XXIII.
WINE AND BEER CELLARS.
WINE CELLARS.—HOW THEY ARE MADE.—PLACES FOR STORING BEER.—THEIR EXTENT.—THE GREATEST WINE CASK IN THE WORLD.—ITS CAPACITY.—PECULIARITIES OF WINE AND BEER VAULTS.—VISITING A CELLAR IN POLAND.—CURIOUS SIGHTS.—THE ANTIQUITY OF THE BOTTLES.—WHAT A VISITOR DID.—THE RESULT OF TOO MUCH WINE.—A DANGEROUS BRIDGE.
A German resident of New York, engaged in the manufacture of beer, visited the excavations at Hallett’s Point, near the upper end of Manhattan Island, and, on viewing the large space which had been dug out of the solid rock, exclaimed, “What a capital place for storing lager beer.” Many a wine and beer manufacturer has made the same remark on visiting the Mammoth Cave, or other huge caverns. The best places for storing malt or vinous liquors are under ground, for the reason that an equal temperature can be maintained at all times; summer’s heat and winter’s cold make but very little change of the thermometer in the depths of the earth.
PLACES FOR WINE UNDER GROUND.
In various parts of the world, particularly in Europe, there are vast underground spaces specially designed for the storage of wine, beer, and similar beverages. Nearly all these articles require to be kept some time before they are fit for use; especially is this the case with wines, some of which improve steadily during a year, or for ten, or twenty, fifty, or it may be for a hundred, or five hundred years. Some of the wine cellars of Europe have been hewn out of the solid rock, or dug out of the solid earth, at vast expense, for the simple purpose of storage. Other wine cellars were, originally, quarries, or mines; and after they had been abandoned by the miners, they were taken up by the wine and beer manufacturers, and adapted to their present uses. The same isthe case in America. Reference is made elsewhere to the cellars of Dubuque, Iowa, which are nothing more nor less than exhausted lead mines. At several places on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers there are cellars which originally were quarries or mines. Their natural treasures were taken from them, and they are now filled with artificial ones.
In California, particularly in the Sonoma Valley, are some wine cellars which have been dug out of the rock for no other purpose than for that of storage. Some years ago I visited one of these establishments with a small party, and the proprietor, in order to give us an idea of the temperature, shut us up a little while, and left us to ourselves. The place was not cold, but it was cool compared with the outer atmosphere, and we very soon began to sneeze. Had we been kept there for any length of time, I suspect that we would have had sore throats and all that sort of thing; but they were prevented by the select assortment of liquids which the wine manufacturer supplied to us with such liberality that some of his visitors’ legs became very much entangled, and refused to perform the duty usually required of them.
All through Europe, and particularly in France and Germany, there are cellars of great extent. The wine makers of France and Germany are able to store away thousands of casks, and other thousands of bottles, every year without any difficulty. The same is the case with the beer makers of North and South Germany, particularly in the vicinity of Munich and Vienna. There is one wine cellar on the Moselle, which is said to be capable of containing a million bottles and twenty or thirty thousand casks of wine at one time, and I have heard of one wine cellar even larger than this. The capacity of the beer vaults of Munich is, I think, greater than that of the German and French wine vaults. It is certain that a storage capacity sufficient to supply the annual consumption of beer in Munich, Vienna, or Berlin, must approach the dimensions of a small city. It is well known that the average German can get outside of a great quantity of beer in the course of twelve months. As an illustration, I may mentionthat the day before writing this paragraph I was told of a strike among some German laborers in an establishment near New York. Their strike was not for wages, but for beer. They were satisfied with the pay they received, but not with the quantity of beer furnished to them. Their employer allowed them two five-gallon kegs daily for every three men, and in their strike they demanded a daily keg of beer per man. They said that two thirds of a five-gallon keg were not sufficient, but they would manage to get along with five gallons each per day. The employer agreed with them, and they resumed work as soon as he consented to their demand.
FAMOUS BEER DRINKERS.
It is on record that one individual German drank one hundred and fifty glasses of beer per day, and I believe there was an instance in Cincinnati, a few years ago, where a German consumed, on a wager, one hundred and eighty-eight glasses between sunrise and sunset of a summer’s day. It is not fair to take these ambulatory beer casks as an indication of the drinking abilities of the Teutons, but it may safely be assumed that an ordinary community of Germans can get outside of an average of twenty glasses a day per man without feeling it.
THE GREATEST WINE CASK.
It is not my province to describe the process of making beer or wine, as the work is mainly performed above ground, but simply to allude to the space where these beverages are stored. I have visited a fair proportion of them in various parts of the world, and they are all pretty much alike. They are simply large vaults or caves, sometimes arched over to prevent the falling in of the earth, while in other cases they are cut out of the solid rock, and require no arching. Sometimes a wine cellar will consist of a single vault, with regular pillars or arches sustaining its roof, while in other cases there will be a great many galleries, or tunnels, running off in different directions. Sometimes the casks containing the wine or beer will be of a size that will permit of their being rolled about, while in other cases the casks or tuns will be so large that they always remain stationary, and are filled and emptied without being moved from their places. An example of this is the celebrated tun of Heidelberg, constructed in 1751,and capable of containing forty-nine thousand gallons. It has been filled but two or three times since its construction, and the process of filling occupied on each occasion two or three weeks. It is sufficiently large to allow the erection of a ball-room upon it, and several festivals and dances have been held there. It is the largest cask which has ever been made, or probably ever will be made.
The preparation and preservation of wine require great care, and, above all things, an even temperature. Many a cask of wine has been spoiled by being kept too hot or too cold; and this is one reason why the preference is shown by wine makers for underground places of storage. Apart from this fact is the saving that can be made by utilizing the space under the earth where the surface is of great value.
As before stated, a visit to one wine cellar is very much like a visit to another. The stranger is led or guided among rows of casks and bottles, and sometimes his underground journey will amount to a mile, or two or three miles, of linear distance. He wonders how the demand can be so great for this material, just as a countryman wonders, as he walks through the market of a large city, how all the beef, pork, and mutton can find purchasers. He may go through a market and think the supply exceeds the demand, just as when he walks the streets for an hour or two, and sees the crowds of people, he will wonder where all this mass of humanity can find sufficient food. In the same way a person unfamiliar with the business may have alternate surprises about the supply and consumption of wine.
A WINE CELLAR IN WARSAW.
One of the first wine cellars which I visited in Europe was in the famous city of Warsaw, Poland. I had entered Europe by the back door, as it were, coming from Asia over the Ural Mountains; and consequently the first ancient city I found where there was any wine trade of significance was Warsaw. A travelling friend and myself were under the guidance of an officer serving on the staff of the governor of Poland, and while pointing out the curiosities of the city, he suggested taking us to one of the oldest wine cellars inEurope. I think he said there were a few, but only a few, which had greater antiquity.
Our party was small,—only three of us altogether,—and we drove in a single carriage to a very unattractive place in the Jews’ quarter of Warsaw. We entered a narrow and rickety-looking building, which gave no promise of the wealth stored away beneath it. The officer was acquainted with the proprietor of the place, so that we easily obtained permission and escort for our underground journey. The proprietor himself took charge of us, and was accompanied by a servant to assist in showing us round, and possibly to see that we did not stow away in our pockets any of the valuable bottles in the cellar.
We descended a narrow stairway, so narrow, in fact, that we went singly, and so low that we were obliged to stoop to avoid hitting our heads. The place was hewn out of the rock on which Warsaw is built, and it was arched over to sustain the weight resting upon it. Reaching the floor of the cellar, we were first led between rows of casks, and the ages of the casks were stated as we walked among them. One was pointed out that had been in the cellar thirty years, and another that had been there two or three times as long. They were covered with dust and cobwebs, and looked as if good for a much longer stay. Over our heads we could hear the rumbling of carriages in the streets, just as one can hear the carriages in exploring the ruins of Herculaneum.
Cask after cask was pointed out, until our eyes were wearied, and we were then taken to the old cellar where the bottles were stored.
Our guide explained that the cellar we had just visited was a modern one, only two hundred and sixty years old. The old cellar, he said, was made in the days when Poland was a kingdom, and more powerful by far than the now great Muscovite empire. I do not remember positively the age he gave it, but I think it was some nine hundred or a thousand years old. I was too busy looking among the bottles to take particular notice of what he said, and am not willing to trusttoo much to my memory, especially on the occasion of visiting a cellar like this. The real interest of the place began when we entered the locality where the bottles were stored. Here were little shelves—I say little, though many of them were three or four feet wide—covered with bottles, some standing upright, while others were carefully packed away. There was one shelf where the bottles had been lying undisturbed for twenty years; another where they had not been touched for thirty, another for forty, and another for fifty years. Above most of the shelves a date was chiselled into the rock, and the date, as I was told, indicated the time when the wine was bottled and placed there. These chiselled places were, however, comparatively few, as the most common designation was that of a date cut in a small piece of board which rested above the bottles.
OLD BOTTLES OF WINE.
In some places the dust of ages had almost obliterated the dates, but our guide seemed to know them all from recollection. I remember one date of 1750, another of 1634, and I believe there was one board dated somewhere about 1590. Shelves were pointed out which were said to contain wine that had not been moved or disturbed in any way for three hundred years. I do not vouch for the truth of the statement, but merely give it as I heard it.
It was interesting to observe how the dust and cobwebs had gathered about the bottles, and also to observe the shapes of the bottles. The more recent shapes were those familiar to all drinkers and friends of drinkers of the present day. Then there were short, thick-set bottles, while others were dumpy and very long in the neck, reminding one of an overfed goose or a camel suffering with the dropsy. Some of the earlier bottles indicated that the art of blowing glass was not well known at the time of their construction, as they were badly shaped, and frequently had deep indentations in their sides. Some of them could be called flasks, rather than bottles, as they had no necks at all, and were round at both ends. All the bottles that I examined were carefully sealed, and I was shown several bottles with long, tapering necks,that had been tightly closed by melting their ends in a flame after the wine had been placed inside, just as the tube of a thermometer is closed after it has been filled with quicksilver or alcohol. In order to get at the wine enclosed in this way, it is necessary to break away the top of the neck.
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS A BOTTLE.
The cellar was perfectly dry, so that no moisture collected anywhere. I may remark, by the way, that a dry cellar is always desirable. There was no moisture, but there was a liberal supply of dust and cobwebs. On bottles that had been in their places only a few years, there would be a slight film or covering of dust. Those that could boast of twenty years, and those that had remained undisturbed a hundred or two hundred years, were covered so thickly that it was almost impossible to distinguish the bottles from the mass which covered them. I saw one shelf—I forget its age—where not a bottle was visible; it seemed to be a mass of cobwebs, and nothing more. To judge from its appearance, I would not have given twenty-five cents for the contents of that shelf; but if I had offered twenty-five hundred dollars, my offer would have been spurned with disdain. I asked the value of the wine on this shelf, and was told that it was twenty guineas a bottle. I did not want any of it at that price, but I presume that there are plenty of men in the world who are ready to pay it.
After we had seen the curiosities of the place, the proprietor insisted that we should make a practical test of his wine. He did not open any of the twenty-guinea stuff, and we could not expect him to, though I secretly hoped he would consider himself sufficiently honored by our presence to do the handsome thing, and break a bottle or two of it just to give us a taste. The best he would do was to open a ten-guinea bottle from another shelf. It is not every day you can smack your lips over wine worth fifty dollars in gold a bottle, and we sipped it very carefully, and allowed it to trickle not too rapidly down our throats. I found it a very agreeable wine; it had a rich and fruity, though rather sweetish taste. I know nothing to which it can be compared, and therefore I will not make any comparison.
WINE TASTING AND ITS EFFECT.
The proprietor treated us on the descending scale, for the next bottle he brought us was a five-guinea one. It was only forty or fifty years old, a very juvenile stuff, but we were unable to discover any great difference between it and the other. Two or three kinds of this wine were shown us, and then he brought all sorts of new wines just in the cellar, that is to say, they had only been there some five or ten, or it may be twenty years. Other wines were brought forward for our deglutition; and after a time the thing became a little monotonous, and I suspected that we might get our heads and feet a little tangled. I suggested that we had other business to attend to, and had better not indulge in the wine business any longer; but the proprietor was polite, and was constantly offering us just one more sample.
“Have the gentlemen taste this one,” he would say to the officer who accompanied us, and at the urgent request of the officer we would indulge the proprietor.
The officer repeatedly stated, on presenting the wine, that that would be the last; but somehow there was always something new to be tasted, and something that we could not decline without giving offence. Before we got through, we tasted nearly every wine in the cellar, and finally asked to be let off.
When we reached the foot of the stairway, we found it had shrunken greatly in size. We had descended without difficulty, but now it was necessary to move up edgewise, and I firmly believe, that if we had remained below much longer, the shrinking process would have made the staircase so narrow, and the roof above so low, that we should have been unable to get out, and might have staid there forever. Think of one’s terrible fate in being shut up in a wine cellar to die.
TURNING AN AMERICAN HEAD.
My companion wanted to sit down on the foot of the stairs and go to sleep, but I told him it was not a custom in Poland on visiting wine cellars, or, so far as I knew, in any other country. He then asked me to write to his friends, if I succeeded in getting out, and tell them to send money enough to buy out the concern to take it home to America.He would take cellar and all if he had to carry the whole city of Warsaw and the Ex-King of Poland in his trunk. He had a friend at New York who would just like this sort of thing. He would be willing to sell all his interest in the United States if he could only assemble his friends in that cellar, and get them as blind drunk as he was. I saw that he was wandering mentally, although unable to wander much physically, owing to the extreme suppleness of his legs. He began to chide me for taking so much wine, and said I ought to have followed his example, and drank nothing.
The situation became alarming. There was the staircase growing narrower until it resembled a loophole in the wall of a fortress. I was very much inclined to sit down with my friend, and wait until the place grew larger. While thinking what to do, we were roused by the appeal of our officer comrade to taste of another wine, a very superior article from Hungary. We told him politely that we must refuse, intimated that we should feel much better without it, and if he could only plan some way by which we could get out of that cellar and reach our hotel, we should be very much obliged.
He led the way up stairs. We observed that luckily they were large enough for him to ascend without difficulty, and finally we reached the space above. Once there we breathed more easily. We thanked our host for the attention he had shown us; we thanked him by shaking his hand, and keeping our mouths closed. To thank him in English would do no good, as he did not understand our language, and we were a little doubtful of our ability to pronounce our words correctly. I am sorry that my friend made so free with this ancient wine, as it totally incapacitated him from saying a word in Polish or any other language with which he was not familiar.
When we reached the open air we found that our heads became level again, and in a little while the effect of our wine-sampling excursion had passed away. Assuming the dignity of a couple of emperors, we rode to our hotel, took a lunch, and felt better.
All over the world it is a trick of the proprietors of wine cellars to put their visitors through the system of sampling, so that, drink as sparingly as they may,—a teaspoonful at a time only,—they will be very much confused in body and mind before they emerge from the clutches of their entertainers.
A DANGEROUS BRIDGE.
In one of the Western States I am acquainted with a wine dealer whose cellar is entered by crossing a narrow bridge over a brook. The bridge is ten or twelve feet long, about three feet wide, and has no railing. I have heard him say that no visitor to his wine vaults ever yet walked that plank on his return from the cellar without tumbling into the brook. From what I have heard of his establishment, I think he is not very far from the truth. Many a visitor to that cellar has received an involuntary plunge bath as he came out into the open air.