Cheerful Cheer

From three salients of the U. S. liquor business last week came word of new enterprise, new success. Cheerful items from vendors of good cheer: Champagne Guild. Last year only one bottle of champagne was sold for every 40 potential U. S. sippers. Hoping to raise this average at least a bottle a year, leading domestic producers got together last month, formed an American Champagne Guild. Last week, comparing notes, they discovered that champagne sales had already started to rise, were 80% greater this October than in the same month of 1935.

For all its exotic reputation, champagne was one of the earliest wines to be successfully produced in the U. S. Nicholas Longworth Sr., great grandfather of the late Speaker of the House, produced it in Ohio as early as 1825, and by 1855 had 1,200 acres of vineyards in cultivation near the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio rivers. His "sparkling Catawba" at $12 a case sold 150,000 bottles a year. This frontier curiosity was wiped out by the Civil War. Great U. S. champagne country now is the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

Principal worry of the American Champagne Guild, whose members include the big Finger Lakes producers, is the usurpation of the name "champagne"' by makers of white sparkling wine fermented in tanks.* True champagne must be fermented in bottles, each bottle twisted lovingly in its rack some 200 times for proper sedimentation.

Brewers' Banner. The rising tide of champagne did not mean ebb tide for beer. Last week The American Brewer estimated the 1936 U. S. consumption at 53,000,000 bbls., enough to give each voter in last week's election 388 bottles. Best since Repeal, 1936 is no banner beer year. In 1914, nickel beer enabled U. S. brewers to sell 66,933,394 bbls., an all-time high.

Accented Whiskey. On sale in Manhattan last week went an "Irish Whiskey with a Southern accent." Brand: William Jameson Irish American Whiskey.

William Jameson distilled his first batch of whiskey in Ireland in 1752, aged it in sherry casks. The company he founded is still making whiskey in Dublin although no Jameson has been in the firm since 1905. Present president of William Jameson & Co., Ltd. is smart, swart Lionel Marks. Last year Mr. Marks observed that during Prohibition the taste for malty Irish whiskey seemed to have dwindled away in the U. S., sought co-operation of National Distillers to get Jameson's consumed somehow. Their new "Irish-American" product is 25% pot-still Irish, 20 years old; 75% one-year-old, light-bodied Kentucky straight. Irish-American promotion calls it "not unlike the strains of a symphony in which one may easily recognize the tones of more than one instrument, although all are joined harmoniously in the richness of modulated music." Last week 100,000 gals. were ready for U. S. distribution at $1.44 per pint.

* In France no sparkling wine can legally be called "champagne" unless produced in the ancient district of that name around Rheims. U. S. winemakers have been permitted to use the name since Repeal.

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