of bottles drawn up on each side, and
sometimes saluting you with a pop as you pass.
You have no contrast of big tubs and small;
no variety of ports, sherries, capes, and
madeiras, in pipes, butts, hogsheads, and all the
rest of it; but everywhere bottles of the
same shape and the same size, except where
pints or half-bottles take the place of whole
ones. It is as well to walk carefully, else
you may slip by stepping into the unctuous
and sweet-smelling puddles that are formed
by companies of explosionists on each side;
and falls are best avoided in a country where,
if you come to the ground, some fleshy
portion of your precious person may chance to
come in contact with a bit of broken glass.
You look into black depths, whither the eye
cannot penetrate; you pass by the massive
square buttresses and pillars which support,
like Atlas, the upper world on their broad
bare shoulders; you see the sharp decided
shadows following you close, as you and your
candle travel along; and you are conscious
that if your guide were evil-minded and were
to leave you alone in a malignant fit of
ill-temper, you would lose yourself as hopelessly
as a child straying in the catacombs of Paris.
You descend from cellar to cellar. All these
different depths and various degrees of
temperature and dampness offer an extensive choice
of climate, which the experienced owner doubtless
well knows how to turn to the best advantage.
As means of communication between
these stages—for tubs of wine, for instance,
that are condemned to be let down and bled
to death and bottled in darkness—there are
trap-doors cut in the floor in places where
you would never look for them. From time
to time, you come upon groups of
sepia-coloured men busily employed at their
subterranean tasks. By the light of their candles,
they hardly look alive. At a few yards'
distance, they strike you rather as spirited
sketches done in burnt umber by some
modern Rembrandt, than as breathing,
warm-blooded fellow-creatures. There is closeness
and mystery in the caverns of Epernay, as
there was light and space in the grottoes of
Chalons. M. Moët might summon a
conference of the gnomes; while M. Jacquesson
is almost privileged to invite the sylphs to
shelter themselves in a cool retreat when
oppressed by the sultriness of the summer air
on the top of the hill. You depart from both
in wonderment that such vast, ponderous,
and costly machinery should be employed in
a work of no greater utility or necessity than
that of furnishing a tickling draught to
fastidious palates.

We call champagne a sparkling wine;
which is quite a mistake. We might as well
talk about sparkling ginger-pop. Ihe French
more correctly style it mousseux, or frothy.
It does not sparkle so brightly as soapsuds.
A dewdrop sparkles, a diamond sparkles better
still. In the way of gems, the only thing to
which champagne makes the slightest
approach, is to seed pearls dancing on the surface
of a glass of water. Burgundy fills the glass
like a liquid ruby; claret shines softly with a
more purple glow; effervescing champagne
offers no brilliancy to the eye. It is only
bright when it is still, or in the popular
notion, good for nothing. Both frothy wines
and white wines differ greatly in their mode
of preparation from those that are respectably
still and red. One rule, however, holds good
for all: the best vineyards produce the best
liquor, and the quality is equally distinguishable
whether the bottle is meant to go off
like a duelling pistol, or to be opened quietly
and noiselessly. If the juice obtained from the
grape has only undergone a sort of half
fermentation—if a slight piquancy has commenced, it
is called vin bourru. White grapes are mostly
treated thus, and the liquor is in great
request amongst certain persons during the
vintage. It possesses all the faults and
inconveniences of sweet wine, purges like it,
and is windy and indigestible. Its admirers,
who belong to the old school rather than the
new, assert that it is diuretic, solvent, purificative,
and so on. When corked in bottle, it
bursts a great many, after the fashion of
champagne wine, to which it approaches in
its nature. Left in open vessels, it completes
its fermentation, and passes into the state of
ordinary wine; only much inferior, from the
circumstance of not having regularly
gone-through all the steps of the process, and in
the proper time. There are certain sweet
wines, sometimes called liqueurs, such as
Bergerac, Arbois, Condrieux, Lunel, Frontignan,
Rivesalte, which are prepared almost
without fermentation. The bunches, most
generally of Muscat grapes, are cut very late,
just before the frosts come on, after they have
undergone the evaporation of nearly one half
of their substance, and are become shrivelled
and wrinkled. They are carefully picked,
almost berry by berry, crushed, and the juice,
at once put into the hogshead, finishes its
working and clears itself there. These wines
keep for an indefinite period. Similar wine
is made in the isles of Greece, in Spain, in
the Canaries and Madeira, where spirit is
mostly added; as to port wine, especially
when it has to travel. The English rarely
taste any but alcoholized wines; pure wine
being notoriously too insipid to please the
British palate. The consequence is that
we seldom have the chance of tasting it
pure. But the list of articles formerly used
in France itself to adulterate wine is really
frightful. To begin with innocent water,
there follow perry, cider, and beet-root juice;
then come elder, privet and other berries,
with logwood; decoctions of elder flowers,
celery, and sage, doctored up with alcohol;
and last, sugar of lead, which, if it failed to
paralyse and kill the wine-bibber, gave him
painter's colic as a mild form of disease. Its
use is now said to be discontinued by the
Parisian wine-doctors, as involving too great a