J. BEYRE ON THE MANUFACTUEE OF SPARKLING WINES. 33I 



pared a wire fastening, of wliicli wc give a drawing in Fi<j. 31. 

 This is put on before tlic bottle is corked, as its upper opening is 

 large enough to admit the cork, and afterward fastened in the 

 manner shown in Fig. 32. This fastening saves th'c labor of put- 

 ting on any strings whatever, and in ten hours a good workman 

 can cork 1000 bottles and put on the wire at the same time. 



After the bottles have been so corked and wired they are piled 

 up from 20 to 25 high, in the following manner (see Fig. 33) : 

 The first row of bottles, B ?, rests with the necks on live laths, 

 marked /, and those of the second row, B' T, on another lath, mark- 

 ed r, which is laid over the lower ends of the first row, and so the 

 pile is built up, care being taken that the outside bottles are stead- 

 ied by a small wedge of cork. This kind of piles can withstand 

 a great pressure from outside, and have the advantage, at the same 

 time, that each single bottle can be taken out for examination at 

 pleasure. 



Storing the Wine in the Cellars. 



To develop the sparkling, the greatest possible care must be 

 taken as to the temperature* in which the wine is kept. Some 

 manufacturers keep the bottles in the fermentation-room in a very 

 high temperature till the sparkling has fairly commenced, and 

 not till then they remove the wine to the cellars. Others keep 

 the wine in the cellars, and only bring it into the fermentation- 

 room when the sparkling process is going on too slowly. 



There are cellars in the Champagne district in which the tem- 

 perature seldom rises above 3° or 4° C, and as many cellars con- 

 tain three different stories, which communicate by openings in the 

 middle of the "floor that can be hermetically closed, it is easy to 

 produce a change in the temperature of the different cellars. 

 When the development of the carbonic acid proceeds regularly, 

 it is not necessary to expose the bottles to a very low tempera- 

 ture ; but when the fermentatiion goes on too quickly, this becomes 

 necessary, for the bursting of one bottle destroys at least five or 

 six others ; and as as many as 7500 bottles are stored together in 

 fifteen different piles in most of the larger cellars, this breaking 

 might become very fatal to the whole mass. 



In order to reduce the temperature, which rises to 18° or 20° 

 C, fresh water or ice-water is poured over the bottles during the 

 coolest time of the day, either before sunrise or after sunset, and 

 the cellars are well ventilated. If this does not prove of suffi- 

 cient avail, the wine is removed to a lower and cooler cellar. 



Most of the cellars are provided with sinks to carry off the wa- 

 ter, as shown by Fig. 3-1. The floor a h, a' h\ m c, m' c', has an in- 

 clination of -^. The channels he, he are 80 centimeters broad by 

 3 or 4 centimeters in depth, and contain large sinks, marked O, 

 at a distance of every 10 meters, in which the wine from the 

 broken bottles flows. 



