Vineyard Gold

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 533, 10 December 1928, Page 14

Vineyard Gold

Rheims the Home of Champagne SEVEN YEARS IN CELLARS “Never again shall I think lightly of or look lightly upon champagne. In all its beauty and its honour I have seen it this week,” writes Winifred James in the London “Daily Chronicle.” I went last week over one of the most famous cellars in Rheims. I expected to be taken to a district lying outside of the town Instead, the car stopped at the house where we had lunched the day before. Received at the door by the master, we walked through the garden to some buildings at the far end of it. Here were the cellars, a maze of deep-vaulted catacombs, which store a seven years’ supply of wine that In time will find Its way all over the world. In Australia, as a child, allowed to sip out of the glass of the elders, I had tasted the wine from this house. Well wrapped up, for the cellars are chilly on such a warm day as it was outside, we were handed a candle and stepped cautiously down the low, wide, stone stairs into the inky darkness below. Streets of Bottles Here were streets lighted only by caudles at intervals, sconced high in the wall above. Here we passed huge vats in which the juice lay awaiting the bottling. Everything graded and tabulated, necessarily, with the most minute precision. In this street the newest wine enters into seven-years’ apprenticeship before it shall emerge to lord it over the feast. It is in the patient care of it, in the untiring processes through which it passes that the wonder of it lies. Every bottle of all the millions has to be handled many hundreds of times. In the first racks of its apprenticeship it is placed on its side and slightly tilted so that the sediment may run down toward the cork. By slow degrees it is raised from time to time in the slots, which are cut so that they will carry the bottles at last almost upright. Every day hundreds of thousands of bottles have each to be carefully tended and watched as a baby is, and for seven years! The other industries that are a part of this are countless. The sugar, the glass, the gold and silver paper, the straw wrappers, the barrels, they keep many more employed than the tenders of the vineyards and of the cellars alone. As we finished our pilgrimage we came to the room where the last rites are administered—the sweetening, the re-corking, the labelling and the packing. Shelter from Shells This cellar, lighted by a sort of fanlight into the garden, was the refuge of many during the bombardment of Rheims. Between the bins I was shown the spaces which had been the different bedrooms of the refugees, principally members of the family; but the cellars were open to all who had no hiding-place. Here service was held regularly. Here a marriage had taken place, a baby had been born. When the occupants got too weary of the close confinements they would creep up into the garden and walk about within the high walls until the rain became heavy. The rain of shot and shrapnel. Then they would go under until the the next time. From the house to the cellars had been cut a tunnel to be used when the house became too dangerous a place t<t stay in. We looked at the piles of square glittering tinfoil; handled respectfully the many-sized silver measures with the long flat handles that are used for sweeting the wine to the different tastes of the different markets, and came up the last flight into the sunlight again. On the hillsides all around, from Rheims to Epernay, the vineyards were marching on to the harvest time, making rich and beautiful the earth, healing the wounds of those terrible years and giving life and health again to the youth that had been begotten in death. Indoors a tray set with glasses and a bottle from the private cellars was brought in and put before us by the butler, but opened by the master. Year 1915, the first of those years to follow when Madame, bereft of her husband, who was prisoner in Saxony, carried the business on through all the rigours and privations of war. The years when the people, weary with the strain of daily work done in dreadful stress, crept out under the cover of darkness and gathered the grapes with the heavens raining destruction. To-day the vines are blossoming as If the war had never been.