The Story of Champagne

by Nicholas Faith

  Even the puritanical Shaw admitted that ‘within these few years, tastes here are improving’. But although more champagnes were labelled ‘dry’, reality followed the description on the label only slowly, and the 1865s were the first vintage to be truly ‘dry’. Indeed, the 1865s were the first ‘vintage’ champagnes to be sold in any great quantity, and set a trend which led to a sort of ‘vintage snobbery’.

  It was another merchant, Fennell of Wakefield in Yorkshire, who persuaded a relative newcomer, George Goulet, to let him have some 1865 brut, after he had failed to persuade Madame Pommery to produce any. Fennell did not have much success in the provinces, which remained attached to ‘rich’ champagne for some years, but it took the fancy of smart London drinkers and established Goulet’s name. Ayala, a friend and major supplier of the Gilbeys, produced a ‘Very Dry’ the same year, a wine taken up by the Prince of Wales and his drinking companions at the Bullingdon Club in Oxford. But it was Pommery’s Brut 1874, helped by the energy of Hubinet, Simon’s predecessor as Pommery’s UK agent, which ‘reconciled many “habitués” of the sweeter champagnes to the fashion of drinking very dry wines’. This wine became a legend. Twenty years later Lloyd Price wrote a ‘farewell’ in Vanity Fair, ‘we leave you after small respectful mouthfuls, sad to think that never again would such a wine pass our lips.’

  Even a quarter of a century later, when, as Simon says, they ‘had acquired a heavy sherry taste and were far from agreeable’ they were still fetching high prices at auction. Some of the wines of that remarkable year were literally ‘brut nature’, without any added sugar, although they did have some brandy in them. Dry champagne was a real revolution: it was a firm statement by the Champenois that their wines were good enough not to require the heavy disguise of syrups and additives which had been required a mere half a century earlier.

  THE ICONIC AVENUE

  The buildings that line the Avenue de Champagne and, above all, the cellars beneath them represent the heart of Champagne.

  Its original name, dating back to the eighteenth century or possibly even earlier, was ‘Le Faubourg de la Folie’. This had nothing to do with folie, madness, but faubourg indicated that it was in the suburbs east of the town itself, while folie meant that it was a small house in a (presumably picturesque) rustic setting. Its later name ‘Avenue de Commerce’ was more accurate. It was Claude Moët, the firm’s founder, who first bought land along the avenue sometime before 1745 and by 1781 his son (also named Claude)already owned a building there, complete with cellars, although he didn’t live there but in a much more fashionable street within the town.

  It was his son Jean-Rémy who went much further, bequeathing buildings on both sides of the avenue, all of them built of stone that had been transported 100 kilometres by horse and cart from the stone quarries north of Reims, rather than of local bricks. They included a mansion impressive enough to house Emperor Napoleon on two visits to the town but which has been ponderously rebuilt since then, as well as the Orangerie, the avenue’s architectural crown jewel, an elegant single-storey affair typical of the early nineteenth century flanked by two handsome mansions.

  During the nineteenth century Moët steadily expanded its presence, and the extent of its cellars – eightfold by 1914. But by then it was not alone. A whole host of newcomers had invested their profits from the region’s nineteenth-century heyday in brick and stone. Typical were the Perrier-Jouëts who owned the elegant Hotel Papelard next to Moët’s premises from 1837 to 1920 when it was bought by them. The Perriers invested the profits from their deservedly famous Belle Epoque champagne to convert a mansion opposite their offices into what is still a masterpiece of Art Nouveau architecture and furniture complete with contributions from Emil Galle and Marjorelle.

  The nineteenth century boom brought perhaps a dozen other firms, including such survivors as Boizel, Charbaut, de Venoge as well as Gaston Burtin’s premises next to Moët. The only firm to turn its back on the avenue was Pol Roger – all you can see is the yard at the rear of the main building used to receive the grapes during the harvest, though behind are a number of charming cottages complete with gardens. All these buildings have cellars, several floors of them, which are perhaps more important. The authorities added a handsome town hall and library complete with a memorial to the nine hundred locals who died in World War I.

  UNESCO’s rules now ensure that there can be no unsuitable construction along the avenue, while the municipality has done its bit by narrowing the roadway and lining it with trees, emphasizing its intrinsic elegance. At the same time a number of firms, like Boizel, Perrier-Jouët and de Venoge are investing in rebuilding their firms’ premises to make them more attractive to visitors and there are grandiose plans for creating a major attraction by reconstructing the Hotel Perrier which formerly housed the town’s library but has been left empty for nearly two decades.

  If the avenue begins with the Moët family it ends a kilometre later just before it encounters a small hill, Mont Bernon, with buildings erected by Eugene Mercier and a much newer and just as grandiose ‘Espace Mercier’ to attract visitors – now owned by Moët, the two connected by a tunnel. But to me the most fascinating spot is a patch of green between the railway and the River Marne. It’s called the Parc Maigret and I like to think that when sailing past it in his barge Georges Simenon noted the name and borrowed it for his famous detective. And I’m totally uninterested in anyone trying to prove that the name derived from another source.

  De Gaulle sipping the wine of the region where he made his home.

  _______________

  24Invariably pronounced ‘Peepair’ in France.

  25An unfortunate phrase, now that ‘as de la pedale’ has come in slang to mean homosexual.

  26Wine, the Vine and the Cellar.

  6

  THE HORRORS OF WAR, THE COST OF PEACE

  The first forty-five years of the twentieth century were a period of greater turbulence – and economic misery – for the Champenois than any time since the mid-seventeenth century. The period witnessed two world wars, in the first of which the inhabitants of Reims were forced to become troglodytes and in the second the region suffered the horrors of German occupation. Woes were compounded by the ravages of phylloxera, by a short, but bitter, civil war in 1911 and by the acute misery suffered, above all by the growers, between the wars.

  PROTECTING THE ‘BRAND’

  In the late nineteenth century the French had begun to drink more champagne and in the years before 1914 consumption increased dramatically. But, perhaps inevitably, as sales grew, so did the assumption that any sparkling wine, wherever and however it was made, could be called champagne. ‘Champagnes’ were made, not only in the obvious alternative winegrowing regions within France, like Burgundy and the Loire valley round Saumur, but also in foreign countries such as Switzerland. A trade paper even advertised champagne made in England. As early as the 1860s, Timothée Trimm revealed how the Parisians concocted ‘champagne’ within twenty-four hours. ‘They take minor white wines from Bordeaux, fine them, dose them with sugar and then bottle them. By using a machine which makes lemonade or seltzer, they inject gas or carbonic acid into every bottle. To deceive the buyer more thoroughly they call it the Grand Turk’s Sillery or the Shah of Persia’s Sparkling Aÿ.’

  Some of the competition was based on lower prices with no pretence that the wines were ‘champagne’. Production of Sekt in Germany tripled to over 12 million bottles in the thirty years before World War I. Asti Spumante started spouting in 1850. More deceptively, the Russians made over half a million bottles of ‘Krimski’ champagne (from the Crimea) and ‘Donski’ champagne from the valley of the River Don. The Americans showed greater ingenuity in their frauds. One town, it was said, had been renamed Reims (another Macon), while a mid-Western fraudster even imported a French cook to help him. She was a widow and her husband’s name had been... Pommery.

  By no means all ‘real’ champagnes were superior to some of the alternatives. In his
‘Report on Cheap Wines’ Robert Druitt pointed out that the sparkling St Peray from Burgundy, and others from Tokay and Austria, were superior to many of the so-called ‘champagnes’. A cheap real champagne, was, he insisted, a contradiction in terms. But this was not the general view. As Saunders Magazine put it, ‘it remains a standing delusion in society that champagne is to be held an indispensable element on any occasion of extra jollification or splendour ... we do not tolerate such shams in eating. If where haunches of venison were to be considered “correct”, haunches of mutton were placed on the table and called by their name, the substitute would be derided on all sides. Yet nine people out of ten are contented to drink a washy, frothy, flavourless liquid, and calling it a high-sounding name, to which they are morally convinced it has no claim, delude themselves into the idea that it is all very “grand”.’

  The pressure on supplies had started in mid-century. Moreau-Berillon gives 1855, when a fungoid disease, oidium, was affecting the grapes, as the year when the negociants found that the grand crus no longer provided enough wine and ‘started to buy wines in secondary crus in the Valley of the Marne’. The pressure increased in the 1870s when the merchants first started to buy wine from the Aube, 112 kilometres south of Epernay, where they already made sparkling wine. This suffered from mildew and was gradually replaced by the Gamay, the high-yielding grape used most famously to make Beaujolais.

  When the artist who called himself ‘Bertal’ wandered round the Marne in the mid-1870s he noted that ‘the inferior cuvées are composed of almost everything; even wines from Orleans are shipped in for them’. Twenty years later the Revue des Deux Mondes pinned the blame for the spread of the vineyards (and the consequential reduction in quality) firmly onto the cut-throat price competition: ‘in practice they were transforming wines from various departments and from many European countries’.

  Not surprisingly, these wholesale and uncontrolled imports aroused enormous bitterness among the growers. As one radical, René Lamarre, wrote in 1890, ‘my father told me that eighteen years ago he had followed one cuvée: grapes bought at Essanes, Treloup in the Aisne, at Chatillon etc. passed in front of his door at Damery; they were pressed at Cumieres; the cuvée was sold at Hautvillers, where the wines, together probably with some additions, were bottled and subsequently sold as brut without any additives for 2.50 francs a bottle to one of the most important firms in Epernay, which wine never leaves at less than 6 francs a bottle. So here is a wine for which the producer was paid 0.50 francs, which cost between one and 1.50 francs to make and for which the drinker will pay between 6 and 8 francs.’27

  These lesser wines were used in the increasing number of ‘Buyers’ Own Brands’, the BOBs so familiar to supermarket shoppers today. In 1899 alone the names of seven imaginary dukes (d’Avenay, de Berry, de Chaitton, de Cramant, de Lombardie, de Senac, de Sezanne) were registered as brand names. The next step, naturally, was to imitate the names of well-known brands. Typical was Theophile Roederer, named after a frontman from Strasbourg. Founded in 1861, the firm operated for forty years before being bought by the ‘real’ Roederers. A two-class system had developed, enormously damaging the name of champagne. The image was so badly damaged that in his novel Germinal Emile Zola wrote that ‘the maidservant poured out a glass of Rhine wine instead of a glass of champagne, which she thought too common’.

  Lamarre was a lone voice, but prophetic. He saw that only a monopoly of supply, including the Aube, could help the vignerons28 in their battle with the merchants. Meanwhile the ‘real’ Champagne region was producing only enough wine to fill 24 million bottles, while 110 million were being sold. Lamarre saw the consequences of the increasing divergence in standards between the lesser so-called champagnes and the fierce insistence of some of the better firms on maintaining their standards: ‘Within ten years we will no longer recognize the name of champagne, but only those of Roederer, Planckaert, Bollinger, without any idea what the wines will be made out of.’

  He was being unfair to the collective conscience of the major houses, who were increasingly aware that they could command a premium price for their products only if they protected the good name of champagne, as well as their particular brand name, and that only they could act effectively as spokesmen for the region. As early as 1844 a group of merchants led by Henri-Louis Walbaum of Heidsieck29 brought an action against an individual who had branded the corks of his sparkling Saumur with the names of Aÿ and Verzy. Walbaum relied on an 1824 statute which prevented anyone from putting a false name of origin on any product. There were also individual initiatives – Bollinger successfully prosecuted two growers who delivered grapes which had come from other communes. But collective action was clearly required to provide any effective and permanent protection.

  In 1882, the year which saw the final triumph of the brands in England, seventy-four individuals representing sixty firms got together to form a ‘Syndicat du Commerce des vins de Champagne’. This was to prove a crucial organization in Champagne’s successful attempts to defend the reputation, and the name, of champagne. The syndicate sprang from an initiative of Henri-Louis’ son, Florens Walbaum, together with Mumm and Giesler, all major exporters. They were furious at an official document claiming that sales of real champagne in the United States had fallen, not only because of competition, but also because of quality problems. The Reims Chamber of Commerce released the offending paper without comment. The merchants first tried to get more of their brethren elected to the Chamber of Commerce. They failed, and as a result the major houses, ‘the dozen or so crowned heads of Champagne’, as the British merchant Ian Maxwell-Campbell described them, realized they needed to form their own organization. The resulting Syndicat immediately started to use every weapon it could, through lawsuits as well as intervention by the French authorities at home and abroad. The Syndicat immediately wrote to French consuls asking for their help and asked for help from the French government against a German law which, it claimed, actively helped the fraudsters. It was also prepared to take on its own government if necessary – fighting a long battle to secure a reduction in the tax on the sugar the members used.30

  The Syndicat’s first diplomatic victory came with the Convention of Madrid in 1890. This established, for the first time, an international legal framework protecting noms d’origine, names which indicated the geographical origin of a particular product. But the ruling was applied only slowly, even in France itself, and in some countries, including Russia and the United States, it provoked a nationalistic backlash. This often took the form of tariffs, especially after the French had erected customs barriers of their own in 1892. When the McKinley tariff was first introduced by the United States sales dropped because champagne was not included in the first list of exemptions (it was in the second). In Germany the Champenois were caught in a political battle. Although the German government was anxious to secure French help in a row over the Congo, it was not prepared to conciliate the Champenois at the expense of its own sparkling drinks industry. In revenge for the French tariff the Germans slapped on a 60 per cent tariff – the step which induced Eugene Mercier, among others, to make ‘champagne’ in Germany. Then the British Exchequer imposed an ad valorem tax. This naturally hit (expensive) champagnes for a couple of years until it was replaced by a flat rate tax of 6s. per dozen on all sparkling wines. The Exchequer also tried to tax the profits made by the subsidiaries that firms like Clicquot and Pommery had established in Britain. The French houses won their point, eventually.

  Harassment was often piled on top of taxes. Russian customs officials tried to impose an additional tariff because the bottles were bigger than those used for ordinary wines. They made additional difficulties because the wine, they claimed, was not accompanied by the precise documents required. American customs officials went even further. They wanted precise figures for the value, not only of the wine itself but also of the bottles.

  But imitations were a far worse problem than even the most bloody-minded excise official.
The Champenois were not the only ones to suffer. One merchant in New York was selling fake burgundies and clarets as well as imitation champagnes. The difference was that the Champenois were well enough organized to fight back. They were engaged in a world war against imitations – a precursor of today’s battles by makers of everything from clothes to perfumes. In Chile the locals would save old champagne bottles for refilling with their own concoctions. Everywhere there were imitations and frauds. The worst offenders were the Hungarians. One ingenious local substituted Clioquot for Clicquot. Others would steam the labels off genuine bottles and stick them onto bottles of their own. It took two years to prosecute one delinquent: and although one prosecution ended in a three-month jail sentence the Syndicat found that ‘the authorities in these countries seem to exercise their ingenuity in looking for ways to help the fraud industry’. Even legal remedies could be counterproductive. The French Consul General in St Petersburg was a great help in prosecuting Russian fraudsters but the prescribed punishment was so disproportionately severe that the Russian courts naturally often found the defendants innocent.

  One crucial battle, in the United States, was permanently lost in a defeat which has enabled other winemakers to continue to sell their sparkling wines as champagne for a century. The Champenois had relied on the Pure Food Act which stated specifically that only wine from the Champagne districts of France could be sold as such. Indeed, in the early years of this century smarter bars and restaurants had abandoned the habit of selling native sparklers as ‘champagnes’. They then waited for the result of a legal battle designed to protect the good name of Vichy water. It was eventually decided against Vichy which, the courts decreed, had fallen into the public domain because it had become too broadly used to be entitled to protection. So the Syndicat had to try and fight its own case. It asked for help in paying the legal expenses. Their lawyer wanted to be paid by results: the case would cost $15,000 if he lost but $50,000 if he won. The Syndicat’s members were not prepared to put up the necessary money, possibly because the market was of major importance to only three of them, and they remained confident that their names would prove of greater importance than the generic name of champagne. On top of this blow, the financial crisis of 1907 had a severe effect on the champagne-drinking classes.