THE HOUSE OF PERNOD AND SONS
Beside the nailing machines, which are of American
origin, we admire a machine which marks the stoppers,
accounting for 5,000 stoppers per hour, without requiring any
attention other than to fill the hopper which feeds it from time
to time.
The nailed cases are lined up in the vast halls of which
we spoke before, there they are branded, rigged, and loaded
onto the wagons that await them at the doorway. A hundred
cases of 12 bottles can thus be finished in the space of an hour
and the number could be well increased if not for the fact that
this would make it necessary to enlarge the buildings.
From the handling of bottles, we descend into the cellars
where new surprises await us.
Under these sonorous vaults are aligned in immense
perspective the 230 tuns containing altogether millions of liters
of fabricated absinthe; 19 large steel vats contain in their bellies
the hundreds of millions of liters of proof spirit of wine. A
simple move of the tap starts the flow of alcohol to the vats
from tank cars brought from Languedoc and Rousillon.
Powerful pumps make the transfers, accumulating in a
storage room the proof spirit needed to distill or to fill the
bottle preparation vats; electric bells, acoustic tubes and
whistles transmit commands at the speed of thought and the
enormous handling required to move such considerable quantities of liquids is done, so to speak, without even realizing it, by four
workers.
