Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/776

754 vaults, or cellars, and these extend far under the hill. Together they are one hundred and thirty-two feet long and one hundred and five feet wide. Stored underground are one million bottles of champagne made by the French method—i. e., by fermentation in the bottle.

You enter: the nostrils are tickled with the odor of the wines. You see the vats heaped full with luscious grapes; the two double wine presses are working and squeezing out the life-blood of the berries; the liquid stream is pouring into large tanks; the men are bare-armed, their hands and faces smeared with red stains—you see this, and can imagine Bacchus and his merry crew holding high carnival.

This new wine, or "must," after it deposits its lees in the course of a few days, is run into casks holding from two to four thousand gallons each. Here it remains for six or eight weeks—that is, until it has passed through its first fermentation. Then it is racked off into other casks, and is now ready for mixing.

The composition of the blend is, of course, one of the secrets of the art. The French wine-maker mixes the juice of black grapes with that of white grapes in the proportion of three to one. The American wine-maker does about the same. He takes juice of the black Concord and Isabella grapes and mixes it with that of the red Catawba, Iona, and Delaware grapes. The great point is to get the right amount of saccharine matter, so as to cause neither too much nor too little effervescence: if too much, the bottles break afterward; if too little, the wine becomes dull, flat, and insipid. Thus the cuvée is effected. Think of the delicacy of taste required in order to know what the juices of many different grapes will bring forth two years hence! The mixture is put into casks in which it undergoes the process of fining, and then it is ready for bottling. After being bottled, the wine is kept in a semi-warm room until fermentation is well begun. The bottles are then carried to the deep, cool vaults, where they are packed in horizontal layers, making a pile four or five feet deep and twelve or fifteen feet long. Thus the bottles remain until the wine within is fully ripe—a period of from twelve to eighteen months.

It is important that the vaults be kept at an equable temperature. This is accomplished by the cold storage system, and the thermometer will not show a variation of more than three degrees throughout the year. The bottles are of great strength and of foreign make. The loss from breakage is always considerable, ranging from five to fifteen per cent. It is one of the items of the extra expense of champagne; the others being the quality of the juice, the care and manipulation required, and the capital invested for two or three years.

When champagne is considered fully ripened, the bottles are