“THE BOY”
Definition of the youth — The valley of the Marne — An Archbishop
in sparkling company — All is not cham. that fizzes — Beneficial
effects of Pommery — Dire memories of the Haymarket — The bad boy at
York — A hair of the canine — The good boy — Gout defied — Old Roman
cellars — A chronic bombardment — Magnums to right of ’em — Duties
of the disgorger — Simon the cellarer — Fifteen millions of full
bottles — Pro-dig-i-ous! — Gooseberry champagne a myth — About Médoc
— The ancients spelt claret with two “r’s” — Hints on adulteration —
“Château Gubbins” — New wine — Gladstone claret — “Pricked!”
“See how it sparkles, this drink divine,”
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 !”
{137}