Even the most casual visitor is aware of the industrial routine behind the showmanship. The wine is given an appropriate liqueur de tirage, a relatively standard mixture of sugar, old wine and yeasts. The yeast provokes the second fermentation and in doing so adds between one and two degrees of alcohol to the vin clair. The sugar should be mixed with double the quantity of that year’s wine (although some makers, professing ignorance of the regulations, still use older wine to improve the flavour). Moreover, the liqueur is not confined to Champagne. Adding sugar to increase alcoholic strength was standard practice until recently in Bordeaux and is still often required in Champagne’s Burgundian neighbour. Then comes the first touch of modernity in the humdrum crown corks – generally with plastic linings – now almost universally employed for sealing the bottles.
Unfortunately, as Serena Sutcliffe points out, the second fermentation ‘has a nasty habit of exaggerating and underlining any inherent faults in the base wine and, far from disguising an imbalance, such as, for example, acidity, the bubbles would only render it even less palatable.’ The mousse, said Michel Budin of Perrier-Jouët, ‘exaggerates the aromas and the bouquets, and they can be much too heavy.’ The balance is a delicate one, and the easy way out is to create a relatively neutral champagne, whose character can be altered, not at the blending stage, but through the dosage, the liqueur added after the second fermentation.
Champagne is usually blended in strictest secrecy but it then enters into the public domain. Indeed, right through its progress from vin clair to finished bottle there is an element of showmanship, not least in the cellars themselves. These combine the fascination of an underground factory with the carefully casual historic references:‘Yes, that particular cellar was quarried in the thirteenth century, or was it the fourteenth?’
As so often in Champagne, the easiest, quickest path during the second fermentation will not produce the best results. The lower the temperature (which generally means the deeper the cellar) the slower the second fermentation, the smaller and more long-lasting the bubbles, the finer the champagne. Indeed, the locals dislike large vulgar bubbles, calling them yeux de crapauds (toad’s eyes) reckoning that the size is a measure of the youthfulness of the wine.56
Unfortunately for lovers of the picturesque, the makers have abandoned the stacking of the bottles into walls using thin wooden slats and now find it much more convenient to keep their stocks in pallets, either wooden or metal, stacked high in the cellars. This is infinitely less romantic but, by the same token, infinitely less labour-intensive. In all the cellars bottles are shielded from the light (Deutz uses 24-volt bulbs), because even a few ultraviolet rays can be harmful. But Roederer goes further. Its stocks of Cristal are held in special cellars under its offices which are kept in total darkness – all the more vital because the bottles are, of course, clear.
Despite modern methods of vinification, despite the softness and early maturity of the Pinot Meunier, any wine worthy of the name of champagne needs at least two years in bottle for the fruit to develop and overcome the acid. The time on lees is basically required for autolysis – the interaction of the wine with the lees. As Hervé Dantan of Lanson puts it, ‘the wine digests the yeasts. Many compounds like proteins, amino acids, polysaccharides or esters contained in the yeasts are transferred very slowly and changed or combined.’ For Benoit Gouez of Moët more time means ‘an extra layer of reductive aromas… brown flavours such as toast, coffee and grilled nuts.’
Not surprisingly, you never come across anyone prepared to admit that their wines are sold after less than two years in bottle. Some of the best firms, most notably Krug, do not allow a bottle out of their cellars unless it has been maturing for at least five years. Of course any increase in the minimum maturation period would be followed by a corresponding rise in the price – but only of the cheapest champagnes, and since these are the ones which are dragging the name down, hurting them would not be as damaging to the good name of Champagne as letting them continue.
BOTTLES – THEIR SHAPES
The size of bottle matters in a champagne, both positively and negatively. The makers themselves prefer the magnum. ‘The ratio between the volume of air and the volume of wine is the best,’ says Edmond Maudiere of Moët. ‘The ratio between the yeasts and the wine may also be best in this size.’ The change in British drinking habits (and the abandonment of imperial in favour of metric measures) has been responsible for the regrettable disappearance of the imperial pint, three-quarters of a bottle. This was designed to provide enough champagne to satisfy a gentleman dining alone – it was Churchill’s favourite measure.
Nothing better illustrates the search for novelty than the attempts to find new attractive shapes of bottle. These have to be decided long before the wine is actually launched – a period lengthened because these special bottles are used only for premium, and thus older, wines. Most bottles are pretty standard, or are modelled after the squat, eighteenth-century model used for Dom Perignon. Perrier-Jouët has its Belle Epoque bottle, which is rather more cylindrical than its rivals and, more importantly, is enamelled with delightful blue and white flowers. In other cases, the more a firm trumpets the originality of the containers it is using, the more the listener is entitled to reflect on whether the concentration on the bottle is not designed to hide the deficiencies of the wine itself.
Most firms ferment only three sizes, half-bottles, bottles and magnums. The other sizes are transvasés, poured from bottles into smaller or larger containers after the second fermentation. This is clearly unsatisfactory, a return to the practice in the eighteenth century, when most of the precious fizz was lost in the transvasement. The quarter-bottles found in aeroplanes are always transvasés, they are simply too small to riddle, and so are most of the bigger bottles, from the jeroboams up.
The Krugs say that wines in containers larger than a magnum are less fresh than in smaller bottles – although the wines from these immense bottles are likely to be drunk under circumstances when no one is actually going to take tasting notes. However, a handful of firms – including Pommery, Deutz and Bollinger – take the risk of allowing bottles up to methusalehs to ferment naturally. The second fermentation in bottles bigger than magnums often creates problems. At Pommery Alain de Polignac could avoid breakages only by reducing the pressure inside the bottles, so that the wine is nearer a cremant than a true champagne grand mousseux.
… and their sizes
Quarter: 20ml
Half: 37.5ml
Medium (or Pinte): 50ml
Standard bottle: 75ml
Magnum: 1.5 litres/2 bottles
Jereboam (or Double Magnum): 3 litres/4 bottles
Rehoboam: 4.5 litres/6 bottles
Methusalah: 6 litres/8 bottle
Salmanasar: 9 litres/12 bottles
Balthazar: 12 litres/16 botles
Nebuchadnezzar: 15 litres/20 bottles
Salomon: 18 litres/24 bottles
Souverain: 26.25 litres/35 bottles
Primat: 27 litres/36 bottles
Melchizedec: 30 litres/40 bottles
RIDDLING
The next step, which begins when the wines are near the end of their period of ageing is the ‘riddling’ process. If the walls of bottles form one of the sights of any cellar, then the remueur, the riddler, at work, twisting and turning up to 40,000 bottles a day, was until recently the most extraordinary. For over a century and a half after Madame Clicquot’s employee M. Muller thought of the idea (see Chapter 4) the bottles were placed neck down (sur pointes) in sloping racks. Every day the remueur turned them slightly to help the detritus slide down the bottle to its neck so that eventually all the remnants of the lees and yeasts have fallen, ready for the disgorgement under pressure that leaves the wine perfectly clear. Until well after 1945 the remueur had to shake as well as turn the bottles because the yeasts didn’t stick together, the glass wasn’t smooth enough and there were traces of the malolactic fermentation which were difficult to budge, all of which
made the remueur’s work more difficult. Improved yeasts have helped the operation, but it was still a long one that employed a great deal of skilled labour and an enormous amount of space.
Over a period of several decades the whole set up was the subject of by far the biggest and most thorough example of wholesale mechanization in the region through the introduction of the gyropalette, a giant metal cage which can be controlled either mechanically or electronically, to imitate the remueur’s movements. The early machines were not properly controllable – originally they consisted merely of concrete racks agitated by a complicated chain mechanism. One particular later type – which shook the bottles energetically – was found to use too much expensive electricity. Although the visitor is fed an awful lot of guff about the supposed loss of quality involved in switching to gyropalettes the change was inevitable, largely a simple matter of economics. Of course, modern winemaking techniques helped. The wines are more homogeneous, they are clearer, the deposits less sticky. But gyropalettes are vitally necessary for reducing labour costs and conserving space – even a bank of gyropalettes occupies only a fraction of the space required for the immense underground parade-grounds full of regiments of pupitres. They also enabled firms (even those as quality-conscious as Roederer) to store their wines on pallets, thus saving very considerable sums in handling charges.
Modern gyropalettes can be programmed to move each bottle as frequently as you choose, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, over five times the frequency of a remueur on an eight-hour day and a five-day week. It was the late Roger Leroy of Duval-Leroy who pointed out to me that the gyropalette can shake the bottle more effectively to dislodge the waste sticking to the sides: it does a more thorough job because it starts from the horizontal, whereas the pupitres start at a fifteen-degree tilt. The revolution is still not complete. Bottles still have a punt – a conical hollow in their bottom – to enable them to be stacked upside down between the remuage and the degorgement. The only major firm which delayed the transition was Moët, which tried, unsuccessfully, to use bulles – encasing the yeasts in a porous plastic ball which is then rolled into the bottle. The ball was simply rolled out again when the time came for the wine to be disgorged.
From the remuage the bottles go through a series of public phases. A very few wines – mostly the larger sizes above the magnum – are disgorged la volée with the degorgeur levering off the temporary stopper with pincers and somehow managing to control the flow – a real show-stopper.57 But virtually all the wines are degorgés à la glace on a specialized production line in an operation performed thousands of times an hour. The necks are plunged into freezing salty water (the saltier the solution, the lower the temperature at which it will freeze). They are left at between -15°C and -30°C for a few minutes, then the stoppers are removed and the gobbet of lees and yeasts pops out without losing more than a few drops of wine.
LIQUEUR D’EXPEDITION
Then comes another moment of secrecy. The onlooker sees the machines which inject the liqueur d’expedition, the mixture which provides the final bottle with its appropriate dose of sugary wine. However, the liqueur has always been a mystery. Not even, or rather especially not, the expert visitor will be told the contents of the liquid specially concocted by every firm which is added to provide even the most characterless blends with an individual touch of style. The table on page 222 shows the legal limits of dosage but, not surprisingly, it’s going steadily down, not only because of riper grapes but because the public’s taste has continued to be for drier wines – typically at Laurent-Perrier the brut is now a mere 10 grams as against 15 grams some years ago. Virtually all the firms with any pretence to quality now offer their brut sans année with under ten grams of sugar but with over a quarter of vins de reserve.
Until the 1920s many firms included all sorts of aromatic products in the liqueur d’expedition, such as stoned peaches and powdered nuts, as well as the essential cane sugar and a good dose of esprit de cognac. Fortunately, although the contents of the liqueur remain a secret closely guarded by the producers and although it can still legally include up to 0.5 per cent brandy this particular additive is no longer used. The quality of the liqueur remains crucial – Drappier, for one, stores stocks of older liqueurs de dosage.
Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, Philippe Coulon, then of Moët told me: ‘It’s the area of trickery, the use of well-rounded old wine can give an artificial feel of roundness to an otherwise thin wine. Using esprit de cognac’ – a stronger spirit than the cognacs sold to the public – ‘in small quantities – gives some depth. It’s the area of trade secrets.’ Even the best houses use the liqueur to give a final touch to the blend, relying heavily on old wines. For Henri Krug, the liqueur ‘removes a certain hardness and smooths the taste. Besides, it’s the last touch which you can add to the wine.’ Salon, the most rarefied of makers, which makes only blanc de blancs from Le Mesnil, varies its dosage to suit the individual customer. ‘We have to adapt but not much. Sugar acts as a mask. Commercially you have to put sugar in younger wines,’ says Xavier Bernard-Bordes, then Salon’s sales director. In general, the greater the percentage of Chardonnay, the less dosage will be needed, since nothing can be harder than a wine from a not very ripe Pinot Noir.
Many firms used to vary the degree of dosage between markets – with the Germans, the Belgians and above all the Americans preferring sweeter wines compared to the Anglo-Saxon taste for dryness. The figures of dosage are often misleading, because what matters is the amount of residual sugar in the final bottle, not the dosage actually added. A few wines are Brut Nature and have no additional dosage at all.
Probably the single biggest problem facing the champagne community is the infamous vente sur lattes, the sale of wines while they are still undergoing their second fermenation. When this happens, and the wines are simply transported from one cellar to another, the only way a particular taste, a definite ‘house’ style can be generated is through the liqueur de dosage. The curtain is firmly lowered for that part of the show. No one is going to wave to a wall of bottles and say casually, ‘Oh we just bought that lot from the CVC.’ Estimates of the size of the trade are necessarily largely guesswork, but it is suggested that it has dropped recently from around 25 to 20 million bottles, which is still well over 5 per cent of the total. This has led one leading merchant to say that only two-fifths of the wines have any individuality, while the majority lack any particular style. This is an exaggeration but it is certainly true of pretty well all the already bottled wines traded sur lattes.
Probably most of the trade is conducted by producers selling cheap wines to supermarkets or for when they are short of wine for relatively marginal markets – my own suspicion is that they are often destined for holiday resorts in hot climates like the Caribbean where the wine will be drunk more carelessly than usual and where an apparent loss of quality can, if necessary, be explained away as the result of the heat or careless handling; all wines should be stored at 15°C so a mere six months in the tropics can age them ten years.
TABLE OF ‘DOSAGE’
In grams per litre of wine:
Brut Nature, Pas Dose or Dosage Zero: zero dosage to less than 3 grams
Extra Brut: 0.6 grams
Brut Under: 12 grams
Extra Dry: 12–17 grams
Sec: 17–32 grams
Demi-Sec: 32–50 grams
Doux: 50+ grams
Most champagnes – over 80 per cent of the total – are still what they call BSA, brut sans année – non-vintage standard dry wines. But recently there has been an increased concentration on a variety of different styles, some of which were previously used in inferior wines. One obvious beneficiary from riper grapes has been the sale of wines with no, or very minimal, dosage. Nevertheless, the region remains cool enough for such wines not to be produced every year. Even Laurent-Perrier, a pioneer – and probably the first – finds that it can’t offer one every year, though they did from 2003 and 2004. The key is t
hat the wines have to be well-balanced, and although they may give very little on the nose they are lightly floral on the palate. Other wines offer a minimal level of sugar. Typically, Devaux’s Ultra D which has a mere 2 grams of sugar is balanced and dry with overtones of vanilla and dried fruit.
Under a CIVC plan, within a few years bottles sold under buyers’ names will have the code names of both the wine-maker and the brand-owner on the label. Obviously the average honeymoon couple on some tropical isle is not going to peer at the small print, but that is not the point. The brand-owner will know that the agents, the importers, local busybodies, wine writers even, will look at the code and find that the firm bought in the wine – and from whom.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
One relatively recent improvement has been in the corks, once made from whole pieces of cork bark. With modern glues you need only one thin roundel which is in contact with the interior of the bottle, so the rest of the cork can be made of bits and pieces. One minor touch, not generally pointed out to visitors, is that some firms soak them in paraffin to make it easier to fit them – sensibly the CVC uses a silicon covering to avoid the danger of contamination. After that all is public again, including the habillage, literally dressing, what we would call the labelling, except that the French word does provide a flavour of the showmanship involved.
The wine obviously needs a certain amount of time before being delivered to the drinker. The minimum ought to be three months but this is not a requirement – though the experts hope it will be. ‘The older the wine,’ says Benoit Gouez of Moët, ‘the more sensitive it is to degorgement’. He allows three months for the brut sans année against a full six months for vintage wines. Devaux is not alone in allowing six months before the wine is sold, ‘so that the liquor can be properly absorbed into the wine,’ while some houses, notably Roederer, consciously leave wines for a couple of months between degorgement and habillage (carried out with special glue to ensure the labels don’t come off in the icy water in which they will probably end up). Then they are dispatched, although obviously a wine destined for the United States can be shipped sooner than one which is going on immediate sale in France itself. Traditional – and knowledgeable – British drinkers know from experience that younger wines from decent firms can and do improve greatly if left for a year or two after purchase, even though the nourishing yeasts and lees have been removed. For a good wine, even a sparkling one, is bound to improve with a bit of bottle age
The Story of Champagne Page 25