Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines | Page 6

and Ay. King
Wenceslaus of Bohemia, a mighty toper, got so royally drunk day after
day upon the vintages of the Champagne, that he forgot all about the
treaty with Charles VI., that had formed the pretext of his visit to
France, and would probably have lingered, goblet in hand, in the old
cathedral city till the day of his death, but for the presentation of a little
account for wine consumed, which sobered him to repentance and led
to his abrupt departure. Dunois, Lahire, Xaintrailles, and their fellows,
when they rode with Joan of Arc to the coronation of Charles VII.,
drank the same generous fluid, through helmets barred, to the speedy
expulsion of the detested English from the soil of France.
The vin d'Ay--vinum Dei as Dominicus Baudoin punningly styled
it--was, according to old Paulmier, the ordinary drink of the kings and
princes of his day. It fostered bluff King Hal's fits of passion and the
tenth Leo's artistic extravagance; consoled Francis I. for the field of
Pavia, and solaced his great rival in his retirement at St. Just. All of
them had their commissioners at Ay to secure the best wine for their
own consumption. Henri Quatre, whose vendangeoir is still shown in
the village, held the wine in such honour that he was wont to style
himself the Seigneur d'Ay, just as James of Scotland was known as the
Gudeman of Ballangeich. When his son, Louis XIII., was crowned, the
wines of the Champagne were the only growths allowed to grace the
board at the royal banquet. Freely too did they flow at the coronation
feast of the Grand Monarque, when the crowd of assembled courtiers,
who quaffed them in his honour, hailed them as the finest wines of the
day.
But the wines which drew forth all these encomiums were far from
resembling the champagne of modern times. They were not, as has
been asserted, all as red as burgundy and as flat as port; for at the close
of the sixteenth, century some of them were of a fauve or yellowish hue,
and of the intermediate tint between red and white which the French
call clairet, and which our old writers translate as the "complexion of a

cherry" or the "colour of a partridge's eye." But, as a rule, the wines of
the Champagne up to this period closely resembled those produced in
the adjacent province, where Charles the Bold had once held sway; a
resemblance, no doubt, having much to do with the great medical
controversy regarding their respective merits which arose in 1652. In
that year a young medical student, hard pressed for the subject of his
inaugural thesis, and in the firm faith that
"None but a clever dialectician Can hope to become a good physician,
And that logic plays an important part In the mystery of the healing
art,"
propounded the theory that the wines of Burgundy were preferable to
those of the Champagne, and that the latter were irritating to the nerves
and conducive to gout. The faculty of medicine at Reims naturally rose
in arms at this insolent assertion. They seized their pens and poured
forth a deluge of French and Latin in defence of the wines of their
province, eulogising alike their purity, their brilliancy of colour, their
exquisite flavour and perfume, their great keeping powers, and, in a
word, their general superiority to the Burgundy growths. The partisans
of the latter were equally prompt in rallying in their defence, and the
faculty of medicine of Beaune, having put their learned periwigs
together, enunciated their views and handled their opponents without
mercy. The dispute spread to the entire medical profession, and the
champions went on pelting each other with pamphlets in prose and
tractates in verse, until in 1778--long after the bones of the original
disputants were dust and their lancets rust--the faculty of Paris, to
whom the matter was referred, gave a final and formal decision in
favour of the wines of the Champagne.
Meanwhile an entirely new kind of wine, which was to carry the name
of the province producing it to the uttermost corners of the earth, had
been introduced. On the picturesque slopes of the Marne, about fifteen
miles from Reims, and some four or five miles from Epernay, stands
the little hamlet of Hautvillers, which, in pre-revolutionary days, was a
mere dependency upon a spacious abbey dedicated to St. Peter. Here
the worthy monks of the order of St. Benedict had lived in peace and

prosperity for several hundred years, carefully cultivating the acres of
vineland extending around the abbey, and religiously exacting a tithe of
all the other wine pressed in their district. The revenue of the
community thus depending in no small degree upon the vintage, it was
natural that the post