When the proper period arrives for the bottles to emerge once more into the upper air, they are conveyed to the packing-room, a spacious hall 180 feet long and 60 feet broad. In front of its three large double doors wagons are drawn up ready to receive their loads. The 70 men and women employed here easily foil, label, wrap, and pack up some 10,000 bottles a day. Cases and baskets are stacked in different parts of this vast hall, at one end of which numerous trusses of straw used in the packing are piled. Seated at tables ranged along one side of the apartment women are busily occupied in pasting on labels or encasing the necks of bottles in gold or silver foil, whilst elsewhere men, seated on three-legged stools in front of smoking caldrons of molten sealing-wax of a deep green hue, are coating the necks of other bottles by plunging them into the boiling fluid. When labelled and decorated with either wax or foil, the bottles pass on to other women, who swathe them in pink tissue-paper and set them aside for the packers, by whom, after being deftly wrapped round with straw, they are consigned to baskets or cases, to secure which last no less than 10,000 lb. of nails are annually used. England and Russia are partial to gold foil, pink paper, and wooden cases holding a dozen or a couple of dozen bottles of the exhilarating fluid, whereas other nations prefer waxed necks, disdain pink paper, and insist on being supplied in wicker baskets containing fifty bottles each.
Some idea of the complex character of so vast an establishment as that of Messrs. Moët & Chandon may be gathered from a mere enumeration of their staff, which, in addition to twenty clerks and 350 cellarmen proper, includes numerous agrafe-makers and corkcutters, packers and carters, wheelwrights and saddlers, carpenters, masons, slaters and tilers, tinmen, firemen, needlewomen, &c., while the inventory of objects used by this formidable array of workpeople comprises no fewer than 1500 distinct heads. A medical man attached to the establishment gives gratuitous advice to all those employed, and a chemist dispenses drugs and medicines without charge. While suffering from illness the men receive half-pay, but should they be laid up by an accident met with in the course of their work full salary is invariably awarded to them. As may be supposed, so vast an establishment as this is not without a provision for those past work, and all the old hands receive liberal pensions from the firm upon retiring.