ing
was brandy, under the name of wine.

While our imported wines are, as a whole, so good, we do not always
show the same discrimination in choosing. There is very little good
champagne, for instance, drunk in America. A vast deal is consumed, and
we are beginning to understand that it is properly a table-wine, or one
that is to be taken with the meats; but sparkling champagne is, _ex
necessitate_, a wine of inferior quality. No wine _mousses_, as the
French term it, that has body enough to pass a certain period without
fermentation. My friend de V---- is a proprietor of vines at Ai, and he
tells me that the English take most of their good wines, which are the
"still champagnes," and the Russians and the Americans the poor, or the
sparkling. A great deal of the sparkling, however, is consumed in
France, the price better suiting French economy. But the wine-growers of
Champagne themselves speak of us as consumers of their second-class
liquors.

I drunk at Paris, as good "sparkling champagne" as anybody I knew, de
V---- having the good nature to let me have it, from his cellar, for the
price at which it is sold to the dealer and exporter, or at three francs
the bottle. The _octroi_ and the transportation bring the price up to
about three francs and a half. This then is the cost to the restaurateur
and the innkeeper. These sell it again to their customers, at six francs
the bottle. Now a bottle of wine ought not, and I presume does not, cost
the American dealer any more; the difference in favour of the duty more
than equalling the difference against them, in the transportation. This
wine is sold in our eating-houses and taverns at two dollars, and even
at two dollars and a half, the bottle! In other words, the consumer pays
three times the amount of the first cost and charges. Now, it happens,
that there is something very like free trade in this article, (to use
the vernacular), and here are its fruits; You also see in this fact, the
truth of what I have told you of our paying for the want of a class of
men who wilt be content to be shopkeepers and innkeepers, and who do not
look forward to becoming anything more. I do not say that we are the
less respectable for this circumstance, but we are, certainly, as a
people, less comfortable. Champagne, Rhenish, and Bordeaux wines ought
to be sold in New York, quite as cheap as they are sold in the great
towns of the countries in which they are made. They can be bought of the
w