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<< previous...Messrs. Werlé and Co., successors to the Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin—Their Offices and Cellars on the site of a Former Commanderie of the Templars—Origin of the Celebrity of Madame Clicquot’s Wines—M. Werlé and his Son—The Forty-five Cellars of the Clicquot-Werlé Establishment—Our Tour of Inspection—Ingenious Liqueuring Machine—An Explosion and its Consequences—M. Werlé’s Gallery of Paintings—Madame Clicquot’s Renaissance House and its Picturesque Bas-reliefs—The Werlé Vineyards and Vendangeoirs—M. Louis Roederer’s Establishment—Heidsieck and Co. and their Famous “Monopole” Brand—The Firm Founded in the Last Century—Their various Establishments Inside and Outside Reims—The Matured Wines Shipped by them.

The cellars of the great champagne manufacturers of Reims are scattered in all directions over the historical old city. They undermine its narrowest and most insignificant streets, its broad and handsome boulevards, and on the eastern side extend to its more distant outskirts. Messrs. Werlé and Co., the successors of the famous Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, have their offices and cellars on the site of a former Commanderie of the Templars in an ancient quarter of the city, and strangers passing by the spot would scarcely imagine that under their feet hundreds of busy hands are incessantly at work, disgorging, dosing, shaking, corking, storing, wiring, labelling, capsuling, waxing, tinfoiling, 64 and packing hundreds of thousands of bottles of champagne destined for all parts of the civilised world.

The house of Clicquot, established in the year 1798 by the husband of La Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, who died in 1866, in her 89th year, was indebted for much of the celebrity of its wine to the lucky accident of the Russians occupying Reims in 1814 and 1815, and freely requisitioning the sweet champagne stored in the widow’s capacious cellars. Madame Clicquot’s wines were slightly known in Russia prior to this date, but the officers of the invading army, on their return home, proclaimed their merits throughout the length and breadth of the Muscovite Empire, and the fortune of the house was made. Madame Clicquot, as every one knows, amassed enormous wealth, and succeeded in marrying both her daughter and granddaughter to counts of the ancien régime.

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