A History of Champagne, with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France. Henry Vizetelly
(After a coloured print of the time).
The officers of the Allied armies quartered in Paris after the Hundred Days supplemented the charms of the Palais Royal—then in the very apogee of its vogue as the true centre of Parisian life, with its cafés, restaurants, theatres, gambling-houses, and Galeries de Bois—with an abundance of sparkling Champagne. Royalty itself set the example by indicating a marked preference for the wine, Louis Dixhuit, according to a statement made by Wellington to Rogers, drinking nothing else at dinner. To celebrate the victories of Leipsic and Waterloo or a successful assault on the bank at Frascati’s, to console for the loss of a grosse mise at No. 113 or of a comrade transfixed beneath a lamp in the Rue Montpensier by a Bonapartist sword-blade, to win the smiles of some fickle Aspasia of the Palais Royal Camp des Tartares or to blot out the recollection of her infidelity, to wash down one of the Homeric repasts in which the English prototypes of the ‘Fudge Family Abroad’ indulged, the wine was indispensable; until, as a modern writer has put it, ‘Waterloo was avenged at last by the gros bataillons of the bankers at roulette and trente et quarante, and by the sale to the invaders of many thousand bottles of rubbishing Champagne at twelve francs the flask.’[248] The rancorous enmity prevailing between the officers of Bonapartist proclivities placed on half-pay and the returned émigrés who had accepted commissions from Louis XVIII., resulted, as is well known, in numerous hostile meetings. Captain Gronow has dwelt upon the bellicose exploits of a gigantic Irish officer in the gardes du corps, named Warren, who, when ‘excited by Champagne and brandy,’[249] was prepared to defy an army; and he tells us that at Tortoni’s there was a room set apart for such quarrelsome gentlemen, where, after these meetings, they indulged in riotous Champagne breakfasts.[250] At home, the British Government were being twitted on their parsimony in limiting the supply of Champagne for the table of the exiled Emperor at St. Helena to a single bottle per diem, a circumstance which led Sir Walter Scott to protest against the conduct of Lord Bathurst and Sir Hudson Lowe in denying the captive ‘even the solace of intoxication.’
As is not unfrequently the case, out of evil came good. The assembled nations had drunk of a charmed fountain, and it had excited a thirst which could not be quenched. The Russians had become acquainted with Champagne, which Talleyrand had styled ‘le vin civilisateur par excellence,’ and to love this wine was with them a very decided step towards a liberal education. Millions of bottles, specially fortified to the pitch of strength and sweetness suited for a hyperborean climate, were annually despatched to the great northern empire from the house of Clicquot; and later on the travellers of rival firms, eager to secure a portion of this patronage, traversed the dominions of the autocrat throughout their length and breadth, and poured their wines in wanton profusion down the throats of one and all of those from whom there appeared a prospect of securing custom.
From this influx of sparkling wine into the frozen empire of the Czar the acceptance of civilisation—of rather a superficial character, it is true—may be said to date. Had Peter the Great only preferred Champagne to corn-brandy, the country would have been Europeanised long ago. As it is, the wine has to-day become a recognised necessity in higher class Russian society, and scandal even asserts that whenever it is given at a dinner-party, the host is careful to throw the windows open, in order that the popping of the corks may announce the fact to his neighbours. Abroad the Russians are more reserved in their manners; and though ranking amongst the best customers of the Parisian restaurateurs for high-class wines, it is only now and then that some excited Calmuck is to be seen flooding the glasses of his companions with Champagne in a public dining-room. The Russians, it should be noted, have sought, and not unsuccessfully, to produce sparkling wines of their own, more especially in the country of the Don Cossacks and near the Axis.
Béranger might exclaim, with a poet’s license, that he preferred a Turkish invasion to seeing the wines of the Champagne profaned by the descendants of the Alemanni;[251] but the merchants of Reims and Epernay were of a different opinion. Les militaires have always affected Champagne; and a military aristocracy like that of the Fatherland, in the cruel days when peace forbade any more free quarters and requisitions, became as large purchasers of the wine as their somewhat scanty revenues allowed of. Their example was followed to a considerable extent by the self-made members of that plutocratic class which modern speculation has caused to spring into life in Germany. Advantage was speedily taken of this taste by their own countrymen, who aimed at supplanting Champagne by sparkling wines grown on native slopes. Nay more, the Germans, as a military nation, felt bound to carry the war into the enemy’s territory, and hence it is that many important houses at Reims and Epernay are of German origin. Across the Rhine patriotism has had to yield to popularity, and the stanchest native topers have been forced to acknowledge, after due comparison in smoky wein stuben and gloomy keller, that, though the sparkling wines of the Rhine and the Moselle are in their own way most excellent, there is but one Champagner-wein, with Reims for its Mecca and Epernay for its Medina.
Of England we shall elsewhere speak at length; but the speculative trade of her colonies, with its sharp bargains, dead smashes, and large profits could hardly be carried on without the wheels of the car of Commerce and the tongues of her votaries being oiled with Champagne. The Swiss have only proved the truth of the proverb that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery by producing tolerable replicas of Champagne at Neufchâtel, Vevay, and Sion. Northern, or, to speak by the map, Scandinavian, Europe takes its fair share of the genuine article; and although the economic Belgian is apt to accept sparkling Saumur and Vouvray as a substitute, both he and his neighbour, the Dutchman, can to the full appreciate the superiority of the produce of the Marne over that of the Loire.
The Italian and the Spaniard may affect to outwardly despise a liquor which they profess not to be able to recognise as wine at all; but the former has to allow, per Bacco, that it excels in its particular way his extolled Lacryma Christi, while the latter does not carry his proverbial sobriety so far as to exclude the wine from repasts in the upper circles of Peninsular society. Moreover, of recent years they have both commenced making sparkling wines of their own. The Austrian also produces sparkling wines from native vintages, notably at Voslau, Graz, and Marburg; still this has not in any way lessened his admiration for, or his consumption of, Champagne. The Greek is ready enough to ‘dash down yon cup of Samian wine,’ provided there be a goblet of Champagne close at hand to replace it with; and boyards and magnates of the debateable ground of Eastern Europe not only imbibe the sparkling wines of the Marne ostentatiously and approvingly, but several of them have essayed the manufacture of vin mousseux on their own estates.
The East, the early home of the vine, and the first region to impart civilisation, is perhaps the last to receive its reflux in the shape of sparkling wine. But, the prohibition of the Prophet notwithstanding, Champagne is to be purchased on the banks of the Golden Horn, and has been imported extensively into Egypt in company with opéra-bouffe, French figurantes, stock-jobbing, and sundry other matters of foreign extraction under the régime of the late Khedive. The land of Iran has beheld with wonderment its sovereign freely quaffing the fizzing beverage of the Franks in place of the wine of Shiraz. The East Indies consume Champagne in abundance; for it figures not only on the proverbially hospitable tables of the merchants and officials of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, but at the symposia of most of the rajahs, princes, nawabs, and other native rulers. The almond-eyed inhabitant of ‘far Cathay,’ reluctant to abandon that strange civilisation so diametrically opposed in all its details to our own, continues to drink his native vintages, warm and out of porcelain cups, and to regard the sparkling drink of the Fanquis as a veritable ‘devils’ elixir.’ But his utterly differing neighbour, the Japanese, so eager to welcome everything European, has gladly greeted the advent of Champagne, and freely yielded to its fascination.
Turning to the undiscovered continent, we find sable sovereigns ruling at the mouths of the unexplored rivers of Equatorial Africa fully acquainted with Champagne,