Producing a clear sparkling wine was useless if the corks were unreliable. They gradually improved until by mid-century new glues meant that they could be produced in more than one piece. Workers had originally pushed the corks in using their teeth but this method was replaced by a special hammer until a corking machine was developed in the late 1820s. A well-known merchant, Hippolyte Bouché of Mareuil, greatly improved the corks d’expedition, used after degorgement, by soaking them in cold water. Bad corks went dark and could be eliminated. Corks could even be branded. The wire muzzles were being applied by machine before the middle of the nineteenth century.
The liqueur de tirage, used to reinforce the wine once the remuage was complete, was also being refined. It included cane sugar, some tannin to remove la graisse, tartaric or citric acid to boost the acidity, and some fine champagne brandy to boost the alcoholic strength. A machine was developed to give the bottles a measured dose of the newly-improved liqueur; another washed the bottles before they were filled. (The Champenois had always been proud of their cleanliness. In the eighteenth century one disgusted winemaker noted how the Parisians used the same water to rinse lots of bottles.)
But none of these mechanical improvements would have been much use without a better control of the basic mechanism of the mousse. The Champenois had already noticed that la grande casse didn’t necessarily derive from too much fizz. It was simply because the cellar was too hot. What was needed to get mousse without casse was steady development: ‘a period of a hundred warm days and cold nights,’ in de Maizière’s words. So they could put the wine in deeper, cooler cellars, caves profondes as against celliers, if they wanted to dampen down the mousse. But the central problem was the sugar required to set off the second fermentation. Chaptal had established that ‘sparkling wines owe their tendency to sparkle only to the fact that they have been enclosed in a bottle before they have completed their fermentation.’ Chaptal, both a scientist and one of Napoleon’s ministers, gave his name to the way the strength of wines can be increased by adding sugar to the juice during fermentation, a technique he imposed on all France’s winemakers when he was Napoleon’s minister of the interior. In Champagne the winemakers had already discovered the same thing for themselves. The discovery came one year when there was such a demand that the buyers wanted to taste the wines early, so the winemakers tried to oblige by adding sugar to accelerate fermentation. Another famous scientist, Cadet de Vaux, also noted that wines didn’t go wrong if there was any sugar left after the first fermentation. This was enough reason to add sugar when bottling the wine, which had become a regular practice before 1830. This had a markedly beneficent effect on the quality of the wines. ‘Thanks to Chaptal and Parmentier,’ wrote André Simon,22 ‘sparkling champagne, during the first half of the nineteenth century, was no longer the “green” wine which it was during the eighteenth century, whenever the sun failed to cooperate, as happened only too often. But sugar, without reliable controls meant a greater number of burst bottles.’
De Maizière reckoned that the casse was ‘only’ 15 per cent if elementary precautions were observed, a mere third of the figure if they weren’t – but the figure could rise horrifyingly in years of la grande casse – in 1828 eight out of every ten bottles broke. Not much more could be done until the winemakers could measure the exact quantity of sugar required to provoke the right degree of mousse. And this was established in 1837 by a figure who remains almost totally unknown to the outside world, André Francois, a pharmacist from Chalons-sur-Marne (now Chalons-en-Champagne).
POSH – AND CROOK WITH IT
Unfortunately, the correspondence of Valentin-Philippe Bertin du Rocheret, the son of the President de l’election d’Epernay and a major vineyard owner, is our single most important source on the subject of the champagne trade in the mid-eighteenth century, but it provides us with a misleading impression, partly because he was unduly involved with the English market, but also because he was such a devious and dishonest fellow. Valentin-Philippe had considerable literary pretensions, wrote a history of Epernay, tried, unsuccessfully, to establish himself in the literary world of Paris, was a friend (and supplier of wine) to Voltaire, but spent most of his time in largely illegal wine deals. In the words of Emile Roche: ‘The son, the nephew and cousin of brokers, he never bought a broker’s licence, which he probably deemed unnecessary, relying on the shelter of his position to be able to defraud the taxman without any fear and to cheat the brokers.’
Typically, he would buy in wine from elsewhere and sell it as the produce of his family vineyards round Aÿ and Pierry in years when these didn’t provide an adequate supply. He even established a warehouse at Charenton outside Paris to avoid the entry dues payable on all wine entering the city. Before his father died he sheltered under the parental umbrella acting as a merchant, flaunting his defiance of the law so freely that his family ganged up on him and had his stocks smashed by the authorities. After his father’s death in 1736 he had to pretend to be friends with the commissionnaires but continued to cheat them whenever possible. He used his connections to the full, exploiting any French envoy in London to act as his agent – although he remained a patriotic Frenchman, remarking after the end of the war in 1749 that ‘the Champenois will make the English pay for the war.’ And when, in 1728, the British government banned the import of wines in bottle,23 he simply organized a regular smuggling route through Dunkirk. He sent the wine, still young and fermenting, in cask with some liqueur as well as cream of tartar to help keep it clear of fattiness.
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13The former director of the CIVC and one of the very few serious experts on the subject.
14C. Moreau-Berillon, Au Pays du Champagne, le vignoble, le vin, Reims, 1922.
15An ancestor of the Gosset family owned vines in Aÿ as early as 1584. But the firm of Gosset was not founded until well after Ruinart.
16Le Commerce des vins de Champagne sous I’Ancien Regime.
17Francois Bonal, Le Livre d’or de champagne.
18Origine et developpement du commerce du vin de Champagne.
19A normal man’s name. The great firm of Dupont de Nemours was founded by Irenée Dupont.
20Through a subsequent marriage his firm became Billecart-Salmon.
21Now a subsidiary of Ayala.
22History of Champagne.
23This measure was the only survivor of a massive scheme by Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister, to make all taxes excise duties.
5
THE CHAMPAGNE INDUSTRY
By providing a rough, but scientific, means of judging the quantity of sugar that should be added to the wines André Francois’ two slim volumes, Sur le travail des vins blancs, and Nouvelles observations sur la formation des vins en bouteilles dramatically reduced the dreaded casse and transformed what had been a cottage-scale business into an industry.
Before Francois’ time winemakers would simply make an estimate based on the apparent acidity of the wine. As a result, years of la grande casse – with bottles exploding all the time – probably coincided with years when the wine was green, and thus a disproportionate amount of sugar was added, inciting an explosive mousse. Using a gleuco-oenometre, a simple device for measuring the sugar content, itself invented by Cadet de Vaux, and a simple table of corresponding weights, Francois developed a formula for adding the sugar, called la reduction Francois, the Francois process. As described by Moreau-Berillon, Francois first improved Cadet de Vaux’s metering system. Then ‘a bottle of wine was reduced in a bain-marie to 4 ounces and after leaving it 24 hours to get rid of the alcohol you take the amount of sugar left.’ Francois had worked out that if a wine thus reduced measured less than 5 degrees then it wouldn’t fizz even if kept in a warm atmosphere. So he worked out a scale to add sugar depending on the amount of residual sugar and the degree to which you wanted the wine to mousse.
His method was not ideal. Although winemakers could measure the percentage of residual sugar left in the wine after the fi
rst fermentation they still didn’t know the total figure for which they were aiming. Nevertheless, applying Francois’ formula dramatically reduced the casse to between 3 and 8 per cent; Perrier-Jouët boasted of a casse of a mere two and a half per cent. Francois not only put the development of mousse on a scientific basis, he also enabled the Champenois to increase the pressure in the bottle.
Before this time the wine was what we would now call crémant, at a pressure merely double normal atmospheric pressure. In the next thirty-six years the average pressure in the bottle nearly doubled. Enabling the Champenois to control the prise de mousse was undoubtedly the single most important step ever made in improving champagne and the only one which represented a dramatic leap forward. The others, as we have seen, were steady, painstaking, undramatic improvements. Indeed, although a number of chemists worked on refining Francois’ work, it took another sixty-five years before the amount of sugar required could be measured precisely enough to reduce the casse to between 1 and 2 per cent.
Tragically, Francois died in 1838 before he could pursue his researches further. De Maizière, for one, was convinced that had he lived he would have enabled the dosage to be decided even more accurately. Despite his modest position the Champenois immediately seized his theories, although the Remois, ever jealous of the wines from the valley of the Marne, held back for a few years because his ideas had been so enthusiastically adopted by their rivals in Epernay. Although there is still no memorial to him, Francois’ achievement has always been acknowledged by the Champenois themselves. The official ‘Historical notes on the wines of champagne’ published for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris put it simply: ‘Since M. Francois’ important discovery, the sparkling wine trade has considerably expanded.’
The fizzier wines needed stronger and more reliable containers. An article in the Revue Scientifique in 1852 pinpointed the previous decade as crucial. In the mid-1840s ‘glass-makers managed to manufacture stronger bottles: thanks to this improvement, casse nowadays, they say, is scarcely above 5 or 6 per cent.’ It was a tribute to the success of the efforts made in the previous quarter of a century that everyone wanted to claim credit for the changes.
By the mid-1840s Max Sutaine could lament that ‘the noise and the fuss of the newcomers have replaced the calm and the dignity of the old ways’. For Francois’ discovery ushered in Champagne’s most untroubled and glorious epoch, from the 1840s to the 1890s. Even the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 provided only a temporary interruption, although prices rose as supplies were interrupted. The German occupation was unpleasant but short-lived. It even made the fortune of a London firm of shipping agents, G. & J. Porter. When the French railways were commandeered by the army on the outbreak of hostilities they arranged an alternative route through Belgium. And following the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Reims became a frontier town, with a correspondingly large and thirsty garrison.
But Champagne’s success did not depend on the French market, which rose only moderately, from over 2 million bottles a year in the 1840s to fewer than 3 million annually forty years later. The myth of a Second Empire Paris awash with floods of champagne concealed what modern marketing experts would call the narrowness of the customer base – a few thousand bankers, English tourists and their girlfriends. But exports, which had been under 5 million bottles a year in the 1840s (a tenth each to Germany, Britain, the United States and Russia) had reached 18 million a year forty years later – though all these figures include an unknown quantity of ‘champagne’ produced in other regions of France.
To satisfy the increased demand every spare piece of soil on the traditional slopes was covered with vines. André Simon, writing in 1905, stated that the grands crus covered about 7,665 acres and yielded an average of 9 million bottles, and the premiers crus 9,552 acres, 11.5 million bottles more. But this was not enough. As demand switched from still to sparkling wines, the actual acreage of vines in the department of the Marne dropped by a fifth in the last eighty years of the century. But seven-eighths of it was used for sparkling wines and that included vineyards whose grapes had not previously been used for sparkling champagne, especially to the west of Epernay. Even so, the 14,000 hectares used for sparkling champagne in 1900 represented a mere 1 per cent of the vineyards in France
Inevitably, quality suffered. The results of competition were evident even before Francois’ discovery. As Cavoleau had noted as early as 1827, price stability had been purchased at a considerable cost in quality. It owed more to ‘profusion and competition among the sellers rather than 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.
MERCIER
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 t
hus 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.’
He added that they were all honourable young men. Of course they weren’t, and he knew it. Their initial capital base probably consisted largely of the list of their previous employers’ customers. But Sutaine adopted a loftier attitude: ‘we cannot avoid expressing one regret: that of seeing an industry based on French soil, an industry which is so clearly of national interest, slip almost entirely from our hands through our own mistakes.’ The pattern was repeated a number of times. Joseph Krug had worked for Jacquesson before setting up his own business. Jacques Bollinger, who came from Wurttemberg, had married the daughter of his employer, Comte Amiral de Villermont, who thought it vulgar to have his name on his bottles, an attitude clearly not shared by his son-in-law. The ‘German’ firms tended to multiply, a trend set by Florens-Louis Heidsieck when he brought three of his nephews to work for him. He died in 1828, after which one of his nephews went off, took as assistant one Henri-Guillaume Piper, and promptly died. His widow married the assistant and the firm became, and remained, Piper-Heidsieck.24
Another nephew founded the firm which became Heidsieck Monopole, while in 1851 Charles-Camille founded Charles Heidsieck. Two of Bollinger’s own industrious clerks, William Deutz and Pierre Geldermann from Aachen, set up on their own after a suitable apprenticeship with Bollinger. In 1827 an important German wine merchant, Pierre-Arnaud Mumm, founded a firm in Reims with one Frederick Giesler, who split off ten years later and founded his own firm. Mumm itself was saved by his grandson George-Hermann.
The Mumms refused to take up French citizenship, and their firm was confiscated at the outbreak of World War I. All the others – the Krugs, the Bollingers, the Deutz and their like – soon became the staunchest of French citizens. They tended to be more dependent on foreign sales than their purely French competitors and they were merchants pure and simple, whereas the locals were either growers-turned-merchants, or came from the merchant aristocracy of Reims, whose families had traditionally owned vines. Paul Krug went the furthest. He had bought some vines to help bail out a friend but subsequently sold them, declaring that ‘everyone has his own role to play’.
The Story of Champagne Page 8