The Story of Champagne

by Nicholas Faith

  George Leybourne, the music-hall artist who sang ‘Champagne Charlie is my name’, went on ‘Moët drinking is my game’ – and would change the name of the brand in return for the appropriate fee. Where champagne is concerned, there is no such thing as a free song, let alone a free drink. For it is made and sold by a hard-headed, hard-working, rather cold-blooded bunch of people, fully aware that no one needs to drink champagne and that its glamorous patina needs constant polishing. It is their story I tell in this book, their efforts to produce, improve, sell and protect their wine. They can never let up. The selling has to be continuous.

  The essential paradox at the heart of champagne is that it is a serious drink which is usually consumed carelessly on occasions which positively inhibit the appreciation of its qualities. It is often drunk more as a ceremonial libation than as a wine: swigged from the bottle after football matches or Grand Prix motor races, or sipped at wedding receptions.

  One of the ways in which champagne is different from, and unquestionably superior to, lesser sparkling wines is that it first won fame as a still wine, indeed competed with the fine wines made from the same grapes in Burgundy 160 kilometres to the south. For a century and a half after the Champenois discovered how to exploit the bubbles, they, and their more discriminating customers, continued to prefer their still wines.

  Champagne, like every other fine wine, is the final and seemingly miraculous product of a whole compendium of forces, from the geology, the history, the climate and the economics, to the vines and their cultivation, the wine and its making, the people and organizations involved, enough for a book far longer than mine. My own effort divides naturally into the two ways of approaching the region of Champagne. If you come at it from the north, you begin to understand the geography, the geology, why and how the wine is made in one particular spot, the impersonal forces which have shaped its destiny, and the viticultural and oenological efforts which go into it. But if you begin (as I do) by coming into Champagne along the Marne valley eastwards from Paris, you can make a start at grasping the history of the region and the people and forces which have made it a worldwide phenomenon.

  Any proper historical study helps to illuminate the present. But one of the particular excitements in writing about champagne is that the past is all around you. For four centuries champagne has shaped the landscape and the architecture of town and country alike. Physically, the vineyards are often in the same place as they have been for hundreds of years while the buildings are an amazingly eclectic mix of historic (and pseudo-historic) styles. But history also intrudes where the wines themselves are concerned. Most obviously, Dom Perignon is not just a part of the region’s history. The role he played over three centuries ago is still of passionate concern to the people who sell the wine today.

  _______________

  1I use capital letters for the region, lower case for the wine.

  2In Les Arts de l’Effervescence, an essential source.

  3Champagne: The Wine, The Land and The People, London, Gollancz, 1967.

  4There is an even more lugubrious version of the saying when one tsarist officer, captured by the Bolsheviks, remarks how ‘between the arrest and the execution there is always time for a glass of champagne.’

  PART 1

  THE STORY

  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 Empire – the triumphal arch the Porte de Mars which still stands close to the cellars of Veuve Clicquot, Krug and Roederer, is one of the biggest in the whole Roman Empire. Though the town was evacuated by the Romans as early as the fourth century they left a legacy: the cellars, which were to prove an essential element in the future winemaking success of the region.

  LES CAVES

  Other winemaking regions can boast fine vineyards and distinguished wine-related architecture. Where Champagne is unique is in the scale and variety of its underground cellars, at least 600 kilometres of them, which play a crucial role in producing champagne. They alone would have been enough to justify Champagne’s case when it submitted a successful application to UNECSO for recognition as a World Heritage Site. As one of the judges remarked of this ‘unique ensemble of universal value’, ‘it’s surprising that you weren’t classified earlier.’ It was only when preparing the dossier that the Champenois realized their full extent.

  These cool underground cathedrals – or parish churches – house champagne’s most precious assets, around a billion and a half bottles, five years’ production, of wines undergoing their crucial second fermentation.

  Over the centuries the cellars have been quarried – or constructed – from many materials, ranging from pure solid chalk or limestone, chalk reinforced by bricks or simply of brick. There is a wide variety, from the cone-shaped chambers on the outskirts of Reims to the thousands throughout the region which have brick walls and ceilings. Some were excavated by ‘cut-and-cover’ methods – including many of the smallest in the heart of Champagne’s villages – others are veritable mines. Some were excavated as shelters in the troubled times after the Romans had left, but the vast majority were designed specifically to house maturing wines.

  ‘Nowhere in the world,’ wrote the memoirist, the Abbé Pluche ‘are there such splendid cellars as in Champagne.’ Today they are scattered all over the region. They are bigger and deeper under the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay and under the Butte Saint-Nicaise on the outskirts of Reims (in 1931 those occupied by the firm of Ruinart were declared a national historic monument). But the most picturesque lie under the Boulevard du Nord among the vines in Aÿ a few kilometres east of Epernay. Most of them are long galleries of cellars, with incredibly narrow staircases, their caverns lined with sheer walls of bottles up to a metre high and a foot wide receding into the darkness.

  They are often on several levels – the lower ones cooler and therefore especially useful in hot summers which could result in too much mousse. Some of the older ones contain relics left by the families that owned them – at Moët there are the remains of the family’s nineteenth-century cellars containing cases of claret and even of marc.

  The pioneers were the Romans who quarried masses of chalk boulders which when dried were sturdy enough to be used as building materials. The quarrying resumed in the Middle Ages: 300,000 cubic metres of chalk was used in the building of the city’s medieval ramparts. As early as the tenth century a chateau was being built at Chateau-Thierry
, 50 kilometres west of Epernay, from locally quarried chalk. Typically, the quarries fell into disuse in the eighteenth and nineteenth century before being exploited in the twentieth century for storing wines.

  The number and length of these cellars were vastly expanded as the production of champagne became an industrial process in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the cellars as we know them today are largely the result of this nineteenth-century industry and as production has expanded – by five or more times since 1945 – both the number and length of the cellars have also expanded.

  Only a minority of the cellars are industrial in size, there are hundreds of much smaller ones dug by individual growers, but together they form a unique underground ‘landscape’ of workshops, covering the whole process of champagne-making, right up to the time it has been bottled and is ready for sale.

  In their heyday before mechanization, which only began after 1945, they employed thousands of a special breed of worker – almost exclusively male – the cavistes, men who in the words of Michel Guillard ‘knew their surroundings like their own pockets and formed a community of their own “men of the shadows”.’ The work was not only hard but also involved many different skills in the handling of thousands of barrels and millions of heavy bottles. The cellars used thirty tons of candles annually as well as oil for thousands of lamps until electricity arrived at the end of the nineteenth century.

  The most personal aspect of the cellars are the numerous graffiti carved in them. These include many plaques carved with the name of the owners or designed to celebrate a working life of up to forty years by individual workers as well as graffiti by such unusual visitors as the Italian prisoners of war of the Germans in World War II. The carvings include at least one showing one of the taxis de la Marne which transported soldiers from Paris to the front at Reims in August 1914, horses, and even a recognizable portrait of Adolph Hitler. But to me the most affecting is the Croix of Lorraine engraved by members of the Resistance in World War II in the Cave Thomas excavated under Dom Perignon’s abbey at Hautvillers.

  Throughout recorded history the convenience of the route along the Marne has brought the inevitable corollary that the valley has been the natural path for any invader from the east and thus the equally natural scene for major battles against marauders. One of the most crucial and decisive was in AD 455 when Attila the Hun was finally thrown back at Chalons-sur-Marne east of Reims after one of the bloodiest battles in European history. In August 1914, nearly fifteen centuries later, the taxis de la Marne trundling along the dusty road from Paris brought vital reinforcements to the French army fighting desperately to prevent the German army from reaching Paris. The invaders were stopped on the outskirts of Reims.

  Round every bend in every country lane in Champagne you seem to come across war cemeteries sheltering the bones of soldiers of half a dozen nationalities. Naturally these include British, French and German memorials, but vast stretches of greensward are also marked with crosses commemorating the thousands of American, Canadian and Italian soldiers who have fought over the route east from Paris. Throughout the Middle Ages the region alternated between the prosperity natural to such a fertile crossroads and its equally natural role as a battlefield. Epernay, 29 kilometres south of Reims, was burnt, pillaged or sacked no fewer than twenty-five times in the millennium before the seventeenth century.

  According to legend, St Remi, Bishop of Reims, converted Clovis, King of the Franks, to Christianity in 496. It took the town and its bishops another four centuries to exploit the achievement, but by the end of the millennium their position was secure. For nearly eight centuries after Hugh Capet was crowned in Reims Cathedral in 987, his successors followed his example and, as a result, Reims rather than Paris became the spiritual centre of France.

  Coronations inevitably involved celebrations, but until Charles III was crowned in 1575, wine from Burgundy had been preferred to the local product. Yet this had a long and by no means dishonourable history. Vines had probably first been planted in the seventh century and over the following centuries – as in Burgundy 160 kilometres south – the clergy, their monasteries and their abbeys started to produce ever more satsfying wines and to store them in cellars used for the purpose as early as the thirteenth century. Indeed, it was the famous figure of Saint Bernard de Clairvaux at the very southern end of the Champagne region nearer to Dijon in Burgundy than to Epernay or Reims who at the end of the twelfth century established a vineyard making wine from the Morillon grape, the early name for Pinot Noir. The first cellars were probably at Colombey-le-Sec to house wines made by the monks. Surprisingly, the nearby city of Troyes did not emerge as the centre of the wine trade even though during the Middle Ages it was a major trade centre, famous for its international trade fairs at which so much trade was conducted during the early middle ages.

  Reims’ special aura of sanctity brought other advantages. Successive kings had made considerable grants to the local monasteries, which thus became major centres of winemaking (and drinking) until the revolution of 1798. As early as the eighth century the rule of the sisters of the Hotel-Dieu in Reims stipulated that, ‘If any of the sisters says anything offensive to another or swears wickedly, then shall she not drink any wine that day.’

  The wines were naturally appreciated, but they were a luxury unavailable to the majority, who could only afford the local beer. Nevertheless, the wine became well known throughout northern Europe, especially in Flanders, as a result of medieval trading patterns.

  Champagne was a regular battleground throughout the Hundred Years War between France and England which finally ended with the expulsion of the English in 1453. For a century or more afterwards it enjoyed a relative peace. Individual peasants competed with the ever-acquisitive monastic foundations for the land of impecunious aristocrats. By the early fifteenth century, wine was the biggest business in Reims and the local brokers, the courtiers en vin, had established a monopoly.

  The same pattern, of literal famine succeeded by relative feast, continued until the middle of the seventeenth century. Champagne suffered particularly badly during the Fronde, the terrible Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s. In the ten years before the sixteen-year-old Louis XIV was crowned, in 1654, Spanish forces descending from Flanders laid waste to the vineyards. Over the next fifty years Champagne had to bear the cost of housing the young king’s armies on their regular marches north and east to Flanders and Germany.

  Fashions were set by the king and his court so Louis XIV’s coronation and his love of champagne helped to boost its reputation. Champagne produced the finest wines within 320 kilometres of Paris. Moreover, the wines from the slopes around Epernay had direct access down the Marne to its junction with the Seine on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Even the Aisne was navigable to Pontavert, a few kilometres north-west of Reims. This crucial access to transportation via the rivers meant that champagne (and burgundy) were two of the rare exceptions to the rule that, until 1789, winemaking in France was a local affair.

  THE MONTAGNE AND THE RIVIÈRE

  Until the middle of the seventeenth century, drinkers, lay and pious alike, did not imbibe anything so vague as a ‘vin de Champagne’. By the ninth century there was already a clear distinction between the vins de la Montagne from the slopes of the Montagne de Reims, the heavily wooded hill on the route south to Epernay and the vins de la Rivière from yineyards on the north bank of the Marne. The better the wine, the more specific the origin. The best wines from the montagne came from two specific villages, Bouzy or Verzenay, those from the rivière from Epernay, or the smaller town of Aÿ a few kilometres further up the Marne valley (and a favourite for many generations), or the Abbey of Hautvillers on the slopes 3 kilometres east, a foundation long associated with fine wine. These names remain famous today, for, as so often in viticultural history, the earliest winemakers found and cherished the finest slopes. Only gradually did the idea of vin de Champagne emerge, and the names of individual villages remained important during
the many centuries when Champagne was famous primarily for its still wines. Only during the nineteenth century were names like Sillery and Bouzy finally eclipsed by those of the merchants selling sparkling wines.

  King Louis XIV, it was said, drank only the wines from the region – more precisely wine from Bouzy sold through a merchant in Aÿ called Rémy Berthauld. A small group of enterprising local noblemen seized the opportunity presented by the king’s tastes to spread the fame of their region’s fine wines. They were a group of what we would now call ‘foodies’, tiresome and finicky. Like many other such groups before and since they were simultaneously mocked and imitated. They were jokingly called the Ordre des Coteaux by their friends after three of them had dined with the Bishop of Le Mans. After the meal the bishop complained bitterly about their choosiness: their veal had to come only from Normandy, their partridges from the Auvergne, and as for their wine, it had to come only from three particularly favoured slopes: Aÿ, Hautvillers and Avenay. Hence the name the ‘Order of the Slopes’.

  Two members of the Order, the Marquis de Sillery and the Marquis de St Evremond, after he was exiled to London (see Chapter 2) played a particularly important role in spreading the fame of the wines of Champagne. The Brularts, marquises of Sillery, were members of the noblesse de la Robe, the legal aristocracy which also built up the reputation of the wines of the Médoc in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For well over a century successive Marquis de Sillery played a parallel role in Reims. The Sillerys owned 50 hectares of vines on the choicest slopes of the Montagne de Reims, at Verzenay, Mailly, Verzy and Ludes. Just before the French Revolution the British traveller Arthur Young noted that the Marquis de Sillery was ‘the greatest wine farmer in all Champagne, having in his own hands 180 arpents’. Their wines were blended at the family’s chateau, conveniently situated at Sillery on the banks of the Vesle.