The Story of Champagne

by Nicholas Faith

  There was one glaring gap in the courtiers’ monopoly. Anyone, lay or clerical, who was in a privileged position could sell wine freely. In theory this exemption was confined to their own wines, and then only if they sold them themselves, or through their children or their servants. In practice the system built up by the Brularts at Sillery and Dom Perignon at Hautvillers meant that great quantities of wine – including most of the region’s finest – could be sold without touching the official chain. As the Intendant, Larcher, lamented in a report in 1697, ‘there are scarcely any army officers or solid burgers who don’t own any vines’. Unless the brokers and the merchants had vines of their own, they were left only with the piquette – the thin wine made from the last squeeze on the grapes to sell.

  But in 1691 the king removed even Reims’ theoretical monopoly. In Moreau-Berillon’s words the edict ‘had for Reims an enormous importance; the town suffered direct damage because it had to repurchase the brokers’ licences. From that time on they lost the monopoly of the sale of Champagne’s wines: Epernay’s trade, hitherto unimportant, soon expanded through the increase in the number of commission agents. From 1730 on ‘the Epernay market dealt directly with every country in Europe as well as with America’, in Raoul Chandon’s words. From that moment on, they didn’t talk only of the wines of Reims: ‘they started to talk of wines of Champagne’.14

  The 1691 edict was the first of many steps which gradually reduced royal authority over the wine trade. Throughout France, during the eighteenth century, there was a constant battle between the royal authority determined to stop the further spread of vines, which endangered the country’s food supplies, and the growers, determined to increase their major cash crop. After any bad winter (above all the terrible winter of 1708–9) a royal edict would restrict the planting of vines. All were invariably futile.

  The next step in the gradual loosening of royal authority came in 1728. Previously, wines could not be transported in bottle except by the privileged few, which obviously severely restricted the sale of sparkling wines. That year the restriction was repealed, although consignments had to be a minimum of a hundred bottles. Seven years later another royal decree standardized the quality, the contents and the weight of bottles, as well as specifying that the cork should be secured with properly tied string, thus providing an official standard for the bottles generally used for sparkling champagne. Before this, the bottles had often resembled apples, with long, and inevitably fragile, necks. So 1735 was the birthdate of the pear-shaped bottle now used for Dom Perignon and other luxury brands.

  These decrees laid the foundation of the champagne trade as we know it today. The year after the law had changed Nicolas Ruinart founded the first house in Champagne.15 He was followed the next year by Chanoine, and in 1734 by Jacques Fourneaux of Reims – whose firm was bought by the Taittinger family in 1932. In 1743 Claude Moët, a vineyard-owner-turned-merchant, founded his family firm in Epernay and fourteen years later the first outsider arrived in the person of one Theodore Vanderveken who moved from Liège to found a firm now known as Henri Abelé.

  Ruinart was a textile merchant, like so many others who branched out from what was still Reims’ principal business. Before vines were planted on a major scale – there were up to 20,000 hectares of vines by 1789 – only sheep could prosper on the thin soils of the region, a situation which led to the growth of a textile business, helped of course by Reims’ geographical position as one local put it ‘on the road from Bruges to Venice.’ Typically, Philippe Clicquot, who founded his champagne business in the 1770s, had been a draper as well as a banker. The decade also saw the arrival of Florens-Louis Heidsieck, the first of the German immigrants who were to play such an important role in the champagne trade in the nineteenth century. In 1785 he married the daughter of Nicolas Perthois, a wool merchant, and founded his textile and wine firm the same year. Even before the Revolution firms were specializing in distinct markets – like Paris, one of the many German states, or Russia. Although there were supposed to be three hundred firms in Epernay most of the major ones were in Reims and by the end of the century many were moving out to the Butte Saint-Nicaise, mainly to exploit the cellars excavated by the Romans.

  But it was the Epernay-based Claude Moët who acted as spokesman for his fellow-growers against the entrenched vested interests of the councillors of Reims who were still fighting for their rights. The war extended to the privileged classes, who still escaped most of the taxes which afflicted the Moëts and the Ruinarts. They formed an unholy alliance with the growers whose wines they bought. ‘What did it matter?’ asked Emile Roche, ‘that the privileged classes were cheats, if they paid handsomely for the growers’ wines?’16 The brokers counter-attacked by acting as principals as well as agents – naturally retaining the commissions to which they were entitled as brokers. On his daughter’s birth certificate Moët described himself as a marchand-commissionnaire, both merchant and broker.

  The real sufferers were the peasants. Although much of the land used for vines had been reclaimed from woodland or scrub, there was a constant battle between the peasants, anxious to produce crops for their own subsistence, and the privileged classes, who owned most of the best land in the villages, and who were anxious to maximize the yield from their vines, most profitable of cash crops. Even when the peasants did own vines they were subject to harassment from every type of authority, which included heavy taxes and the fact that they were even obliged to use their lords’ pressoirs. Most of them were so indebted that they were effectively serfs. As they complained in 1789, ‘their ordinary nourishment is bread soaked in salted water: and as for meat, they only eat it at Mardi Gras, Easter Day, when the squire gives his annual feast, when working at the pressoir, and at weddings.’

  Fear ensured that the peasants respected the law. Everyone else, lay and clerical alike, spent their time cheerfully exploiting the many opportunities to cheat the authorities. The sheer parochialism of so many aspects of French life made matters easier. Moreau-Berillon gives a long and complicated list of the many measures used, from ‘muid’ to ‘caiqs’, which were measured in four separate gauges (jauges) – those of Paris, Reims, ‘Rivière ou champagne’, and ‘champagne batarde’. The jauge of Reims was smaller than that of its Paris equivalent and this anomaly provided the region’s many sharp operators with the chance to substitute smaller casks than they had promised. They were not above importing wine from other regions and baptizing it with the precious name. But this usurpation was confined to still wines. The sparkling wine sold as champagne in the eighteenth century all came from what is now the department de la Marne, and almost exclusively from the rivière and the Côte des Blancs.

  All the wines from Champagne were at a distinct disadvantage in the English market. They were French and therefore paid far more duty than port. Unlike their competitors from Bordeaux and Oporto their wines had to be transhipped (at Rouen or Le Havre), or carried overland to Dunkirk, which increased costs and made them liable to some of France’s notorious internal duties.

  In 1728, the British government banned the import of wines in bottle, but the measure, repealed in 1745, was never entirely effective, partly because King George II preferred sparkling champagne. But it was pretty vile stuff, consumed largely in London’s Pleasure Gardens as the equivalent of today’s nightclub champagne. The sparkling wine had to be drunk quickly, for, as André Simon put it, ‘after a time it lost its limpidity and if decanted, its effervescence. The result was that sparkling champagne must have been both green and harsh when consumed.’ English connoisseurs continued to prefer the red wines from the montagne and the white wines from Sillery. Yet the English market remained important enough for the merchants to make a plea for help in 1780 after the War of American Independence had halted shipments to Britain for four years.

  The battle between the three types of wine swayed back and forth throughout the century. Exports expanded nine times in the course of the century and by 1789 300,000 bottles were being
exported – a few to Venice where, not surprisingly, Casanova was a customer. This created a demand for land. Indeed land values could well have been the reason behind Madame de Pompadour’s famous remark that champagne was ‘the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it’. When she had failed to buy the Romanée vineyard, the pride of Burgundy – which went to the Prince de Conti – she bought vineyards in Champagne, which naturally required publicizing. Perhaps she should have said that it ‘leaves a woman feeling beautiful’.

  By 1789 the region’s vines were producing about 45,000 hectolitres – over 5 million bottles – but not much of it was sparkling. Indeed, when Claude Moët’s grandson bottled 50,000 bottles in 1776 this was considered a prodigious feat – most leading proprietors, lay or ecclesiastical, probably bottled only between 3,000 and 20,000 bottles annually. In mid-century over 140,000 bottles were exported to major markets in one year, though over four times as much was exported in cask. In the last year before the Revolution sales in bottle had more than doubled to 288,000 bottles – in a year when total sales had been reduced by successive plagues of caterpillars. Francois Bonal17 reckons that mousseux accounted for a mere 6 per cent of total sales, which is probably on the low side – the price of land in the Côte des Blancs jumped more than eightfold during the century, far more than vineyards elsewhere, as its grapes came to be appreciated for their fizz-potential. One of the few certainties in the fizz-equation was that the wines of Avize at the heart of the Côte des Blancs were more likely to generate mousse than those from the rivière – partly because those from Aÿ, for example, fermented more quickly and so did not leave enough residual sugar to set off a second fermentation

  By 1750 the Champenois had given up pretending that their red wines were as good as those from Burgundy. But the white wines of Sillery reached their greatest fame at the time thanks to the redoubtable Maréchale d’Estrées, a precursor of the veuves of the next century, a formidable and litigious lady, perpetually at war with the peasants and the authorities in Reims. At the time her wines were known as vins de la Maréchale but their fame (and hers) faded with the name and wine of Sillery.

  In the mid-1740s Germany and the Low Countries were by far the biggest markets for Champagne. This was not surprising. Flanders and the Netherlands were traditional markets, while the hundreds of German courts all imitated the fashions of Paris and Versailles. King Frederick II of Prussia was so intrigued by the mechanism of mousse that he asked the members of his Academy to investigate. The story goes that they complained they didn’t have the money to buy enough samples so they asked for a few dozen bottles for experimental purposes. The proposed investigation was promptly abandoned.

  In France royal authority was steadily being eroded. In 1766 the commissionnaires and marchands were merged, calling themselves the corps des marchands de vins and paying only a single licence fee. The very word commissionnaire disappeared. Ten years later a royal edict finally freed the whole wine business. But, as Moreau-Berillon says, all the edict did was to ‘legitimise a state of affairs which had already existed for many years previously.’

  In the fifteen years before the Revolution there was a swing back to the still wines of Champagne both in England and in France. ‘How the taste of this country has altered during the last ten years,’ wrote Moët’s agent, Jeanson, from London in 1790. ‘Almost everywhere they ask for a dry wine; but they want a wine so vinous, and so strong, that there is hardly anything but Sillery that will satisfy them.’ As one of Moët’s contacts, John Motteux, emphasized, Sillery was incomparable if it was genuine: ‘it must not have the least sweetness or mousse.’ In France the swing was associated with the soberer reign of Louis XVI. At the Revolution his cellar contained only still wines from Bouzy and Verzy (as well as a great deal of Constantia from the Cape of Good Hope). Francois Bonal claims that by the eve of the Revolution, ‘only a few old Topers still remembered how they went into raptures at the sight of a cork hitting the ceiling’.

  When a cork did hit the ceiling the wine was naturally known as a saute-bouchon, the strongest of a number of different types of more-or-less sparkling wines. The much-despised tisane de champagne barely sparkled at all; pétillant, then as now, fizzed gently; demi-mousseux was the equivalent of today’s crémant, half the pressure of the grand mousseux – the official name for a saute-bouchon. But even this only had a pressure of three atmospheres, half that of an ordinary bottle today. Whatever the pressure, the Champenois faced two seemingly insoluble technical problems: the strength (or lack of it) of the bottles and the total unpredictability of the development of the mousse. Until these were solved, sparkling vin de champagne could never be a reliably profitable product and would only be produced in limited quantities.

  Unfortunately, all the better white wines remaining unsold in the spring (not just the mousseux) had to be bottled to preserve them, so the wine’s behaviour was bound to be unpredictable. Legras, a well-known figure in the trade, pointed out that ‘usually a third break and sometimes more than a half, which makes the growers uneasy and unable to make money out of their vines ... it is this loss which makes for the high prices of bottles of wines which, if bought on the premises, are sometimes sold at two or three livres a bottle, although they should cost only twenty-five sols’ – an eighth of the price. Sparkling wine was a premium product only in the sense that it cost more, not because the wine itself was necessarily any good. Rather, it was a cheap wine in an expensive and unreliable container.

  As the market for sparkling champagne grew, growers were tempted to make it out of any quality of grapes. Legras, who himself handled about 30,000 bottles a year, pointed out, ‘previously they bottled only the best wines ... but for the past eight or ten years, a number of individuals have taken upon themselves to bottle a proportion of their most ordinary wines hoping to sell them at a better price than if they were in cask, if the wine happened to sparkle.’ He also blamed the increased losses on inferior bottles, for in 1724 the glassmakers, presumably faced with increased demand, had started to use slag and recycled broken bottles, which reduced the strength of the final product.

  Once the wine was bottled it naturally developed a deposit. The methods used to cope with this were still primitive. The contents of bottles could be transvasés, poured into another bottle, but of course most of the mousse would be lost in the pouring. Or dark bottles (and the classic smoky purple glasses of the period) could be used to hide the deposit. By the end of the century they knew little more about the mechanism of the mousse than a hundred years earlier. They knew that the wine was liable to mousse if there was any sugar remaining after the first fermentation and that it should be racked and fined before bottling. But not much more.

  Our best witness for the precarious state of the sparkling champagne business is Armand de Maizière,18 who had been brought up in a winemaking family with a long memory. In 1848 he described how:

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century they were already aware of the more frequent accidents and the principal technical troubles found with sparkling wine: major breakages in one lot; and the same year much less breakage in a neighbouring lot: rare years when there were massive general breakages: equally infrequent years when the mousse developed without problems: invariably some recalcitrant wines which did not sparkle at all: bottles which exploded with a high-pitched crack enough to break their neighbours: explosive breakages in otherwise recalcitrant bottles; corks which proved defective either because of the cork itself, or because they were simply too small: wines which were sick because of thickness, grease, bitterness, acidity. Some years all the wines from Avize would break and those from the neighbouring slopes of Aÿ would suffer only minor breakages. In other years the wines from Avize would produce a satisfactory mousse while those from Aÿ lacked any sparkle though, with Sillery they are amongst the most expensive wines on the market.

  In 1848, looking back fifty years, de Maizière emphasized that it had required a generation of peace to transform the
making of vin mousseux from a haphazard, dangerous business into a trade which could produce reliable profits from a product which didn’t literally blow up in the maker’s face. At the same time Champagne was learning to live with the fall from grace of its traditional still wines – and of course with a series of political upheavals following the 1789 Revolution.

  A REAL REVOLUTION

  The Revolution came as Champagne was suffering badly from the effects of the worst winter for eighty years, compounded by frosts which lasted until June. On 21 October 1789 the Intendant, the king’s local representative, wrote how: ‘The wine harvest, which is one of the most important for Champagne whose principal product it is, must be regarded as effectively null and void, because it is barely a twelfth of the average and because adverse weather promises no possible quality, for the grapes, although still green and far from an acceptable degree of maturity, have all been affected by rot.’

  The old pattern of ownership naturally disappeared at the Revolution. Resentment at the memory of Madame la Maréchale ensured that the Brulart estates were confiscated. The monastic estates which had been the standard-bearers of quality wines for over five hundred years were parcelled out. The balance of power tilted sharply towards the merchants and remained in their favour for a hundred and fifty years. Before the Revolution the fame of the region’s wines had been attached to specific villages, like Sillery or Hautvillers, even if most of the wine was not actually produced there. Once the great estates had been broken up, the way was open for the merchants to provide a guarantee of quality through imposing their own names on wines from many different communes. This put them permanently on their mettle: a vineyard provides a permanent guarantee of potential quality; a merchant’s brand name has to justify itself the whole time.