The potential for expansion was undoubtedly there and locals reckoned that at least a thousand superbly situated hectares would be available. Many quality-conscious merchants would much prefer this, more sweeping, change to the gradual planting of increasingly marginal land within the existing appellation. For, like the 1855 classification of the great wines of Bordeaux, the 1927 classification of Champagne had become seemingly untouchable. Both provide what is still a remarkably accurate overall picture, a tribute to the shrewdness of past winemakers in choosing the best slopes, but nevertheless both were snapshots of a vineyard at a given moment.
The first real step towards change came in 1984 when the all-powerful Institut National des Appellations Contrôlées (INAO) got the right to class the terroirs on ‘technical criteria’, in other words to examine new communes in Champagne as if they were applying to be a new appellation. Three years later Laurent Panigai of the CIVC conducted a rigorous and detailed examination of all the criteria over every parcel of land in the existing vineyard. As he said: ‘Every possible aspect is being taken into account, forcing geologists, geographers, morphologists, pedologists and meteorologists to work together as never before. Twenty sub-regions, tens of thousands of samples of soil, subsoil, the varieties and rootstocks – and of course microclimates.’ To which he could have added favourable exposition to avoid west-facing slopes exposed to cold winter or spring rains, the existence of vegetation which grows on warm chalk, enough chalk, natural drainage, and good water reserves. He concluded that up to 3,000 hectares of additional suitable land was available, nearly a tenth of the existing vineyard area.
The locals immediately realized the likely consequences. In 2003 the CIVC, anxious not to be involved with the inevitable horde of growers unhappy at the eventual outcome of any investigations, happily handed over the whole project to the INAO. The process is proving to be a lengthy one. A full report was handed over to the CIVC but only selected individual communes and was not parcellaire, that is, it did not distinguish specific parcels of vines. In any case with sales stabilizing at 300 million bottles a year, stock of three years’ sales and possible production of 350 million from existing vineyards the panic has subsided while the INAO conducts a lengthy examination parcellaire of every possible site.
Luckily only two existing communes were considered unworthy of the appellation and one of those is used purely as an experimental plot by Moët so the traumas expected from deselection were avoided. At first sight the list of the forty communes from which the INAO is choosing the most suitable sites was pretty confused. While, for instance, it proposes the removal of Orbais l’Abbaye, the most southerly commune in the Surmelin valley west of Epernay, it would add La Ville sous Orbais just to the north and six other communes along the same valley. But a closer examination reveals a more logical picture, with thirty-two out of the forty clustered in four distinct zones, all close to existing vineyards. Perhaps the most notable single fact about the new communes is a negative if unsurprising one: that they are all close to existing vineyards, for thirty-one out of the forty selected were in four regions, to the north and above all to the west of Reims, seven more to the south-west including round Sezanne, one in the department of the Aisne to the north-west of the present appellation and only two in the Haute-Marne in the extreme south-east. At the same time the much larger area of the zone d’elaboration, in which only champagne can be produced – to avoid the production of other, obviously lesser, sparkling wines in the Champagne region – has been tidied up.
The most obvious communes to be chosen were Fontaine sur Aÿ and Champfleury above the main road south from Reims to Epernay – like Fontaine they fill inexplicable gaps between two other vinegrowing communes. But the biggest concentration is round Mongueux, an isolated hill west of Troyes and forming the western boundary of the Aube, a commune long famous for its superb Chardonnays. Mongueux would be surrounded by no fewer than eleven new communes. In the south-east there are four new communes round Vitry le Francois, an historically important vineyard resurrected in the 1970s when it was granted production rights over 500 hectares while its qualities were further recognized in the 1990s when it doubled in size. Then there are the new communes in a semicircle above the vineyards in the Ardre and Vesle valleys north-west of Reims. There are a scatter of new ones in the increasingly important Aube. And there’s even one new commune near De Gauille’s shrine at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises – the neighbouring Colombey-le Sec is already in the appellation.
LES RICEYS
The winemakers at Les Riceys – three enchanting winegrowing villages in the Aube 128 kilometres south of Epernay – claim that it was introduced to the court at Versailles in the late seventeenth century by the masons building the chateau. One day, it is said, King Louis XIV, watching them at work, tasted the wine and approved of it. A pretty legend, and indeed the wine itself bears the hallmark of an ancient relic, studiously preserved. The wine comes, not from the heartland of Champagne on the Marne, but from the Aube. The wine is indeed the translucent clairet colour used to describe the wines from Champagne at the time. It is still made in the way described by the eighteenth-century author Nicolas Bidet: ‘the grapes are picked in strong sun as for red wines’ – to extract the maximum colour from the skins – ‘no égrappage52 but a light crushing in the vat where the grapes are steeped for a night before being pressed’, and then vinified and matured for a year in small oak casks. Today’s Rosé des Riceys comes only from especially sunny, well-drained plots. It used to be produced only in warm sunny years, but can now be produced almost every year. But the grapes are still picked on hot afternoons, in a deliberate attempt to capture every possible element of colour in them. They say ‘The colour varies, the taste doesn’t’, and this helps explain the very varying descriptions of the colour of the wines of Champagne in the seventeenth century.
Today there are fifteen producers, responsible for 60,000 bottles of a wine which some locals say is ‘legendary but unsaleable’ on account of its relatively high price and the fact that few of today’s drinkers have ever heard of it. And to drink, it is, as the locals put it Ca bourgignonne – ‘it reminds you of a burgundy’ – unsurprisingly since the Côte d’Or department which produces Burgundy is only a few kilometres away. When young it has a rich but a little sharp almost peachy taste, but a 2011 I tasted was already a trifle hard.
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49Le Vignoble et le vin de Champagne.
50Champagne: The Wine, The Land and The People.
51Growers cannot tell for a couple of years if a vine which has apparently survived has not been so weakened that it will die during one of the following winters.
52Removal of the stalks.
10
THE VINES AND THE GRAPES
VINES – YOUNG, OLD ... AND HEALTHY
Nothing about the making of champagne is easy, and no aspect is more problematic than growing the grapes. Too little was known about the subject to help in choosing the first generation of post-phylloxera vines, mostly planted in the 1920s. But the vines are uprooted every thirty years, so another opportunity occurred when the second generation of grafted vines was planted after 1945. These were mostly the result of massal selection, in which cuttings were taken from the healthiest looking plants. Even so, because the vines had not been treated during the Second World War and little or nothing was known about virus diseases, quite a lot of diseased vines were planted. Even healthy vines were liable to the leaf-roll which only attacks unhealthy vines in other regions.
When the next wave of replanting started in the 1960s the major growers were starting to get to grips with clonal selection – choosing one particularly promising plant and reproducing its qualities. This itself produced problems. ‘You mustn’t look for quantity,’ Georges Vesselle told me, ‘and you have to decide whether you depend on one clone, or whether to mix them and find the appropriate clone for every cru – it was so much simpler before phylloxera, each cru automatically had its own massal s
election.’ But the present generation owes a great deal to Vesselle and to his colleagues in other firms and at the CIVC3’s own research institute, who are producing increasingly suitable vines – and if they can produce, say, later-budding Chardonnays they will be able to alter the balance of varieties in the whole vineyard.
The vines are ‘bench-grafted’ indoors, left for a time in hot-boxes to enable the scar from the graft to heal, and then bedded out in special nurseries. They will then be planted in the vineyard, from which their predecessors will have been uprooted. The process creates both physical and biochemical problems. In Patrick Forbes’ words:
When a vine has been in the ground for between twenty-five and thirty-five years, its roots are embedded in the soil and subsoil with a vice-like grip and enormous strength is required to uproot the stump. The usual procedure is, first, to scoop out a great hole round the stump with pickaxes and crowbars, and then to haul out the stump with a chain harnessed to a horse or a winch. Even when a winch is used there is always a mighty tug-of-war before the roots snap or yield, and sometimes several hours of intense effort are required to uproot a single stump.
Forbes was writing in the 1960s, before the arrival in most of the vineyards of machinery powerful enough to replace the historic combination of horse and manpower. The method he describes so graphically had one major advantage. It removed much more of the root system than modern ploughs and machinery. For, however the vines are removed (and these days over 5 million vines are uprooted every year) some roots are left and they continue to live, for up to five years in chalky soil, eight in clay, and the fungi and bugs which feed off them are dangerous for the young vines. So the winemakers face an agonizing decision. Ideally they should leave the ground fallow for five years – ‘The sun is the best disinfectant,’ said Claude Gimmonet, when he was in charge of the vineyards of Moët & Chandon in the 1980s. The alternative is to fumigate the soil and replant eighteen months later. The five-year wait may be acceptable in some classed vineyards in Bordeaux where the vines live for sixty years or more, but is economically impossible in Champagne, where yields start to drop sharply once a vine is twenty-five or thirty years old. Since the new vines are not producing regularly until they are four or five years old, leaving the ground fallow for five years would mean that a vineyard would not produce for up to ten years as against a mere twenty-five years in production
So growers have to take the risk and rely on the fumigants reaching the roots – most of which are, in fact, relatively shallow, less than half a metre below the surface, well within the capacity of modern ploughs. But this in turn depends on the friability of the soil and its ability to withstand the heavy wheels of modern tractors, which tend to compact the soil, while the massive blades of modern ploughs turn the soil over in heavy solid lumps.
PRUNING
Before phylloxera the vines formed a compact mass, with up to 10,000 per hectare shielding each other from the wind and preventing over-rampant growth. The same idea is behind modern planting patterns, with less than four feet between the rows and the vines themselves, giving up to 8,000 vines per hectare. The rows have to be measured with some precision so that the machines can work as close to the vines as possible – Vesselle experimented with laser-guided planting to increase the precision. Like so much else in Champagne the method of pruning is strictly controlled. In 1938 the French government limited to three the number of pruning systems permitted. This was not just a piece of bureaucratic fuss. ‘Pruning in itself is not fundamental,’ says Claude Badour, formerly the CIVC’s research director, ‘it’s a means to an end,’ or rather two ends: to limit the yield of the vines and to ensure that the grapes are grown close to the ground. They will be more awkward to pick but will ripen better since they catch the heat and light reflected from the chalky soil – ‘our solar panels’ in Vesselle’s words. This ‘microclimate below the leaves’, in Badour’s words, produces effective heat only up to a foot above the ground. So the vines are pruned back below two feet in height. ‘We were saving the vignerons from themselves,’ says Badour. ‘We had to be strict. We’re simply trying to discourage overproduction. Unfortunately, if we allowed a maximum of five or six shoots then the vignerons would automatically take all the shoots they were allowed.’
The reasoning was intuitively grasped by a visiting Scottish gardening expert who exclaimed: ‘It’s just like the way I prune my prize roses.’ The object was the same – to limit the yield and thus improve the quality. Nevertheless, the restrictions can create their own problems. In the spring of 1986, after two successive dreadful winters, the vines had to be cut back very hard. This automatically meant that the grapes were closer to the ground and thus more susceptible to rot from the damp earth in the late summer just as they were ripening.
The three systems allowed are, however, rather distinctive. The Chablis method, as the name implies, was developed for Chardonnay vines in a northern climate, and is used for nine-tenths of the Chardonnay vines in Champagne. It allows four main branches, each of which is rigorously pruned every year. As soon as the furthest gets too close to the next vine it is lopped off and another shoot allowed from the base.
For the Pinot Noir the Champenois prefer the Cordon de Royat system, a single branch trained to a maximum height of 60 centimetres above the ground. Tom Stevenson describes the result – how, approaching Bouzy in winter, ‘the vines look like columns of gnarled old men in perfect formation; they are all face on, bent almost double, as if with one arm dug into the pit of the back and the other seeking the support of a stick.’ The Guyot, only allowed in lesser growths, does not have a permanent main branch, merely one (Guyot simple) or two (double) shoots springing out of the stump of the vine. Because it has no permanent main shoot it falls foul of Badour’s basic rule, which is to rely on one or more old branches to act as throttles preventing too much nourishment reaching the new shoots. Whatever the system, the pruning, carried out in what is generally a bitter east wind in early March, provides one of Champagne’s most memorable experiences: the sight and smell of the sweet, clear blue haze rising from thousands of vine-prunings being burnt in neat stacks.
FROSTS, PESTS AND PARASITES
The winters are cold and hard work. Between the time the buds open and the harvest, the work is less physically demanding, but the tension rises all the time from the end of March when the buds start to open (the debourrement) and the new shoots start to sprout. From then on the problems that can be created by a snap frost grow worse. In 1913 and 1921 there was frost while the vine was actually flowering. This led to total disaster, as the cold literally nipped the flowers in the bud. To combat late frosts the Champenois used to use paraffin burners, the rather charmingly named chaufferettes. They are now experimenting with spraying water on the vines, for the frost will freeze the water, not the vine and, in any case, the danger has been reduced by climate change.
During the period between the flowering, generally in mid-June, and the harvest the vine is subject to many and various pests and parasites – more so, it seems, in Champagne than elsewhere, for the climate is northern and the vines produce a great deal of juice. One familiar problem is coulure, when the grapes do not develop at all. ‘We don’t know what it is,’ says Georges Vesselle, ‘although we can associate it with wet and cold and the general well-being of the vine. We believe that with better vines which are the result of clonal selection we can minimize the problem.’ Coupled with coulure is millerandage, which results in tiny hard berries which neither develop nor ripen. This proved a blessing in disguise in 1986 when the Chardonnay was attacked by millerandage, which left gaps in the bunches. So when other varieties, especially the Pinot Noir, were attacked by rot later in the summer, the gaps left by the millerandage in the bunches of Chardonnay allowed air to blow away the rot. As a result, the 1986 Chardonnay crop was smaller in quantity but superior in quality to the Pinot Noir.
Modern techniques have conquered some of the Champenois’ old enemies. Cochylis, the night
moth, and its cousin the Eudemis are now less dangerous than they were: they can’t stand metal so the use of metal wires to support the vines reduced their ravages. Pyral, a yellow moth, is an old enemy of the Champenois. It was first spotted in 1733 but is still around. ‘You can hear them eating at night,’ says Georges Vesselle. They used to be trapped by attracting them to the bright lights of acetylene lamps. Now, more prosaically, Vesselle can be assured of silent slumber thanks to modern insecticides. And chlorose, so dangerous to grafted plants, is being fought on two fronts: applying iron sulphate and selecting suitable rootstocks.
But some problems are endemic in northern vineyards where the grapes are harvested well into damp and misty autumn weather, although thanks to climate change the harvest can now begin as early as the end of August when it used to start at the end of September. Grey rot was a particular problem – the moulds destroy the colour cells in the skins and then taint the juice. But the locals recognize that they just have to live with it. ‘The only solution is sunshine,’ says Vesselle – although he exaggerates. The rot is confined to the skin of the grapes, and in champagne-making the juice is never left in contact with the skins.
The Story of Champagne Page 21