Sparkling Wines of Auvergne, Guienne, Dauphiné, and Languedoc--
Sparkling Saint-Péray the Champagne of the South-- Valence with its
Reminiscences of Pius VI. and Napoleon I.-- The "Horns of Crussol"
on the Banks of the Rhône-- Vintage Scene at Saint-Péray-- The Vines
and Vineyards Producing Sparkling Wine-- Manipulation of Sparkling
Saint-Péray-- Its Abundance of Natural Sugar-- The Cellars of M. de
Saint-Prix and Samples of his Wines-- Sparkling Côte-Rotie,
Château-Grille, and Hermitage-- Annual Production and Principal
Markets of Sparkling Saint-Péray-- Clairette de Die-- The Porte
Rouge of Die Cathedral-- How the Die Wine is Made-- The Sparkling
White and Rose-Coloured Muscatels of Die-- Sparkling Wines of
Vercheny and Lagrasse-- Barnave and the Royal Flight to Varennes--
Narbonne formerly a Miniature Rome, now Noted merely for its Wine
and Honey-- Fête of the Black Virgin at Limoux-- Preference given to
the New Wine over the Miraculous Water-- Blanquette of Limoux and
How it is Made-- Characteristics of this Overrated Wine.
Sparkling wines are made after a fashion in several of the southern
provinces of France--in Auvergne, at Clermont-Ferrand, under the shadow
of the lofty Puy de Dôme; in Guienne, at Astaffort, the scene of a
bloody engagement during the Wars of Religion in which the Protestant
army was cut to pieces when about to cross the Garonne; at Nérac, where
frail Marguerite de Valois kept her dissolute Court, and Catherine de
Médicis brought her flying squadron of fascinating maids of honour to
gain over the Huguenot leaders to the Catholic cause; and at Cahors, the
Divina, or divine fountain of the Celts, and the birthplace of Pope John
XXII., of Clement Marot, the early French poet, and of Léon Gambetta; in
Dauphiné, at Die, Saint-Chef, Saint-Péray, and Largentière, so named
after some abandoned silver mines, and where the vines are cultivated
against low walls rising in a series of terraces from the base to the
summit of the lofty hills; and in Languedoc, at Brioude, where St.
Vincent, the patron saint of the vinedressers, suffered martyrdom, and
where it is the practice to expose the must of the future sparkling wine
for several nights to the dew in order to rid it of its reddish colour;
also at Linardie, and, more southward still, at Limoux, whence comes the
well-known effervescing Blanquette.
Principal among the foregoing is the excellent wine of Saint-Péray,
commonly characterised as the champagne of the South of France. The
Saint-Péray vineyards border the Rhône some ten miles below the
Hermitage coteau--the vines of which are to-day well-nigh destroyed by
the phylloxera--but are on the opposite bank of the river. Our visit to
Saint-Péray was made from Valence, in which dull southern city we had
loitered in order to glance at the vast Hôtel du Gouvernement--where
octogenarian Pius VI., after being spirited away a prisoner from Rome
and hurried over the Alps in a litter by order of the French Directory,
drew his last breath while silently gazing across the rushing river at
the view he so much admired--and to discover the house in the Grande
Rue, numbered 4, in an attic of which history records that Napoleon I.,
when a sub-lieutenant of artillery in garrison at Valence, resided, and
which he quitted owing three and a-half francs to his pastrycook.
We crossed the Rhône over one of its hundred flimsy suspension bridges,
on the majority of which a notice warns you neither to smoke nor run,
and were soon skirting the base of a lofty, bare, precipitous rock, with
the "horns of Crussol," as the peasants term two tall pointed gables of
a ruined feudal château, perched at the dizzy edge, and having a
perpendicular fall of some five or six hundred feet below. The château,
which formerly belonged to the Dukes of Uzès, recognised by virtue of
the extent of their domains as _premiers pairs de France_, was not
originally erected in close proximity to any such formidable precipice.
The crag on which it stands had, it seems, been blasted from time to
time for the sake of the stone, until on one unlucky occasion when too
heavy a charge of powder was employed, the entire side of the rock,
together with a considerable portion of the château itself, were sent
flying into the air. The authorities, professing to regard what remained
of the edifice as an historical monument of the Middle Ages, hereupon
stepped in and prohibited the quarry being worked for the future.
Passing beneath the cliff, one wound round to the left and dived into a
picturesque wooded dell at the entrance to a mountain pass, then crossed
the rocky bed of a dried-up stream and drove along an avenue of
mulberry-trees, which in a few minutes conducted us to Saint-Péray,
where one found the vintage in full operation. Carts laden with tubs
filled with white and purple grapes, around which wasps without number
swarmed, were arriving from all points of the environs and crowding the
narrow streets. Any quantity of grapes were seemingly to be had for the
asking, for all the pretty girls in the place were gorging themselves
with the luscious-looking fruit. In the coopers' yards bran-new casks
were ranged in rows in readiness for the newly-made wine, and through
open doorways, and in all manner of dim recesses, one caught sight of
sturdy men energetically trampling the gushing grapes under their bare
feet, and of huge creaking wine-presses reeking with the purple juice.
It was chiefly common red wine, of an excellent flavour, however, that
was being made in these nooks and corners, the sparkling white wine,
known as Saint-Péray, being manufactured in larger establishments, and
on more scientific principles. It is from a white species of grape known
as the petite and grosse rousette--the same which yields the white
Hermitage--that the champagne of the south is produced, and the
vineyards where they are cultivated occupy all the more favourable
slopes immediately outside the village, the most noted being the
Coteau-Gaillard, Solignaes, Thioulet, and Hungary.
Although there is a close similarity between the manufacture of
champagne and the effervescing wine of Saint-Péray, there are still one
or two noteworthy variations. For a wine to be sparkling it is requisite
that it should ferment in the bottle, a result obtained by bottling it
while it contains a certain undeveloped proportion of alcohol and
carbonic acid, represented by so much sugar, of which they are the
component parts. This ingredient has frequently to be added to the
Champagne wines to render them sparkling, but the wine of Saint-Péray in
its natural state contains so much sugar that any addition would be
deleterious. This excess of saccharine enables the manufacturer to
dispense with some of the operations necessary to the fabrication of
champagne, which, after fermenting in the cask, requires a second
fermentation to be provoked in the bottle, whereas the Saint-Péray wine
ferments only once, being bottled immediately it comes from the
wine-press.
The deposit in the wine after being impelled towards the neck of the
bottle is got rid of by following the same system as is pursued in the
Champagne, but no liqueur whatever is subsequently added to the wine. On
the other hand, it is a common practice to reduce the over-sweetness of
sparkling Saint-Péray in years when the grapes are more than usually
ripe by mixing with it some old dry white wine.
At Saint-Péray we visited the cellars of M. de Saint-Prix, one of the
principal wine-growers of the district. The samples of effervescing wine
which he produced for us to taste were of a pale golden colour, of a
slightly nutty flavour, and with a decided suggestion of the spirituous
essence known to be concentrated in the wine, one glass of which will go
quite as far towards elevating a person as three glasses of champagne.
Keeping the wine for a few years is said materially to improve its
quality, to the sacrifice, however, of its effervescent properties.
M. de Saint-Prix informed us that he manufactured every year a certain
quantity of sparkling Côte-Rotie, Château-Grillé, and Hermitage. The
principal markets for the Saint-Péray sparkling wines--the production of
which falls considerably short of a million bottles per annum--are
England, Germany, Russia, Holland, and Belgium.
[Illustration]
The other side of the Rhône is fruitful in minor sparkling wines, chief
amongst which is the so-called Clairette de Die, made at the town of
that name, a place of some splendour, as existing antiquities show, in
the days of the Roman dominion in Gaul. Later on, Die was the scene of
constant struggles for supremacy between its counts and bishops, one of
the latter having been massacred by the populace in front of the
cathedral doorway--ever since known by the sinister appellation of the
Porte Rouge--and Catholics and Huguenots alike devastated the town in
the troublesome times of the Reform. Clairette de Die is made
principally from the blanquette or malvoisie variety of grape, which,
after the stalks have been removed, is both trodden with the feet and
pressed. The must is run off immediately into casks, and four-and-twenty
hours later it is racked into other casks, a similar operation being
performed every two or three days for the period of a couple of months,
when the fermentation having subsided the wine is fined and usually
bottled in the following March. Newly-made Clairette de Die is a sweet
sparkling wine, but it loses its natural effervescence after a couple of
years, unless it has been treated in the same manner as champagne, which
is rarely the case. The wine enjoys a reputation altogether beyond its
merits.
In addition to the well-known Clairette, some of the wine-growers of Die
make sparkling white and rose-coloured muscatels of superior quality,
which retain their effervescent properties for several years.
A sparkling wine is also made some ten miles from Die, on the road to
Saillans, in a district bounded on the one side by the waters of the
Drôme, and on the other by strange mountains with helmet-shaped crests.
The centre of production is a locality called Vercheny, composed of
several hamlets, one of which, named Le Temple, was the original home of
the family of Barnave. The impressionable young deputy to the National
Assembly formed one of the trio sent to bring back the French royal
family from Varennes after their flight from Paris. It will be
remembered how, under the influence of Marie Antoinette and Madame
Elizabeth, Barnave became transformed during the journey into a faithful
partisan of their unhappy cause, and that he eventually paid the penalty
of his devotion with his life.
In the extreme south of France, and almost under the shadow of the
Pyrenees, a sparkling wine of some repute is made at a place called
Lagrasse, about five-and-twenty miles westward of Narbonne, the
once-famous Mediterranean city, the maritime rival of Marseilles, and in
its palmy days, prior to the Christian era, a miniature Rome, with its
capitol, its curia, its decemvirs, its consuls, its prætors, its
questors, its censors, and its ediles, and which boasted of being the
birthplace of three Roman Emperors. To-day Narbonne has to content
itself with the humble renown derived from its delicious honey and its
characterless full-bodied red wines. Limoux, so celebrated for its
Blanquette, lies a long way farther to the west, behind the Corbières
range of mountains that join on to the Pyrenees, and the jagged peaks,
deep barren gorges, and scarred sides of which have been witness of many
a desperate struggle during the century and a half when they formed the
boundary between France and Spain.
We arrived at Limoux just too late for the famous fête of the Black
Virgin, which lasts three weeks, and attracts crowds of southern
pilgrims to the chapel of Our Lady of Marseilles, perched on a little
hill some short distance from the town, with a fountain half-way up it,
whose water issues drop by drop, and has the credit of possessing
unheard-of virtues. The majority of pilgrims, however, exhibit a decided
preference for the new-made wine over the miraculous water, and for
one-and-twenty days something like a carnival of inebriety prevails at
Limoux.
Blanquette de Limoux derives its name from the species of grape it is
produced from, and which we believe to be identical with the malvoisie,
or malmsey. Its long-shaped berries grow in huge bunches, and dry
readily on the stalks. The fruit is gathered as tenderly as possible,
care being taken that it shall not be in the slightest degree bruised,
after which it is spread out upon a floor to admit of the sugar it
contains becoming perfect. The bad grapes having been carefully picked
out, and the pips extracted from the remaining fruit, the latter is now
trodden, when the must, after being filtered through a strainer, is
placed in casks, where it remains fermenting for about a week, during
which time any overflow is daily replenished by other must reserved for
the purpose. The wine is again clarified and placed in fresh casks with
the bungholes only lightly closed until all sensible fermentation has
ceased, when they are securely fastened up. The bottling takes place in
the month of March, and the wine is subsequently treated much after the
same fashion as sparkling Saint-Péray, excepting that it is generally
found necessary to repeat the operation of _dégorgement_ three, if not
as many as four times.
Blanquette de Limoux is a pale white wine, the saccharine properties of
which have become completely transformed into carbonic acid gas and
alcohol. It is, consequently, both dry and spirituous, deficient in
delicacy, and altogether proves a great disappointment. At its best it
may, perhaps, rank with sparkling Saint-Péray, but unquestionably not
with any average champagne.
[Illustration]