CREATING THE CHAMPAGNE
Winemakers responsible for table wines, even the finest, have a relatively simple task: to extract the key qualities in the grapes they harvest and avoid adding any qualities not inherent in them. Makers of champagne have to make a number of decisions which will affect the quality – and the particular style – of the wine once it has been fermented for the first time. Outsiders might say that theirs is an industrial task, they themselves prefer to say that it’s a technological one. Either way they’re doing it better today than they did thirty, let alone a hundred years ago, resulting in better wines. Over the past thirty years the many technical improvements have been reinforced by climate change. ‘The unfavourable consequences of extreme increases in temperature,’ says Dominic Moncomble, the CIVC’s technical director, ‘will affect our consumers far more than they will affect us.’
Against all expectations they have been helped by climate change, which has resulted in a number of major developments. This is a counterintuitive statement since the basic quality of the drink has always lain in a proper balance between the flavours and the acidity in the fruit, and in theory the higher the temperature the higher the degree of alcohol in the grapes and the lower the precious acidity. But history shows that lower acidity does not necessarily result in inferior wines. As Moncomble points out, while climate change certainly poses a major long-term threat to the inherent quality of the wine ‘the lowest acidity in history was recorded in 1947, one of the greatest vintages since the war and, says his colleague Laurent Panigai ‘no one complained at the time about the lack of acidity and the strength of the wines’. ‘In any case,’ adds Michel Valade, another CIVC apparatchik, ‘even the most experienced tasters can’t detect a difference of one or one and a half per cent in the level of acid’ and, a final determining point, over the last twenty-five years there’s been no correlation between the levels of acid and the quality of the wine.
So far, one might say, so good. The most obvious improvement, of course, has been the reduction of the threat from icy winters and the ability to harvest the grapes up to three weeks earlier, bringing the date forward from late September to late August or the first week of September – although some recent vintages like 2003, 2004 and 2015 have been too hot to be comfortable. While daytime temperatures have increased the nights remain cool, and this is the crucial factor in ensuring the grapes retain their acidity. Further, chalk both drains easily and holds rainwater so that even in years of drought and extreme heat like 2003 they were far less affected than most of France’s other vineyards.
The average quality of the grapes – and thus of the wines – has steadily improved over the last generation and because demand has stagnated there is no longer any pressure to look for increased yields. As one merchant puts it, ‘Forcing a vineyard to produce is totally finished because of the lack of any relationship between yield and quality.’ With the maximum yield which it has achieved in a couple of years recently of 15,900 kilos (the equivalent of 10,000 bottles) for every hectare of vines, the region could produce 430 million bottles, 100 million more than the record reached in 1999.
The ‘Champagne community’ shepherded by the CIVC has played its part in improving quality. Yields from the pressoir have been reduced while the third pressing was eliminated, reducing production by 7 million bottles and thus, hopefully, also eliminating the unscrupulous firms which were selling the greenest fizz. At the same time the minimum period wines were to be aged in bottle was increased by three months to fifteen months – the aim to increase it to eighteen has not yet been achieved.
PRESSING QUESTIONS
Once the bunches of grapes have been picked – with the sharpest of scissors – the next preoccupation is to get them safe and sound to the pressoirs, the press houses scattered throughout the region. This is less simple than it sounds. The pressoirs should be within a few kilometres of the vines, a practice pioneered by none other than Dom Perignon himself. The grapes must be kept cool to stop them from bursting and staining the juice, or, even worse, starting to ferment prematurely – any juice Moët receives in the paniers is automatically relegated to the rebeches, the lowest category of all, and is never used to make champagne. Before World War II the mannequins in which the grapes were transported were made of wicker to allow constant contact with the air. The now universally-used plastic paniers – the size and shape of the oblong baskets used in launderettes – are still pierced with airholes. Premature fermentation used to be prevented by harvesting as early as possible in the morning, while the mannequins were often carried to the pressoirs at night.
The pressoirs are supposed to provide the winemakers with a source of healthy raw material, but they are difficult to control, simply because there are so many of them. Yields have more than doubled while the capacity of ordinary presses remains the standard Champenois measure, the marc, 4,000 kilos. A small pressoir with three presses can handle the grapes from only 7 or 8 hectares a day. So, in theory, the region now needs over twelve hundred presses to handle its increased production – although a handful of much larger presses increase the average throughput. Even so, there are bound to be far more, and more scattered, pressoirs than any of the other links in the champagne-making chain.
Each load of grapes is pressed twice. The first produces the cuvée, a maximum of 2,050 litres for every marc – roughly three-quarters of the total amount of juice permitted, which must never be more than a hundred litres for every 150 kilos of grapes. The mass of partly crushed grapes is too dense for the juice to flow on subsequent pressings, so it has to be cut with a special spade (a truly back-breaking job) and the grapes then crushed once more to produce the tailles, literally the ‘cuts’. Again the quantities are limited. Before the days of modern electric motors up to seven or eight pressings were required, but today all the juice from a marc emerges after the two pressings, each of which takes an hour. The cuvée from the finest white grapes are topped with a light-olivey froth and give off a lovely aroma of grapefruit and lemon, while the bouquet from the black grapes is more fruity. The tailles, which are less acid than the cuvée, give off a decidedly musty aroma. The marc is then cut up and hauled to another press to produce the rebeche – the final juice which is sometimes turned into thin, bitter wine to be given to the harvesters. The final lump of rock-solid marc is hauled off to the distillery of Jean Goyard on the eastern outskirts of Aÿ which handles all Champagne’s leftovers.
There are still some traditional, romantic presshouses left in the region. One of the finest is the splendid pressoir at Mareuil-sur-Ay, housed within a Louis XV-style chateau-cum-farmyard built in the middle of the nineteenth century by the Duke of Montebello, wine merchant, politician, and son of Marshal Lannes, one of Napoleon’s favourite generals. The Montebello pressoir holds three classic vertical presses, each with a circular roof of tightly fastened wooden shutters pressing down inside a shallow receptacle with slatted wooden sides. In the days before the pressoirs were turned by electric motors they were manned by teams of navvies and coal-miners, men used to steady rhythmic physical work who were paid six times the rate received by an ordinary harvester. Like most other pressoirs, Montebello is working en prestation, under contract to local growers whose juice has already been sold to major firms.
At the other extreme is the pressoir at Chigny-les-Roses on the plain below the Montagne de Reims, installed by the local cooperative thirty years ago and now proudly demonstrated to winemakers from all over the world – although even this famous juice-factory can cope only with the 120 hectares of vines in Chigny itself. The paniers are loaded onto a continuous chain which tips them into a series of cylindrical presses containing two sausage-shaped rubber balloons, which squeeze them gently against the sides of the cylinder. Champagne presses have always been designed to provide the greatest possible surface-to-volume ratio, and thus ensure that the mass of grapes is pressed as evenly and gently as possible.
There are, of course, bigger pressoirs than those at Ch
igny. At Moët’s installations in Epernay – fearsomely large – they still use vertical presses, and although these are fed by a chain similar to that at Chigny the marc still needs turning over between pressings. As the juice flows, even the lay observer can detect fascinating differences between the qualities. Although the juice flows naturally, precautions have to be taken in any year when there is even a hint of rot. At Montebello they drained the first 100 litres from each marc during the 1986 harvest. The difference in colour was dramatic. The first juice was a dirty sludgy pink, the rest a lovely clear glowing colour (which unfortunately disappears in fermentation). The alternative is to treat the juice with a neutral clay, bentonite. In the bigger pressoirs or wineries the juice is then cooled to -4°C to start the purification process before it goes for debourbage – allowing the juice to settle in concrete tanks for ten or twelve hours to remove the stalks, before flowing to the fermenting vats. Ideally these should be directly beneath the tanks used for debourbage but today an increasing proportion of the juice is transported in tanker lorries to a winery some kilometres away.
The pressoirs were the subject of the most dramatic – and expensive – changes required to improve the quality of the wine. ‘Everything happens during pressing,’ says Dominique Demarville, the cellar master at Veuve Clicquot, ‘If you take care at this crucial stage afterwards everything is quite straightforward.’ The traditional press was simply a matter of two massive stones being pressed together and remains a practical proposition because it had so little effect in oxidizing the pulp and is still suitable for champagne because of its broad surface area. Modern Vaselin-type horizontal presses, which have two motors pushing the walls of the press together like vinous cymbals were not ideal. These were presses which, one could say, squeezed the grapes until the pips squeaked; they may have been suitable for the tough skins of black grapes like the Cabernet Sauvignon but were far from ideal for pressing the thin-skinned Pinot Noir in Champagne. So in a remarkably short time hundreds of presses were replaced, usually by the preferred cylindrical presses containing a membrane which gradually squeezes the grapes. Nevertheless, the classic type of vertical press is still manufactured by the firm of Coquard, now a cooperative.
As a result of the changes all the pressoirs in the region are now capable of producing clean juice worthy of the quality of the gapes. The first decisions as to the quality and style of the final product are taken when the juice undergoes its first fermentation into a rather uninteresting wine of between ten and eleven degrees – up to three degrees higher than it was before the arrival of climate change. And gone are the disastrous levels such as the miserable eight degrees reached in the icy year of 1980.
THE FIRST FERMENTATION
‘Because wine is such a stable product,’ Dominique Foulon of Moët told me thirty long years ago, ‘and because winemaking is such a small-scale business, the winemakers are behind all sorts of people: the dairy industry, which is working with a much more unstable product, in terms of cleanliness and control of the stability of the product; the brewers who understand the use of yeasts and the control of fermentation far better than the winemakers: the Australians who understand the prise de mousse far better than us; and finally the drug manufacturers in terms of detailed quality control.’
Nevertheless, the Champenois have, with good reason, always considered themselves highly capable winemakers. Even their still wines involved considerable technical skills because theirs was such a northerly vineyard. More recently, because the second fermentation could never be natural, they were forced to be more interested in the scientific basis of fermentation than other French winemakers. Most obviously, they had to learn to use the artificial yeasts which are still uncommon in other fine wine areas. ‘We’ve done lots of work on cultivating good yeasts to make sure that they drive out bad ones in difficult years,’ said Philippe Coulon, then of Moët, which is now breeding ‘good’ yeasts more intensively, and on a larger scale, than ever before. This is not new, the Champenois have been using selected yeasts for nearly a hundred years.
Before the fermentation the juice has to be inspected and tested. At some of the bigger cuveries, like the Centre Viticole de Champagne at Chouilly, a cooperative which includes over 6 per cent of the producers of champagne, all the juice is centrifuged to get rid of the native yeasts and to ensure that the debourbage has been satisfactory. ‘Cleanliness is half the quality of champagne,’ they say at the CVC. A telltale sign is how much sulphur dioxide has been used to prevent the oxygen getting at the wine. A lot (and the smaller cooperatives are reckoned to be the worst offenders) means that the pressing has not been as scrupulously clean as it should be.
In bad years in the past it was relatively normal to add a touch of very strong brandy, esprit de cognac, blended with some neutral spirit to the juice to beef up the alcohol content – a habit universally abandoned after the disastrous 1972 vintage. Nowadays the actual first fermentation is simplicity itself. Most firms now produce their own special strains of yeasts whose enzymes convert the sugar in the juice into alcohol. And it is usual to chaptalise, to add sugar during the fermentation, to increase the alcoholic content of the wine. But, apart from that, the juice is simply left for between ten days and three weeks, first to boil and bubble (the bouillage) and then to ferment more quietly.
In 1945 most champagnes were fermented in wooden casks, although cement vats had made their appearance after 1918. After 1945 stainless steel vats of very varying sizes became an almost universal choice. These vats can hold up to a thousand hectolitres, enough wine to make over 130,000 bottles, part of a further transformation in the scale of the winemaking process from a craft industry, into a process more reminiscent of the dairy industry.
The change was not merely one of scale. It also involved blending most champagnes before the first fermentation, a complete abandonment of the age-old idea that a blend was patiently created from dozens of small, highly individual casks of already-fermented wine. This is now quite impractical for the basic non-vintage champagnes sold by most major firms. Even in a heavy-yielding year it requires the grapes from well over 12 hectares of vines to fill a thousand hectolitre vat. Even the biggest of communes is simply not going to produce enough juice to fill so big a vat in the limited period – at most two days – for which the juice can be held before it is fermented. So the switch to the larger vats associated with vastly increased production reduces the individuality of most of the biggest-selling champagnes. Yet the switch to mass-production in stainless steel was desperately needed: the winemakers simply could not have coped with the 700,000 casks which would have been required to ferment the quantity of juice regularly produced these days. Moreover, without stainless steel, the surplus wine reserved for future use could never have been stored at all.
These days even the most casual visitor can guess at the individuality of a firm’s champagnes by seeing if the vats in which they are fermented vary in size. The smaller the size, the more conscientious the firm in safeguarding the different styles of the grapes as long as possible, so that the assemblage, blending the still wines before they are bottled to acquire their fizz, is done with as distinct and varied a series of wines as possible. At Moët’s winery the sizes vary from the 1,000 hectolitre vats used for the tailles, down to the 650 hectolitre vats used for juice from the Aube, to vats of 350 hectolitres for better-class juice and even smaller ones to make the wines used for Dom Perignon. Some firms, like Pommery, have claimed that they can blend their wines before they are fermented in order to achieve the style they want. They know the characteristics of the grapes they are getting from their own vineyards and the many suppliers, their regular livreurs who, in many cases, have been selling their grapes to the firm for generations, and the smaller the vats the more selective the blenders can be over the origin and quality of their wines
Everyone is looking to control the temperature they deem appropriate. Dominic Demarville is looking for ‘cool skin contact’ right from the start of ferme
ntation. Nowadays the temperature of fermentation can be exactly controlled, depending on the style of the wine required. In the past the only control possible was to house the casks in a part of the cellars with an appropriate temperature and hope for the best. The change to the present system has often been in two steps. Typically, each of the new vats installed at Pommery in the 1980s, carefully placed within the dignified old premises, has a separate temperature control. The previous cement vats were linked so that there was only one control for all of them.
The higher the temperature, the shorter the fermentation period, and thus the more neutral the wine. So the lower the temperature the more complete the extraction of the essential fruitiness from the grapes. At some wineries the need to ferment for as long a time as possible is balanced by the pressure to use the vats to ferment a second load of juice which prevents the winemaker from controlling the exact period of fermentation he or she requires for the style of wine they wish to produce. Although the juice is still often fermented at between 15°C and 20°C, many firms now specialize in lower temperatures which involves longer fermentation time and probably a need for greater maturity. So it is not surprising that the cult of long, slow fermentation is carried furthest at a relatively small, albeit distinguished, firm, Billecart Salmon, which ferments its wines for a month at a mere 8°C, resulting in light elegant wines.
The Story of Champagne Page 23