Verzy Growing area ‘chef-lieu’ of the canton (administrative centre)
Verzy ‘chef-lieu’ of the canton (administrative centre)
Châlons-enChampagne
Châlons-en-Champagne
Vitry-le-François
Barsur-Aube
Cotê des Bar
Barsur-Seine
0 5 10km Les Riceys
Essoyes
Mussy-sur-Seine
The Croix de Lorraine carved by Resistance fighters in Dom Perignon’s own cellar, the Cave Thomas.
1 Before The fIzz
‘If Champagne hadn’t been at a natural trade crossroads would the region have been so open to different men, ideas and cultures? If foreigners attracted by the region had not mobilised their energies and their financial power in serving champagne, would it have succeeded in its many developments? If its merchants had not possessed the notion of international trade would the word champagne have been uttered in so many languages? If the growers and the merchants had not joined forces in one of the first French ‘interprofessions’ would the name – and the appellation of Champagne have acquired the same prestige?’
The late Pierre Cheval, the father of Champagne’s nomination as a World Heritage Site
To drive east from Paris along the Marne valley to Chateau Thierry, Epernay and Chalons-en-Champagne – along the historic Royal Road east from Paris to Germany – is to appreciate that the area is a natural crossroads where travellers from France to Germany meet those on the once-crucial route south from the Low Countries to Switzerland and Italy. This centrality is the key to Champagne’s historical troubles and to its more recent success. The history of Reims, the capital of the region, is typical. Its name comes from the Remi, the tribe which occupied the town before the arrival of Julius Caesar’s legions. There is ample evidence of much earlier inhabitants of the region but the story, as far as the wine is concerned, starts with the Romans. Luckily for them the Remi collaborated with the Romans and the result was one of the biggest cities in the Roman
Dom Perignon himself, though the figure is purely imaginary.
3 The monk’S wIne revoluTIon
The real perIgnon ...
The Abbey of Hautvillers provides one of Champagne’s most effective theatrical experiences. The site has an unequalled view over Epernay and the valley of the Marne, source of the vins de la Rivière already famous in the mid-seventeenth century. Ecclesiastical man was already exploiting the site before the turn of the millennium, and although most of the original abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution, enough remains to convey a sense of eternal consecration to a devout purpose. The ruins are genuine enough to inspire a suitable sense of historical awe – a feeling intensified by the archaeologists still painstakingly examining the stones to determine the exact size of the abbey in the early Middle Ages.
Art and nature combine to seduce the visitor into the delusion that sparkling champagne was invented here during the near half-century between 1668 and 1715 when Dom Perignon was procurator of the abbey. The myth also introduces an agreeable paradox – that so hedonistic a wine should have been invented by a monk. For its apparently holy origins greatly help legitimize a drink originally associated exclusively with dissipation and seduction. Even today so reputable a publication as the Encyclopaedia Larousse names Perignon as the creator of sparkling champagne.
In reality Dom Pierre Perignon, the procureur – all-powerful administrator – of the Abbey of Hautvillers for nearly fifty years after his appointment in 1668 was revolutionizing the wine itself, but
mentioned in the same bracket as those from Hautvillers. When he died in 1742 he was given the unusual honour of burial in the nave of the abbatial church, and a delegation from Hautvillers (including Dom Perignon’s successor) came to the funeral and signed the register. Nevertheless, Perignon rightly remains the symbol of the winemaking revolution of the late seventeenth century.
dom pIerre perIgnon
Dom Pierre Perignon was born in Lorraine of a solidly bourgeois family. He was twenty-nine when in May 1668, he was sent to Hautvillers. Soon after his arrival he was appointed procureur, or administrator. As such he was both treasurer and cellarer, in charge of all the wordly goods that provided a living for the abbey and its monks. His was a difficult role.
According to Chapter 31 of the rules laid down by Saint Benedict himself ‘as cellarer of a monastery should be chosen a brother who is both wise and of mature character, and sober in what he eats and drinks. He must not be too proud, nor agitated, nor unjust, nor slow, nor too spendthrift.’
He ran the estate and, as the man responsible for supervising the tenants of the abbey’s lands, also had charge of the wines they and he produced. He occupied the position, second only to a series of aristocratic abbots, for nearly half a century, dying in 1715 at the ripe old age of seventy-six, still in charge of the winemaking. Ironically, he appears to have been a teetotaller, living the frugal life appropriate to his religious calling. Twelve years after his death the Mercure de France noted that ‘this monk whom one could assume was some sort of gourmet never drank wine and lived almost entirely from fruit and dairy products.’
Perignon took every possible opportunity to increase the size of the abbey’s vineyards and the quantities of wine and grapes passing through its hands. A great deal of land had been left fallow, apparently ownerless, as a result of the widespread misery and destruction caused by the Fronde and France’s war with Spain which ended in 1659 with the Treaty of the Pyrenees. It helped that pious locals left the abbey considerable sums of money while he also increased the landholdings by lending money to the peasants (apparently at around 5 per cent), and then seizing their land if they could not repay their debts. He inherited 10 hectares of vines, an estate which had increased to 21 hectares by the time he died. He was pretty ruthless, and not only with the peasants, for he appropriated as much as he could, taking disputed cases right up to the King’s Grand Conseil. His other achievement as treasurer was to increase the value, as well as the quantity, of the wine sold by the estate. By 1700 the wines from Hautvillers, like those from Sillery and a handful of other ecclesiastical estates, were worth four times that of ordinary wines from Champagne and twice as much as a superior Champagne wine. Improving the still wines of Champagne was a full life’s work for anyone even if he had had the inclination to induce the fizz.
The wines of Hautvillers came partly from the abbey’s own vineyards, partly from the dime, the eleventh or twelfth part of the tenants’ crop to which the abbey had the rights, notably at Pierry, Avize and Mesnil-surOger, famous vineyards then as now. The abbey also had many other agricultural holdings, as well as windmills and fishing rights. The dime could be paid either in money, in grapes taken au pied de la vigne, or in wine. As always in pre-revolutionary France local habits were utterly confused even in the same village. In Aÿ and Dizy, two key parishes, most landowners paid in cash, but the Hautvillers estates had always made every effort to get their rights in wine.
As a result, in the words of Emile Roche: ‘Taking the dime in kind provided the Abbey of Hautvillers with a quantity of wine infinitely greater than could have been produced by its own vines – a fact which explains why throughout the ages the ecclesiastics had blended their wines and why what was known as “vin de Hautvillers” was simply the wine blended at and sold by the Abbey but not necessarily coming from its immediate neighbourhood.’9 Roche estimated that just before the Revolution, only an eighth of the 1,025 pièces of wine – enough
9 Le Commerce des vins de Champagne sous L’Ancien Regime
A cartoonist's tribute to women celebrating their divorces –women’s lib or Ab Fab?
4 TrIumph of The fIzz
Winemakers and their more knowledgeable customers had nothing but scorn for a product which merely demonstrated the unsatisfactory nature of the wine, an attitude which lasted for at least a generation after Perignon’s death. As Jean-Luc Barbier13 puts it: ‘Champagne is the only wine which was initially demanded by its customers and not sold by its producers’ – who in fact despised it for nearly a hundred years. In 1726 the wine merchant Bertin de Rocheret wrote how ‘a wine will turn frothy, particularly if it is strong and green... froth is suitable only for chocolate, beer, or whipped cream’. The best wines were kept still. As he told an important client, the Marechal de Montesquiou, about an excellent wine from Aÿ, ‘it would be a great shame to bottle it as sparkling wine’. The Abbé Mignon, yet another clerical wine expert, dismissed sparkling wine as merely ‘three spoonfuls of wine in the bottom of a glass topped by the strongest foam frothing to the brim of the glass... I found it appallingly green and without any depth.’
Unfortunately, not for the first or last time in the history of wine, what the customers wanted was not necessarily what the winemakers considered their finest product. Within a couple of decades after the drinkers of Restoration London had started drinking sparkling champagne the habit had started to spread to Paris and Versailles and, not surprisingly, to the same set of louche aristocrats as in London.
Glassworks were established in the Argonne forest 80 kilometres east of Epernay and became the source of Champagne’s bottles in the eighteenth century although they were expensive because of the internal taxes paid when anything moved between provinces at the time. Bottles
13 The former director of the CIVC and one of the very few serious experts on the subject.
to the origin or even the quality of the wines.’ The pressure inevitably worsened after Francois’ discovery. Partly as a result, prices were stable for an extraordinarily long period. A bottle which had cost F3.50 under Napoleon I cost F4.50 in 1840 and a mere F5 in 1891. Andre Simon remembers one old merchant who had bought champagne in Aÿ in 1842 at a mere 16s (80p) a dozen, a fifth of the price it had reached thirty years earlier during the Napoleonic wars. Apparently it was a ‘very good wine’, but this was not typical. As Simon says, ‘The public which had hailed the advent of a genuine low-priced champagne, was very soon disgusted with the beverage sold as champagne under any name or fancy label, and the result was the introduction and growing popularity of known “brands”, in which the public felt some confidence might be placed.’ Born in 1877, Simon entered the trade as a young man, so his evidence derives directly from what he had heard from older members of the trade.
mer CIer
The major beneficiary of the unhappy lot of the smaller, integrated merchants operating out of small towns like Avize was Eugene Mercier. In 1858, when he was only twenty, Mercier organized a group of five growers whose produce he sold from an office in Paris. This allowed him to sell wine whose production he had not had to finance, the only way for an ambitious newcomer to ‘hit the ground running’. He then married the daughter of one of the five. A man of furious energy who slept only three hours a night ( ‘je dors si vite’, ‘I sleep so quickly’, he is alleged to have said) he specialized in selling cheaper wine in the French market and was not over-scrupulous as to its origins. In the 1890s, after the Germans had imposed duties aimed against imported champagnes, he
built himself a winery making ‘champagne’ on the Rhine. Mercier was a true original.
His caves in Epernay, up the hill from Moët, were designed to rival those of his older adversary. ‘Comptez par kilometres,’ he told his architect loftily, ‘et non par metres’ – ‘measure your plans by kilometres and not by metres.’
Mercier’s showmanship outside Champagne was even more remarkable. For the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris he built the largest barrel in the world, containing the equivalent of 200,000 bottles. This was then towed to Paris by twenty-four white oxen, a journey which took three weeks and generated enormous publicity, increased when an axle broke in the Rue Lafayette in Paris itself.
He also went on to commission what was probably the world’s first advertising film from the Lumière brothers, most distinguished of all pioneers of the cinema. ‘The life of a bottle of champagne, from grape to glass’ was a film lasting a mere minute in which Mercier himself was a prominent feature. He then tethered an enormous balloon on the Champ de Mars, complete with sampling facilities. Unfortunately, the balloon broke loose one windy day taking with it the waiter and nine unsuspecting drinkers. Sixteen hours later, they landed unharmed in the Austrian Tyrol, where Mercier was fined twenty crowns for illegally importing six bottles of champagne. He claimed that this was the cheapest publicity he had ever bought.
a – peaCeful – german InvaSIon
An increasing number of these ‘brands’ had names of German origin. Max Sutaine, himself a merchant, summed up the reasons (and the speedy and inevitable French reaction) as early as 1845: ‘the unhappy but nevertheless very real French unwillingness to study foreign languages’ meant that they had to employ young polyglot German clerks ‘to whom was confided the care of foreign correspondence. Many of these young persons who thus found themselves initiated into the secrets of champagne-making, well knew, with an intelligence which we are the first to acknowledge, how to profit from the exceptional opportunities they were offered, and set up their own businesses.’
9 The vIneyard
It is extraordinary enough that only one small area in north-eastern France, on the northern edge of Europe’s winegrowing regions, should be capable of producing the finest sparkling wine in the world but this is compounded by a first, or even second look at the detailed map of Champagne. This induces puzzlement that such a higgledy-piggledy collection of vineyards, covering over 30,000 hectares, apparently consisting of thousands of mere blotches scattered across hundreds of kilometres of north-eastern France, could be thought of as producing a single, relatively homogenous wine. I describe the region as extending from Disneyland, on the eastern outskirts of Paris, to far-off – culturally as well as geographically – Colombey-les Deux Eglises, de Gaulle’s home a few kilometres north of the Côte d’Or, source of the wines of Burgundy. It’s not a vast vineyard, at 34,000 hectares it is a mere third of that in Bordeaux, but the vines comprise 280,000 separate sites. With a few exceptions the vines are distributed between three departments, with 23,000 in their historic homeland the Marne, 3,300 to the west in the Aisne and nearly 8,000 in the Aube well to the south of the other two.
A closer examination reveals that most of the ‘blotches’ consist of slopes above rivers like the Marne, the Vesle, the Aube and the Seine, well-rounded hills topped by the woods characteristic of Champagne which provide shelter from the west winds.
Champagne’S Tell-Tale geology
To understand what could be described as the ‘Champagne phenomenon’ the best starting point, oddly enough, is to approach Champagne from
nowadays, grateful for any job, however temporary). The three weeks of harvest are inevitably tense, although the winemakers somehow manage to keep their tempers with the hordes of visitors attracted by the annual miracle of the transformation of grapes into wine.
The harvest is not, of course, exactly as it was. And perhaps we should be thankful for that. In the good old days the combination of overwork, tension – and drink – resulted in at least a couple of murders every year. Even today the weather usually increases the tension. Rain brings rot. But if the sun shines too fiercely, as it did in September 1986 (the temperature was up in the 30s) the grapes go floppy, losing up to a tenth of their juice. Early autumnal frosts helped check the rot that year, more rain simply spread it. Yet to the Champenois 1986 was just another average year.
One old habit that has, regrettably, vanished is to reject any bunches which show signs of rot – a process the locals call epluchage. Better methods of treating the juice to ensure that the wine will not be contaminated have combined with simple greed and the confidence that, since the juice is fermented off the skins, some superficial rot does not matter. The general lack of selectivity can also be justified by improvements in the winemaking, so that lower-quality grapes are now more acceptable. One of the few exceptions is Roederer, which, alone among major firms, can rely on its own grapes for four-fifths of its
requirements. (Although all the better firms are particularly scrupulous with their own grapes which are destined for their finest quality wines. Moët’s vineyards, for instance, regularly yield 11 per cent less than the average.) The luxury – as it now is – of being able to eplucher their grapes provides Roederer’s winemakers with an enormous advantage, since virtually everyone else is having to cope with some rotten grapes. So Roederer can make at least some distinguished wine in a year like 1974, when the grapes were ripe but were picked in miserably wet conditions. In the words of Jean-Claude Rouzaud, who was then in charge of his family’s vineyards: ‘we reinforced our teams of grape pickers, in order, on the one hand, to pick more rapidly and, on the other hand, to be able to make a severe selection of the grapes and consequently to eliminate the bunches or parts of the bunches which had suffered from grey rot.’ The Cristal he made that year, when tasted in October 1986, was still full and delicious, the only hint of the problems a rather agreeable whiff of cabbage leaves on the nose.
CreaTIng The Champagne
Winemakers responsible for table wines, even the finest, have a relatively simple task: to extract the key qualities in the grapes they harvest and avoid adding any qualities not inherent in them. Makers of champagne have to make a number of decisions which will affect the quality – and the particular style – of the wine once it has been fermented for the first time. Outsiders might say that theirs is an industrial task, they themselves prefer to say that it’s a technological one. Either way they’re doing it better today than they did thirty, let alone a hundred years ago, resulting in better wines. Over the past thirty years the many technical improvements have been reinforced by climate change. ‘The unfavourable consequences of extreme increases in temperature,’ says Dominic Moncomble, the CIVC’s technical director, ‘will affect our consumers far more than they will affect us.’
Against all expectations they have been helped by climate change, which has resulted in a number of major developments. This is a counterintuitive statement since the basic quality of the drink has always lain in a proper balance between the flavours and the acidity in the fruit, and in theory the higher the temperature the higher the degree of alcohol in the grapes and the lower the precious acidity. But history
In 1945 most champagnes were fermented in wooden casks, although cement vats had made their appearance after 1918. After 1945 stainless steel vats of very varying sizes became an almost universal choice. These vats can hold up to a thousand hectolitres, enough wine to make over 130,000 bottles, part of a further transformation in the scale of the winemaking process from a craft industry, into a process more reminiscent of the dairy industry.
The change was not merely one of scale. It also involved blending most champagnes before the first fermentation, a complete abandonment of the age-old idea that a blend was patiently created from dozens of small, highly individual casks of already-fermented wine. This is now quite impractical for the basic non-vintage champagnes sold by most major firms. Even in a heavy-yielding year it requires the grapes from well over 12 hectares of vines to fill a thousand hectolitre vat. Even the biggest of communes is simply not going to produce enough juice to fill so big a vat in the limited period – at most two days – for which the juice can be held before it is fermented. So the switch to the larger vats associated with vastly increased production reduces the individuality of most of the biggest-selling champagnes. Yet the switch to mass-production in stainless steel was desperately needed: the winemakers simply could not have coped with the 700,000 casks which would have been required to ferment the quantity of juice regularly produced these days. Moreover,
without stainless steel, the surplus wine reserved for future use could never have been stored at all.
These days even the most casual visitor can guess at the individuality of a firm’s champagnes by seeing if the vats in which they are fermented vary in size. The smaller the size, the more conscientious the firm in safeguarding the different styles of the grapes as long as possible, so that the assemblage, blending the still wines before they are bottled to acquire their fizz, is done with as distinct and varied a series of wines as possible. At Moët’s winery the sizes vary from the 1,000 hectolitre vats used for the tailles, down to the 650 hectolitre vats used for juice from the Aube, to vats of 350 hectolitres for better-class juice and even smaller ones to make the wines used for Dom Perignon. Some firms, like Pommery, have claimed that they can blend their wines before they are fermented in order to achieve the style they want. They know the characteristics of the grapes they are getting from their own vineyards and the many suppliers, their regular livreurs who, in many cases, have been selling their grapes to the firm for generations, and the smaller the vats the more selective the blenders can be over the origin and quality of their wines
Everyone is looking to control the temperature they deem appropriate. Dominic Demarville is looking for ‘cool skin contact’ right from the start of fermentation. Nowadays the temperature of fermentation can be exactly controlled, depending on the style of the wine required. In the past the only control possible was to house the casks in a part of the cellars with an appropriate temperature and hope for the best. The
13 The fIrmS
There are over two hundred firms selling champagne, as well as thousands of recoltants-manipulants and an even greater number of Buyers’ Own Brands. Thus it is quite impossible to provide anything like a complete buyer’s guide. The following list is confined to the bigger firms and producers which can claim to have their own style of wine. I can provide only an inadequate, one-dimensional analysis. Better to look for the specific qualities of the fruit from which the wines were made. These qualities may induce nonfruit associations – as with the ‘warm bread’ feel of a pinot meunier, the ‘biscuity’, creamy feel of a chardonnay. Better to say, so this is the idea that Bollinger or Pol Roger have of the fruit from which they are making this delicious juice. And for me? Well I recognize the grandeur of Krug, but for everyday drinking (if there’s any such thing as an ‘everyday’ champagne) I prefer something rather lighter and more obviously elegant, like a Pol Roger, a Billecart-Salmon, a Taittinger or a Roederer.
Founded in 1843 by a M. Besserat, the company became famous between the wars under its present name (M. Besserat married a Mlle Bellefon) for its crémant wines. Since then, like many other medium-sized firms it has suffered from being repeatedly sold, first to Cinzano in 1959 and then to Pernod-Ricard in 1976. In 1987 it was bought by the Lanson-BCC Group who have improved the quality of the wines.
