The choice of a particular grape variety mattered less than the care taken to ensure that all the vines at least produced grapes of the same colour, for the same rows of vines had previously included both black and white varieties. Pluche emphasized that to have the wine ‘as white and sparkling as crystal, yet coming from the blackest of grapes, its whiteness is never better assured than when one has taken the care to uproot all the white grape vines.’ The memoir, too, emphasizes that well-chosen vines ‘yield only small black grapes. As a result you uproot any which yield grapes which are white or coarse black ones.’ Clearly they already realized that the finest wine came from small black grapes packed with concentrated juice, although the rather casual distinction merely between big and small, or black and white grapes, renders rather ridiculous any learned discussions about the varieties they used. Some authorities have given long lists of them, but contemporaries mention only the ‘Fromenteau’ – probably the Pinot Gris – and the ‘Raisin Noir’ (the Pinot Noir). In a tome entitled Abregé des tous fruits, published in 1690, the Fromenteau is described as ‘a reddy-grey grape’. The Burgundians claimed that it came from Beaune, thus emphasizing that theirs was the original variety and that therefore the wine it produced was better than that from Champagne.
The vines themselves lasted up to sixty years, twice today’s lifespan, but, as happens today, they started slowly, giving only a little wine in their third year and little more in their fourth and fifth years.
What has changed is the time the grapes are picked. In the words of the memoir, Dom Perignon taught winemakers to: ‘try and harvest only on days when there is plenty of dew on the ground; or, in hot years, after a shower... if you are lucky, in dry years, there will be some misty days, which occur from time to time: not only will the wine be whiter and more delicate, but there is almost a quarter more of it’ – crucially, the mist softened the skins, a great help in reducing their staining power (the moist night-time river air also helped). They would harvest only till ten if the sun was hot, ‘After that time, the grapes had heated up, so the wine will be coloured or stained with red and will remain too thick.’ Philippe-Nicolas Hue, fermier-general of the abbey, noticed how they insisted on harvesting, ‘at a precise degree of maturity’. Perignon, like his successors today, was clearly fanatical on the point. His immediate successor, Dom Pierre, explained how, eight or ten days before the harvest, he brought in a sample of the grapes from the vines which he intended to go into the premiere cuvée and left them on his windowsill for the night, he then tasted them on an empty stomach, ‘blending the grapes from one lot of vines with others and never getting them wrong ... he thus obtained blends... of the requisite degree of perfection... if you presented him with a basket of grapes gathered in all the vineyards round about and from Cumières he would taste them, arrange them according to the vineyard from which they came and select with the greatest certainty the samples which should go with one another to make the finest wine, allowing for the heat and the humidity of the summer and autumn.’
THE HAUTVILLER EXPERIENCE
In the past hundred and sixty years secular man has improved on the efforts of religious man. In 1822 the ruins of Hautvillers were bought by Comte Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles, son-in-law of Jean-Remy Moët, whose family ran the biggest business in Champagne. Since then the Moëts, the Chandons and their successors have cultivated the image of Hautvillers and its presiding spirit, Dom Pierre Perignon, so successfully that he is now probably the single most famous figure in the history of wine. Nevertheless, they exploited the Dom only slowly. When the great British journalist, Henry Vizetelly, visited the abbey in 1871 he found that the family had built a tower from which to view the Marne and had put plaques in the abbey celebrating Dom Perignon, but the atmosphere at Hautvillers was dominated by the thirty-six cows Chandon kept round the abbey to furnish manure for his vineyards.
The site has been restored, with a small museum and a conference centre. On a terrace immediately below the abbey a small walled clos of vines has been planted. The vines are grown en foule – not in rows, but in the old fashion as individual plants. There has been one recent discovery when Dom Perignon’s special cellar, ‘Thomas’, was excavated. It was designed to house 535 pièces, each containing 205 litres of wine – enough to fill nearly 150,000 bottles. Only a small proportion of this immense quantity of wine – far greater than the quantities produced by any of his contemporaries – came from Hautvillers, suggesting that the second assemblage from the casks played a more important role than the much-publicized pre-tasting of the grapes themselves.
The balance, then as now, was a nice one. The memoirist remarks that if the grapes ‘are too ripe, the wine does not have enough backbone, and if they are too green, the wine will be harder, more difficult to drink and will mature later.’ The harvesters went through the vineyards three times to ensure quality, the first time to gather the small unripe grapes, the second the best, the third the rest. The grapes were carried, carefully so as not to break the skins and stain the juice, in enormous paniers, or mannequins, holding 80–100 kilos, slung between the shoulders of a couple of strong men. Bidet recommended willow – a material used until very recently – as the best to stand up to rough treatment when in the carts.
The pressoirs were built as close as possible to the vines (Perignon had one at Hautvillers itself, two at Champillon, and another at Dizy – neither more than a few kilometres away). Then, as now, they were carefully designed to provide a gradual, even pressure on a great mass of grapes. In Perignon’s day the biggest presses were at least 10 feet across, and required eight or ten men to operate them. The precautions were worth it. As the memoirist puts it, ‘When the pressoirs are near the vines it is easier to stop the wine from being coloured... one principle is for sure, that once the grapes have been harvested, the sooner they are pressed, the whiter and more delicate the wine will be, because the longer the juice stays in the containers, the redder it will be.’
The first pressing, the abaissement, was the vin de goutte. ‘It was’, wrote the memoirist, ‘the finest and most delicate juice from the grape: but the wine is too delicate and lacks enough body.’ This was followed by the most valuable pressings, the première and deuxième taille, by which time the juice was flowing more freely because the skin had broken. All the juice up to the fourth pressing went to the grand vin, although in a bad year the fourth pressing was too red to be used and was relegated to the boisson des domestiques – the inferior wine suitable to be given to servants – with up to eight subsequent pressings in all. But most of the wine was good. Two-thirds was reckoned to be fine wine, a sixth vin de taille and the rest vin de pressoir. Harvest time must have been a killer. The memoir recommended that they leave an hour and a half between each of the last three pressurages, to give the pressureurs time to sleep, ‘or to rest; the fatigue is worse because it has to be endured night and day for three weeks.’
The white grapes were harvested separately, much later, around All Saints’ Day in the first ten days of November. The resulting wine was sold as soon as it was made. It clearly lacked character unless it had suffered a little. It was best, apparently, if it was harvested after the first frosts (presumably because the juice was more concentrated). Rot didn’t matter, the wine just needed more purifying. But then the wine from white grapes was not taken as seriously as that from black grapes. When these were too green, or didn’t have enough body, as happened during wet and cold years, or when they had too much juice, as in hot wet years, they needed thorough mixing with the lees by rolling the casks three or four weeks after they were made. They were racked twice, in December and March, using a long leather pipe developed specially by the Champenois, then fined in April, using fish skins to collect the suspended matter, a technique which is still practised today. The famous ‘secret’ of Dom Perignon, which mystified so many people for so long, seems to have been his own special method of clarifying the wine to produce that extra degree of clarity for which his
wines were famous. (Dom Grossard rather gave the game away when he talked about the ‘secret de coder les vins’.) Immediately after the fining the rivière wines had to be bottled, for they ‘lost their quality in wood: either they have to be drunk up in the course of the first or second year, or they have to be put into flasks. The wine will keep very well for four, five or even six years in glass flasks.’
The wines were probably blended twice. Pluche went out of his way to emphasize Perignon’s role in this, still one of Champagne’s most crucial processes. ‘It was the knowledge of the good effects resulting from the grapes of three or four vineyards of different qualities which has carried to perfection the famous wines of Sillery, Aÿ and Hautvillers... Pere Perignon, a Benedictine monk from Hautvillers-sur-Marne, was the first who successfully applied himself to separate the grapes from different vineyards. Before this method spread more widely such wine was referred to simply as the wine of Perignon or Hautvillers.’ But his famous preselection could apply only to the grapes at Hautvillers itself, for those from other vineyards were pressed on the spot. Once the wine from the outlying pressoirs had been brought in, the wines were blended again. Each cask in the cellar was marked with chalk to indicate if it was the first or subsequent pressing and what vines it came from.
The achievement of Dom Perignon and his contemporaries in making white wine from black grapes merely accentuated the problem of effervesence. For by the time the weather had warmed up sufficiently the following spring the wine had been put into tightly stoppered bottles, usually strong enough to contain the explosive force of the gas produced by the renewed fermentation. The whiter the wine, the stronger the bottles, the more secure the corks – and all three techniques were developing throughout the second half of the seventeenth century – the greater the chance of fizz. The mousse was even more noticeable with wine made from the supposedly inferior white grapes (a fact which further damaged the reputation of sparkling wine). These were harvested so late that they didn’t have time to ferment properly before the onset of the winter cold. So it is not surprising that they were turbulent.
A cartoonist's tribute to women celebrating their divorces – women’s lib or Ab Fab?
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8In his classic History of the Champagne Trade in England.
9Le Commerce des vins de Champagne sous L’Ancien Regime
10His collection of books and manuscripts, now in the public library in Epernay, forms the single biggest source of information on the history of la Champagne viticole.
11Saint Thierry, a few kilometres north-west of Reims, was famous for its Benedictine monastery, founded in the ninth century. Its wine was not normally listed as one of the great wines of Champagne, yet the author claimed that it had ‘been for a long time one of the most renowned and sought-after’ of Champagne’s wines.
12See Chapter 7.
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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 made from what was known as verre Anglais became commonplace while the traditional wicker surround used to protect the earlier, weaker flasks was abandoned about that time. By the second half of the century the champagne flute had appeared on the market.
As Louis XIV, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, grew steadily more puritanical, a rather louche alternative social focus developed, centred round Philippe, Duke of Orleans, who became regent after Louis XIV’s death in 1715. Unlike its equivalent in London, it was not a ‘cafe’ society, but its petits soupers, intimate late-night suppers, were highly conducive to the consumption of masses of sparkling wine. The first recorded quatrain in French referring to sparkling champagne dates from 1712 (forty years after its equivalent in England) and talks about ‘mousse argentine’, a silvery fizz. Under the Regency it became a drink suitable for a government in which decisions were made ‘amid the vapours of champagne and a mania for epigrams.’ As one wit put it: ‘drinkers of champagne never lunch but they always dine.’
Even more louche, and indeed disgusting in his personal habits was a brilliant, if lazy and disreputable general, the Duc de Vendome. At one party he apparently invited a chorus of young lovelies to entertain the company at his country house near Paris. They were scantily dressed to resemble the Bacchantes, the female followers of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, and they were all carrying bottles of fizz from the estates of Vendome’s friend the Marquis de Sillery. Such disreputable drinkers naturally disgusted so sophisticated a person as the distinguished lady of letters Madame de Sévigné who in 1697 referred to sparkling champagne as ‘Le Vin de Diable’ – the devil’s wine.
But for over a century after it arrived in France in the late seventeenth century it was universally considered a mere flotte, a mess of alcoholic bubbles fit only for the most degraded company. As Henry Murge wrote in his book Scenes of Bohemian Life as late as 1851, champagne was nothing but an ‘elegant cider’ to be drunk only when you find a shop girl to seduce or a comic act to perform. Nevertheless, champagne soon became associated with more respectable events. As early as 1737 a painting by Jean Francois de Troy called Lunch of Oysters showed a pefectly respectable meal, even though the guests seem awash in a shoal of molluscs. It was soon followed by another depicting a lunch of ham, notable for the broken glass on the floor, presumably as the result of a bottle which had burst.
The producers of the more reputable still wines of the region fought back as the fizzy tide moved in. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Nicolas Bidet described how Champagne still produced ‘red wines, white wines, vins gris and straw-coloured wines, otherwise called partridge eye.’ While courts and the frivolous demanded vins mousseux, connoisseurs preferred the red wines of the montagne or the white wines of Hautvillers and Sillery. These were, of course, still wines. The first shift in taste had come in 1695 when King Louis XIV’s doctor, the infamous Fagon, persuaded his master, for his health’s sake, to abandon a lifelong habit and switch from the wines of Champagne to those from Burgundy. So many social habits revolved round the king that the Champenois now had to compete directly with the Burgundians. For half a century an absurd promotional war was waged, largely in quatrains of ever-increasing feebleness, between the red wines of the two regions. André Simon found that ‘champagne is nearly always compared to Burgundy, sometimes to claret, and is even said to be “drunk with water”’.
The Champenois were at a disadvantage. Even their most favoured slopes could produce p
roper red wine only three or four times in a decade. Even in warmer years when the colour was satisfactory, the wines could never be as smooth or mellow as those from Burgundy – although they proved perfectly adequate substitutes in the Flemish market. Inevitably the more delicate white wines from the river were badly affected. As the memoirist remarks, they were simply too fragile for export. Nevertheless, the white wines from the Côte des Blancs south of Epernay became better respected in the eighteenth century because they were so suitable for sparkling wines.
Whatever wines they were producing, the Champenois’ geographical position astride the historic invasion route to Paris provided them with welcome customers. The campaigns in Flanders between 1706 and 1711 associated in British minds with the first Duke of Marlborough (although it was a Dutch general, Growestein, who nearly reached Reims in 1712) proved a bonanza for the Champenois winemakers by introducing members of the cosmopolitan armies of the day to the delights, particularly of the white wines of the region. This was a precursor of a phenomenon seen more obviously after 1815 and 1871, when increased sales provided some compensation for the defeat of French armies.
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHAMPAGNE TRADE AS WE KNOW IT
The eighteenth century was a time when old certainties were disappearing. For centuries the ‘brokers appointed by the councillors of Reims’ had enjoyed a monopoly on the sale of wine from the region. Throughout the eighteenth century it became a lot easier to become a broker. Although their numbers were in theory limited, the king, ever short of revenue, regularly withdrew and then reissued their licences, or sold new offices which the existing holders had to buy up in self-protection. This monopoly was crucial. Reims was never the natural centre for the trade; geographically, Epernay was better placed because of its position on the Marne. The Remois knew this – the Marquis de Sillery even tried to get the Vesle canalized, to provide him with direct river access to Paris.
The Story of Champagne Page 5