Black Blight

In the vineyards of northern France grape-growers watched helplessly the progress of a mysterious blight which will cut the millions of bottles of champagne which should have filled the cellars of Rheims this autumn down to a few scant thousands.

They recognized that "the Black Hand," a baffling recurrent vine disease, has again touched with death the seemingly healthy grape-globes. The harvest, it is saul, will be burned. With bitterness the proprietors have noted that the coming of the pest has, as usual, been ironically concurrent with a bumper wheat crop in Europe. Scientists, vainly laboring in the vintners' laboratories at Rheims, are forced to admit once more that the ultimate riddle of champagne has not been solved.*

*It was a Benedictine monk, Dom Perignon, procurator of the Abbey of Haut Villers, who discovered the great secret of regulating the effervescence of champagne, late in the 17th century. Not only did he thus produce a perfect sparkling wine that gushed from the bottle and overflowed the glass, but he invented a system of cork's in place of the bit of oil-soaked rag that had hitherto been used; and, to humor his fancy, he adopted a tall thin tapering glass for the service of his wine in order that he might watch the play of the bubbles.