spot.
[Illustration:
THE CELLARS OF M. LOUIS DUVAU AÎNÉ AT THE CHÂTEAU OF VARRAINS.]
Another considerable manufacturer of sparkling saumur is M. Louis Duvau
aîné, owner of the château of Varrains, in the village of the same name,
at no great distance from the Coteau de Saumur. His cellars adjoin the
château, a picturesque but somewhat neglected structure of the last
century, with sculptured medallions in high relief above the lower
windows, and florid vases surmounting the mansards in the roof. In front
is a large rambling court shaded with acacia and lime trees, and
surrounded by outbuildings, prominent among which is a picturesque
dovecote, massive at the base as a martello tower, and having an elegant
open stone lantern springing from its bell-shaped roof. The cellars are
entered down a steep incline under a low stone arch, the masonry above
which is overgrown with ivy in large clusters and straggling creeping
plants. We soon come upon a deep recess to the right, wherein stands a
unique cumbersome screw-press, needing ten or a dozen men to work the
unwieldy capstan which sets the juice flowing from the crushed grapes
into the adjacent shallow trough. On our left hand are a couple of
ancient reservoirs, formed out of huge blocks of stone, with the
entrance to a long vaulted cellar filled with wine in cask. We advance
slowly in the uncertain light along a succession of gloomy galleries
with moisture oozing from their blackened walls and roofs, picking our
way between bottles of wine stacked in huge square piles and rows of
casks ranged in tiers. Suddenly a broad flood of light shooting down a
lofty shaft throws a Rembrandtish effect across a spacious and most
melodramatic-looking cave, roughly hewn out of the rock, and towards
which seven dimly-lighted galleries converge. On all sides a scene of
bustling animation presents itself. From one gallery men keep arriving
with baskets of wine ready for the disgorger; while along another
bottles of wine duly dosed with syrup are being borne off to be
decorated with metal foil and their distinctive labels. Groups of
workmen are busily engaged disgorging, dosing, and re-corking the
newly-arrived bottles of wine; corks fly out with a succession of loud
reports suggestive of the irregular fire of a party of skirmishers;
a fizzing, spurting, and spluttering of the wine next ensues, and is
followed by the incessant clicking of the various apparatus employed in
the corking and wiring of the bottles.
Gradual inclines conduct to the two lower tiers of galleries, for the
cellars of M. Duvau consist of as many as three stories. Down below
there is naturally less light, and the temperature, too, is sensibly
colder. Advantage is taken of this latter circumstance to remove the
newly-bottled wine to these lower vaults whenever an excessive
development of carbonic acid threatens the bursting of an undue
proportion of bottles, a casualty which among the Saumur sparkling wine
manufacturers ranges far higher than with the manufacturers of
champagne. For the economy of time and labour a lift, raised and lowered
by means of a capstan worked by horses, is employed to transfer the
bottles of wine from one tier of cellars to another.
The demand for sparkling saumur is evidently on the increase, for
M. Duvau, at the time of our visit, was excavating extensive additional
cellarage. The subsoil at Varrains being largely composed of marl, which
is much softer than the tufa of the Saint-Florent coteau, necessitated
the roofs of the new galleries being worked in a particular form in
order to avoid having recourse to either brickwork or masonry. Tons of
this excavated marl were being spread over the soil of M. Duvau's
vineyard in the rear of the château, greatly, it was said, to the
benefit of the vines, whose grapes were all of the black variety;
indeed, scarcely any wine is vintaged from white grapes in the commune
of Varrains.
At M. Duvau's we went through a complete scale of sparkling saumurs,
commencing with the younger and less matured samples, and ascending step
by step to wines a dozen and more years old. Every year seemed to
produce an improvement in the wine, the older varieties gaining greatly
in delicacy and softening very perceptibly in flavour.
Another sparkling saumur manufacturer of note is M. Alfred Rousteaux,
to-day the sole proprietor of the well-known brand of Morlet and
Rousteaux, a firm established for many years at Saint-Florent.
M. Rousteaux's cellars here are excavated in the tufa cliff which rises
behind the little suburban village, and are all on one level. The
galleries, though somewhat winding and irregular, are broad and roomy,
and in them about 400,000 bottles of wine undergoing the necessary
treatment are piled up in stacks or placed _sur pointe_. The original
firm had only been in existence a few years when they found that their
Saint-Florent establishment was inadequate to the requirements of a
largely-increasing business, and they started the branch establishment
of La Perrière at Saint-Cyr, near Tours, but on the opposite bank of the
Loire. Here are a handsome residence and gardens, a spacious court, and
convenient celliers where the bottling of the wine is effected, together
with extensive and well-constructed cellars in which a like quantity of
wine to that contained in the cellars at Saint-Florent is stored. With
his finer sparkling wines M. Rousteaux mixes a certain proportion of
wine from the Champagne district, and thus secures a degree of lightness
unattainable when the _cuvée_ is exclusively composed of Saumur
vintages. At La Perrière M. Rousteaux has a vineyard of upwards of sixty
acres, yielding the best wine of the district, which is noted, by the
way, for its excellent growths. Hereabouts a succession of vineyard
slopes stretch from one to another of the many historic châteaux along
this portion of the Loire, the romantic associations of which render the
Touraine one of the most interesting provinces of France. Near Tours
besides the vineyards of Saint-Cyr are those of Joué and Saint-Avertin;
the two last situate on the opposite bank of the Cher, where the little
town of Joué, perched on the summit of a hill in the midst of vineyards,
looks over a vast plain known by the country people as the Landes de
Charlemagne, the scene, according to local tradition, of Charles
Martel's great victory over the Saracens. The Saint-Avertin vineyards
extend towards the east, stretching almost to the forest of Larçay, on
the borders of the Cher, where Paul Louis Courier, the famous vigneron
pamphleteer of the Restoration, noted alike for his raillery, wit, and
satire, fell beneath the balls of an assassin. A noticeable crû in the
neighbourhood of Tours is that of Cinq Mars, the ruined château of which
survives as a memorial of the vengeance of Cardinal Richelieu, who,
after having sent its owner to the scaffold, commanded its massive walls
and towers to be razed "_à hauteur d'infamie_" as we see them now.
Finding that sparkling wines were being made in most of the
wine-producing districts of France, where the growths were sufficiently
light and of the requisite quality, Messrs. E. Normandin and Co.
conceived the idea of laying the famous Bordeaux district under
contribution for a similar purpose, and, aided by a staff of experienced
workmen from Epernay, they have succeeded in producing a sparkling
sauternes. Sauternes, as is well known, is one of the finest of white
wines, soft, delicate, and of beautiful flavour, and its transformation
into a sparkling wine has been very successfully accomplished. Messrs.
Normandin's head-quarters are in the thriving little town of
Châteauneuf, in the pleasant valley of the Charente, and within fifteen
miles of Angoulême, a famous old French town, encompassed by ancient
ramparts and crumbling corner towers, and which, dominated by the lofty
belfry of its restored semi-Byzantine cathedral, rising in a series of
open arcades, spreads itself picturesquely out along a precipitous
height, watered at its base by the rivers Anguienne and Charente.
Between Angoulême and Châteauneuf vineyard plots dotted over with walnut
trees, or simple rows of vines divided by strips of ripening maize, and
broken up at intervals by bright green pastures, line both banks of the
river Charente. The surrounding country is undulating and picturesque.
Poplars and elms fringe the roadsides, divide the larger fields and
vineyards, and screen the cosy-looking red-roofed farmhouses, which
present to the eyes of the passing tourist a succession of pictures of
quiet rural prosperity.
[Illustration]
Châteauneuf communicates with the Sauternes district by rail, so that
supplies of wine from there are readily obtainable. Vin de
Colombar--a famous white growth which English and Dutch cruisers used to
ascend the Charente to obtain cargoes of when the Jerez wines were shut
out from England by the Spanish War of Succession--vintaged principally
at Montignac-le-Coq, also enters largely into Messrs. Normandin and
Co.'s sparkling sauternes _cuvée_. This colombar grape is simply the
semillon--one of the leading varieties of the Sauternes
district--transported to the Charente. The remarkably cool cellars where
the firm store their wine, whether in wood or bottle, have been formed
from some vast subterranean galleries whence centuries ago stone was
quarried, and which are situated about a quarter of an hour's drive from
Châteauneuf, in the midst of vineyards and cornfields. The wine is
invariably bottled in a cellier at the head establishment, but it is in
these cellars where it goes through the course of careful treatment
similar to that pursued with regard to champagne.
[Illustration]
In order that the delicate flavour of the wine may be preserved the
liqueur is prepared with the finest old sauternes, without any addition
of spirit, and the dose is administered with the most improved modern
appliance, constructed of silver, and provided with crystal taps. At the
Concours Régional d'Angoulême of 1877, the jury, after recording that
they had satisfied themselves by the aid of a chemical analysis that the
samples of sparkling sauternes submitted to their judgment were free
from any foreign ingredient, awarded to Messrs. Normandin and Co. the
only gold medal given in the Group of Alimentary Products.
Encouraged, no doubt, by the success obtained by Messrs. Normandin and
Co. with their sparkling sauternes, the house of Lermat-Robert and Co.,
of Bordeaux, have recently introduced a sparkling barsac, samples of
which were submitted to the jury at the Paris Exhibition of 1878.
[Illustration:
VINTAGER OF THE CÔTE D'OR]