France Champagne
To be classified as champagne, a wine must do more than sparkle. It must come from the Champagne region in northeast France. This is a basic tenet of wine law in France, throughout Europe and now, thanks to tenacious negotiation, in much of the rest of the world. It would be claiming too much to say that all champagne is better than any other sparkling wine. But the best champagne has a combination of freshness, richness, delicacy, and raciness, and a gently stimulating strength that no sparkling wine from anywhere else has yet achieved.
Part of Champagne's secret lies in its combination of latitude and precise position. The latitude is higher than for any other wine region (except for England - whose best sparkling wines are fair copies of champagne). Even before global warming brought an increase in average ripeness, Champagne's proximity to the sea helped to ripen grapes this far from the equator and temperatures in the ripening month of July are higher than in Germany's Franken, California's Santa Maria, and New Zealand's Marlborough. This means that the relatively early ripening varieties grown in Champagne reliably reach just the right levels of sugar and acidity before autumn sets in. Higher temperatures have brought embarrassingly generous crops, however, as the vines adjust to warmer growing seasons.
Champagne, whose soil and climate have so much to offer, is only 145km northeast of Paris, centred on a small range of hills rising from a plain of chalk and carved in two by the River Marne. The map shows Champagne's heart, but the whole region is much more extensive. The Marne département still produces more than two-thirds of all champagne, but there are vineyards in the Aube to the south that specialize in vigorous, fruity Pinot Noir (about 22% of the region's total), and the mainly Pinot Meunier vineyards on the banks of the River Marne extend westwards well into the Aisne département (about 9%).
Demand for champagne is higher than ever and by 2004 all of the official champagne producing area of 81,191 acres (32,871ha) (delimited in 1927) had been planted, with the Champenois still arguing about how it might be extended. Only 10% of this precious vineyard belongs to the large exporting houses responsible for the worldwide reputation of champagne who tend to blend ingredients from all over the region to produce their wines. The rest is owned by more than 19,000 growers, many of whom are part-time.
More and more of these growers, well over 2,000 at the last count, are making and selling their own wine rather than selling grapes to the maisons, although they sometimes do that as well. The growers' champagnes, which are increasingly highly regarded, now account for almost a quarter of all sales. Just over a tenth of all champagne is put on the market by one of the co-ops established in Champagne's dog days in the early 20th century. But the champagne market is still dominated by the famous names, the big houses of Reims and Epernay - together with a few, such as Bollinger of Ay, based outside the two Champagne towns.
Because it is obviously so successful here, the champagne recipe has been much copied. Take Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay grapes and apply a kid-glove process now called the "traditional method" (the Champenois having objected even to the world's admiring use of the old term "champagne method").
The grapes are pressed, in four-ton lots, so gently that the juice is very pale, even from the dark-skinned Pinots Noir and Meunier, and only a precisely prescribed amount of juice from each lot may be used for champagne. (Most of the increasingly popular rose champagne is made by deliberately adding some red wine to the white.)
The juice ferments lustily at first. In the past it slowed down, the doors would be thrown open to let in the autumnal chill and fermentation stopped. The wine spent a chilly winter, still with the potential of more fermentation latent in it.
So it used to be shipped. England in the 17th century was an eager customer for barrels of this delicate, rather sharp wine. The English bottled it on arrival, in bottles that were stronger than any known in France. It refermented in spring: the corks went pop and the beau monde found that they had created a sparkling wine. Whether or not it was the English who did it first (and the inhabitants of Limoux claim to have made the first brut sparkling wine, in the 16th century), premature bottling was vital to the process that changed Paris's favourite local wine into a prima donna.
For the wine continued to ferment in the bottle and the gas given off by the fermentation dissolved in the wine. If the natural effect was encouraged by adding a little sugar and a little more yeast, what had been a pretty but very light wine was found to improve immeasurably, gaining strength and character over a period of two years or more. Above all, the inexhaustible bubbles gave it a miraculous liveliness. Today sugar and yeast are added to the fully fermented dry wine so that a second fermentation takes place in the bottle.
The chief difference between champagne brands lies in the making of the cuvee, as the blend of dry base wines is called. Everything depends on experience in assembling the young wines - which are sometimes deepened by a dose of older, reserve wine - and on how much the house is prepared to spend on raw materials. The quality and character of vineyards even in the heart of Champagne vary considerably.
Another crucial ingredient in champagne quality is the length of time the producer leaves the wine on the lees of the second fermentation in bottle. The longer the better, and certainly longer than the mandatory minimum of 15 months for non-vintage and three years for vintage champagne, for it is contact with this sediment as much as anything that gives champagne its subtle flavour.
The reputation of an established house is based on its non-vintage wines, blended so that no difference is noticeable from year to year. Styles vary from the challenging concentration of a Krug or a Bollinger to the seductive delicacy of a Taittinger, with Pol Roger and Louis Roederer as models of classical balance.
The industrialization of champagne began with the widow Clicquot in the early 19th century. Her achievement was a way of cleaning the wine of its sediment (unavoidable when it re-ferments in bottle) without losing the bubbles, which involved remuage, literally shaking by hand the sediment on to the cork in gradually upended bottles. Today this is largely done mechanically in large computer-controlled pallets. The neck of the bottle is then frozen, a plug of murky ice shoots out when the bottle is opened, leaving perfectly clear wine behind to be topped up by wine with varying dosages of sweetness.
The Heart of Champagne
What lies beneath the vines is Champagne's trump card. Not only can cool, damp cellars be easily hewn from chalk, but it retains moisture and acts as a perfectly regulated vine humidifier which actually warms the soil and produces grapes rich in nitrogen - particularly useful for making yeast work effectively.
Today three grapes dominate. Meaty Pinot Noir is most planted (38% of the vineyards) having overtaken Pinot Meunier, a sort of country cousin that is easier to grow and ripen, obviously fruity but not so fine. Plantings of refreshing, potentially creamy Chardonnay have also increased, to 28% of the total.
Although today an increasing number of champagnes are emerging from single vineyards, the traditional and still usual plan is to combine the qualities of the best grapes from the distinct parts of the region. In this marginal climate full ripeness is the exception, and slight variations of slope and aspect are crucial.
The Montagne de Reims, the wooded "mountain" of the city where France's kings were crowned (it rises to less than 300m), is planted with Pinot Noir and to a lesser extent Pinot Meunier. Pinot planted on such north-facing slopes as those of Verzenay and Verzy produce base wines notably more acid and less powerful than those grown on the much more propitious southern flanks of the Montagne de Reims at Ay but can bring a particularly refined, laser-etched delicacy to a blend. Montagne wines contribute to the bouquet, the headiness and, with their firm acidity, to what the French call the "carpentry" ~ the backbone of the blend.
The village of Bouzy, whose lower slopes can be too productive for top quality champagne, is famous with English-speakers for obvious reasons, but also because it makes a small quantity of still red wine. The comparatively tart still wines of the Champagne region - both white and occasionally light red - are sold under the Coteaux Champenois appellation.
The Vallee de la Marne in the west has a succession of south-facing slopes which trap the sun and make these the fullest, roundest, and ripest wines, with plenty of aroma. These too are predominantly black-grape vineyards, famous for Pinot Noir in the best-exposed sites but with Pinot Meunier and, increasingly, Chardonnay planted elsewhere.
The east-facing slope south of Epernay (topographically not unlike the Cote de Beaune) is the Cote des Blancs, planted with Chardonnay that gives freshness and finesse to a blend. Champagne made with 100% Chardonnay is sold as Blanc de Blancs. Cramant, Avize, and Le Mesnil are three villages with long-respected names for their (unblended) wine. (The Cote de Sezanne is effectively a slightly less distinguished extension of the Cote des Blancs.)
These (and all Champagne-appellation) vineyards have what you might call a concealed Classification - concealed because it is never mentioned on the labels. The echelle (ladder) des crus gives the grapes of every Commune a percentage rating. Until this century an indicative grape price was agreed for the harvest as a whole. A grower in one of the Grand Cru communes would be paid 100% of the price. Premiers Crus would receive between 99% and 90%, according ,to their place on the ladder, and so on down to 80% for some of the outlying areas. Now the grape price is agreed on an individual basis between the grower and the producer, although the vineyard ratings may still apply - and some would like to see the ratings revised to distinguish more precisely between different vineyards' potential.
Such super-luxury "prestige" brands as Dom Perignon, Krug, Pol Roger's Sir Winston Churchill, Roederer Cristal, Perrier-Jouet's Belle Epoque, Veuve Clicquot's La Grande Dame, and Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne naturally have the highest average echelle rating in their constituent wines. Krug and Bollinger have long been exponents of fermenting their base wines in oak. An increasing number of other producers, including many of the more ambitious growers, are following suit The resulting wines - it should never be forgotten that champagne is a wine ~ can suffer if served too young or too cool. The cheapest champagnes have little to offer at any stage.
REFERENCE: The world Atlas of wine, 6th Edition, Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson
