WINE STOREHOUSE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 155, 23 February 1932, Page 7

WINE STOREHOUSE

ANCIENT LONDON YAULT WHERE STOCKS LIE MATURING. EIGHT MEN ALWAYS TAPPING. Waxworks pale into insignificance and stage smugglers' caves seem like a shadow of the real thing when conipared with the unexpected surprise of the Crescent Vault, says a writer in the Daily Express, London. The Crescent Vault is 127 years old, and it the show vault of the London Docks. Here port that has been round the world and sherry that was pressed from the grapes when the present generation was young, lies in "pipes" and barrels and casks, row upon row, maturing. Infrequent gas jets that east little light, but keep the temperature at the necessary level of 60' degrees Fahrenheit, give oif blue rays that make the surrounding darkness all the more intense.

And from time to time in the long corridors, some of them a quarter of a mile in length, one glimpses a circle of faces, half-revealed by hand-lanlps, bending over a cask, . like those of smugglers conspiring. The quiet there is unearthly, and is only broken by the voices of the bond coopers and a low, mysterious tapping. Test for Leakages. The tapping is the sound of th? bond coopers going about their daily work of testing the casks for- leakages. They are guided entirely by the sound of the casks as they resound to. their tapping. Twice every day they have to complete the round of three and a half acres of casks. And eight men are kept busy doing this eight hours a day every working day of the year. No one may cross the threshold of the Crescent Vault without carrying a lamp. The lamps serve the purpose of lighting one's way and also a check on who is in the vault. For every lamp is numbered, and the lamp man can, at a glance, say who is working there. There are three-quarters of a million gallons of wine in this one vault alone; Empire wine, vermouth, port, sherry, marsala, madeira, such as makes one' mouth water to think of, and the duty alone on the foreign wines 'runs into a good-sized fortune. But the bond coopers, the Customs men, and the guardian of the lamp, who live- daily with these priceless vintages go home Contentedly to their pint of bitter.