"Du saint-pourcain
Que l'on met en son sein pour sain."
("Saint-Pourcain wine, which you imbibe for the good of your health.")
[Illustration: Fig. 110.--Banner of the Coopers of Bayonne.]
[Illustration: Fig. 111.--Banner of the Coopers of La Rochelle.]
Towards 1400, the vineyards of Ai became celebrated for Champagne as those
of Beaune were for Burgundy; and it is then that we find, according to the
testimony of the learned Paulmier de Grandmesnil, kings and queens making
champagne their favourite beverage. Tradition has it that Francis I.,
Charles Quint, Henry VIII., and Pope Leon X. all possessed vineyards in
Champagne at the same time. Burgundy, that pure and pleasant wine, was not
despised, and it was in its honour that Erasmus said, "Happy province! she
may well call herself the mother of men, since she produces such milk."
Nevertheless, the above-mentioned physician, Paulmier, preferred to
burgundy, "if not perhaps for their flavour, yet for their wholesomeness,
the vines of the _Ile de France_ or _vins francais_, which agree, he says,
with scholars, invalids, the bourgeois, and all other persons who do not
devote themselves to manual labour; for they do not parch the blood, like
the wines of Gascony, nor fly to the head like those of Orleans and
Chateau-Thierry; nor do they cause obstructions like those of Bordeaux."
This is also the opinion of Baccius, who in his Latin treatise on the
natural history of wines (1596) asserts that the wines of Paris "are in no
way inferior to those of any other district of the kingdom." These thin
and sour wines, so much esteemed in the first periods of monarchy and so
long abandoned, first lost favour in the reign of Francis I., who
preferred the strong and stimulating productions of the South.
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