At this point the British were drinking an astonishing 40 per cent of the production of champagne, and their taste was therefore very influential. Although some markets (notably Russia) preferred sweet champagne, often dosed with in excess of 12 per cent of liqueur de tirage, or added sugar, James Milnes Gaskell was typical of the emergent English taste for much drier wines. In 1874 that English taste was formalised in the creation of the first "brut" champagne by Pommery & Gréno, but clearly Milnes Gaskell and his friends had before this found sources of that drier style of champagne which so impressed Henry Adams in the early 1860s.
Adams did not forget the education in drinking he had received while living in England. In 1880 he published Democracy, a novel set in Washington, and born of his dismay at the scene of American politics. It has a baffled question of perennial importance at its heart: is a respectable government impossible in a democracy? But it also contains much social comedy. A British aristocrat, Lord Skye, is giving a lunch party and Miss Dare, an American girl who has set her cap at him, inquires about the wine:
"I hope it is very dry champagne," said she, "the taste for sweet champagne is quite awfully shocking."
The young woman knew no more about dry and sweet champagne than of the wine of Ulysses, except that she drank both with equal satisfaction, but she was mimicking a Secretary of the British Legation who had provided her with supper at her last evening party. Lord Skye begged her to try it, which she did, and with great gravity remarked that it was about five per cent she presumed. This, too, was caught from her Secretary, though she knew no more what it meant than if she had been a parrot.
Five per cent here is the degree of dosage, not of alcoholic strength, and it equates to a degree of sweetness which we would now call, at the driest, demi-sec. The memory of vinous discoveries made by Henry Adams during those Yorkshire winters in the 1860s hovers behind this vignette of attractive American pretension.
