The Story of Champagne

by Nicholas Faith

  There is only one major exception to the idea of leaving the wine and liqueur to settle and that is Bollinger’s rightly famous Recemment Degorgé, recently disgorged fine wine. It was Madame Bollinger no less who came up with the idea which was intended ‘to appreciate the importance of disgorgement and the oxidative shock it provides.’ The wine’s deserved success is probably because the firm ferment the relatively small quantity of wine it is going to use in the RD in wood, which provides a base wine which is relatively oxidized and can cope with the extra time on the lees.

  _______________

  54The quality of Lanson’s wine has improved greatly since it was left longer in bottles.

  55In an article for The Drinks Business.

  56The size of the bubbles depends not only on the wine itself, but also on the glass from which the wine is drunk, since the bubbles are released by the irregularities in the glass.

  57I once saw this at Bollinger. Even the directors had only seen it done on a handful of occasions.

  12

  THE ENJOYMENT OF CHAMPAGNE

  The biggest – and in many ways most surprising – development recently has been the surge in sales of rosé, pink champagne, which now accounts for nearly a fifth of all sales in French supermarkets, Historically, and for good reason given its lack of quality and its frequent taste of liquid strawberry jam, it had been despised as a gimmick that sporadically went in and then quickly out of fashion. It epitomized the frivolity with which champagne was consumed. ‘The pink or rosé champagne,’ wrote André Simon about the early nineteenth century, ‘seems to have enjoyed but a transient reputation; it had probably nothing to recommend it but its attractive appearance,’ and he quotes the author-merchant Cyrus Redding: ‘No one who knows what the wines are at all would drink rose-coloured champagne, if he could obtain the other kinds.’ In those days champagnes were tinted with cochineal, or with an infamous preparation called Teinture de Fismes – a preparation of elderberries boiled in cream of tartar.

  In the 1930s another burst of popularity followed Hollywood movies featuring the drink – my readers are probably too young to remember the song: ‘Bubble, bubble, bubble went the pink champagne’. Twenty years later, said Christian Billy of Pol Roger, ‘it enjoyed a short vogue because Princess Margaret was supposed to enjoy it,’ and firms like his offered it rather reluctantly because they felt – rightly – that it wasn’t up to the quality of their other wines. The new vogue owes a lot to a more general thirst for pink-coloured wines and the Champenois have been sensible enough to climb on the bandwagon. They are helped by the fact that theirs is the only French winemaking region which is allowed to blend different wines into a rosé.

  A handful of firms (including Laurent-Perrier in good years) make it the hard way, by allowing the skins to remain in contact with the juice for long enough to stain it a delicate pink. The exact shade is inevitably going to vary from vat to vat, let alone from year to year, but it does make a ‘serious’, structured and satisfying wine. Most firms choose an easier method, simply adding between 10 and 15 per cent of still red wine to the blend. If they do this the rest of the blend ought to contain a disproportionate amount of Chardonnay – which is why Dom Ruinart rosé is so delicious, it’s all Chardonnay apart from the Pinot acting as a sort of vinous dye.

  Today almost every reputable firm is offering rosé wines which for the most part are fresh, refreshing and deliciously fruity without being cloying in any way. Given the history of the type there is bound to be some inconsistency in the wines, but climate change has again helped. It ensures that the better ones, of which there are a good many on the market, combine the depth and fruitiness of a firm red Burgundy, a feel of raspberries or very slightly unripe cherries with the freshness of a fine champagne.

  Many firms used to claim as part of the overall snobbery of their attitude that the red wine they used came from Bouzy. Obviously most of it didn’t and the claim, like so many others, has been removed from their vocabulary: the real Bouzy is far too precious a commodity to be drowned in a common or garden rosé. Duval Leroy claims that the red wine it produces at Vertus, at the southern tip of the Côte des Blancs has more of the authentic Pinot sweetness than the often rather thin and harsh Bouzy Rouge. At the other extreme the CVC says it ferments the red wines it uses for rosé by maceration carbonique, in its skins, to get as red a wine as possible. The final result, in the change in attitude among drinkers and produces alike, is that they can be decidedly upmarket, with virtually all of them being more expensive than standard champagne.

  A more traditionally serious – and successful – variant on champagne’s offerings is the blanc de blancs made exclusively from the Chardonnay. Christian Billy of Pol Roger (whose blanc des blancs is fresh and delicious) makes little of it. ‘It’s easier to make than an ordinary blend,’ he says, ‘because you are using only the finest white grape wines.’ But you cannot merely choose the finest white grapes from the best crus. ‘They can’t be made entirely from the Côte des Blancs,’ says Dominique Foulon of Moët, ‘they’re simply too typés, too aggressively different, you need some of the Chardonnays made on the Montagne de Reims.’ Many firms also use the wines from the Côteaux du Sézannais, a sub-region of the underrated slopes south of the Côte des Blancs almost exclusively devoted to the Chardonnay.

  Whatever their origin the wines are usually excellent, partly because the Chardonnay is a more forgiving variety than the Pinot Noir. So most blanc de blancs have the lively citrussy feel of the fine Chardonnays being made in countries like New Zealand where the wine also never sees any wood – as opposed to Chardonnays from Burgundy (or California) which are kept in wood for a year or more.

  The contrasting type, blanc de noirs made entirely from black grapes, is relatively rare but is now taken much more seriously by the Champenois. Here again, climate change has helped. It used to seem much less satisfactory, harsher, less ‘champagny’ than wines made from both black and white grapes but today this is less true and the wines often have a proper fruity robustness.

  Wines which are sweeter than brut, from the extra dry to the sec and demi-sec culminating in the truly sugary doux, are of course relics from the days when drinkers like the Tsars liked their wines really and truly sweet but then they degenerated in quality, being made, like the rosés from otherwise unsatisfactory wines. Until recently very few houses produced even half-decent non-dry champagnes with Roederer as a notable exception. Today the quality has improved and they are even being promoted. Clicquot, of all people, has gone so far as to launch one for use in cocktails. But it remains a niche business accounting for perhaps a couple of per cent of total sales.

  Yet another change over the past thirty years has been the proliferation of wines made from a single vineyard, an obvious contradiction of the tradition, started by Dom Perignon himself, that champagne was a blend of grapes from different vineyards. Yet today there are reckoned to be thirty of them, not surprisingly mostly from grands or premiers crus. The first such contradiction in terms was Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes made from ungrafted grapes grown in two tiny plots in Aÿ and Bouzy. It is difficult to tell if its very special flavours derive from the location, the fact that the vines are ungrafted, or the way they are grown, en foule, as a mass of individual plants. ‘On the nose,’ wrote Jancis Robinson, it has ‘all the impact of a good Côte de Nuits red Burgundy, in the throat the unctuous power of a very fine cough syrup.’ She clearly knows a classier type of cough syrup than any I have ever come across. To me the Vieilles Vignes was simply a marvellous rich wine with none of the harshness which used to be associated with the general run of blanc de noirs.

  Bollinger was followed early in the twentieth century by Philipponnat with its Clos des Goisses, made exclusively with grapes from their 5.5 hectare clos (a walled vineyard). The vines, mainly Pinot Noir with some Chardonnay, grow on a steep slope – in local slang a goisse – facing due south, and the grapes reach a degree and a half stronger than those from any neighb
ouring vineyard. It wasn’t until 1986 that Krug launched its 1979 Clos de Mesnil from a walled vineyard at Mesnil-sur-Oger, which gave out a penetrating perfume. Eleven years later Krug added a blanc de noir, the 1995 Clos Ambonnay. Among the more recent offerings are Pommery’s Clos de Pompadour and Jacquesson’s three separate wines from Avize, Dizy and Aÿ. Lanson even has a clos of a single hectare within Reims producing 8,000 bottles from vines which are well over thirty-five years old – truly vieilles vignes by Champagne standards. But the smallest single cru is almost certainly in Vertus at the southern tip of the Côte des Blancs: the Clos Notre Dame next to the church of the name amounting to something less than a hectare. Owned by the Fourny family, it is a vineyard so sheltered that when the temperature reached 40°C in 2003 the result, say the family, ‘was not wine but marmalade’.

  By contrast vintage champagnes have been a fixture on the champagne scene for a very long time. The obsession with a single vintage originated in Victorian London, for, as Henri Krug points out, the Anglo-Saxons have been trained to expect any great wine to be from a specific vintage. To make matters worse, as Jean-Claude Rouzaud of Roederer says, ‘the reputation of a vintage is made in Bordeaux, where they are completely different from Champagne.’ In Champagne reputations have been made by a single vintage. The 1874 Pommery set wine bores drooling for a generation, while the 1928 Krug remained a firm favourite with the English royal family even after the death of its greatest admirer, King George VI.

  Great wines could always be made – obviously in small quantities – even in lesser years but it took a great deal of confidence (and a great many vines of your own from which to select a small percentage of your finest wine) to ‘do a Roederer’ and release a wine from a theoretically bad year like 1974 or 1977. But climate change ensures that wines from single vintages can now be produced in most years. Strictly speaking of course, a vintage champagne, like a vintage cognac, is a betrayal of the fundamental principle underlying the drink: that it should be a blend. Nevertheless, these wines do provide the bigger firms with the chance to make more personalized wines of a remarkably high standard. Moreover, the warmer climate has again helped. Whereas, for instance, before 1980 there had not been more than five or six vintages of Dom Perignon in any one decade, there were six out of the seven vintages between 2000 and 2006 – a record also achieved by Cristal

  Ironically, vintage champagnes – which cannot be sold until they have had at least three years in bottle – have become increasingly fashionable at a time when variations between years have become less marked. But it requires a great deal of confidence to assert that non-vintage wines can be genuinely superior. Krug, as might be expected, is categorical. ‘A millesimé has to be very type, it cannot just be any old good year.’ As Henri and Rémi’s grandfather put it: ‘A Krug cuvée champagne is my baby. For vintage champagne I have to share the credit with God.’ Indeed the importance of the deity is a good excuse for the producers not to have to stick to house style. It was easier for Krug to impose its views than for Laurent-Perrier, still a small firm in 1957 when it introduced its Grand Siècle – a well-balanced and fruity wine which is a blend of three good years. For its part Bollinger emphasizes that it makes vintage wines only, as it proclaims on the label, in ‘Grandes Années’. And of course some vintages are slower to mature than others, Gosset, for example, launched its 1990 before its wine from that very hot year 1989.

  Making a truly premium champagne is a different matter, although, in theory, it should simply be the fullest expression of the character of a firm’s wines and, as a result, only available in good vintages, they are simply the house’s idea of what the best wine should be. And that’s all you can ask.

  There are obviously quite a lot of them – as we saw in Chapter 8 when hopes for a millennium boom saw thirty-seven of them. But in what one can only describe as real life, far fewer firms have a sufficiently high reputation to offer wines which are inevitably going to be pretty pricey – and even fewer which are blanc de blancs. Apart from the tiny quantities made by Salon and Krug’s few hundred cases of Clos des Mesnils, the finest blanc de blancs, wines worthy of the title of ‘premium’ are Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne, which somehow combines freshness and richness followed closely by Dom Ruinart and by Pol Roger’s blanc de blancs.

  But firms have to be careful when they try and distil their characteristics in such wines. ‘Almost too flavoursome, chocolatey,’ is how Oz Clarke described Veuve Clicquot’s La Grande Dame, made exclusively from vineyards owned by Madame Clicquot herself. These wines are so expensive that they keep down the prices of many excellent ‘ordinary’ vintage champagnes – like Clicquot’s, preferred by many tasters to La Grande Dame. Another danger is demonstrated by Pol Roger’s Premium Cuvée named after Sir Winston Churchill. It is a truly robust beverage, certainly reflecting Churchill’s own character, but far removed from the elegance of the firm’s other wines. In any case for many firms it takes courage to go your own way. Obviously it is easier for Roederer, with the splendid vineyards which allow it to display the different characteristics of different vintages in its Cristal, which no one would dream of trying to imitate.

  All but one of these wines are produced in relatively small quantities – with Cristal the biggest at around half a million bottles in the best vintages. They also all employ the name of the firm. The double exception is of course Dom Perignon, a brand which just happens to have been created by Moët. Since its introduction eighty years ago sales have soared and although the actual figure is a closely guarded secret they are now reckoned to be around 4 million bottles, proof that a luxury item can continue to maintain its reputation even when it is mass-produced, in this instance well above the combined sales of Krug and Bollinger, arguably the most prestigious names in the region.

  The ability to keep its quality is helped by the fact that its chef de caves, Richard Geoffroy – who made his name vastly improving the quality of Mercier’s wines – can choose from all Moët’s best vineyards, even those which belong, in theory, to Clicquot and including those taken from Pommery during the brief period it was owned by Moët. Of course it varies from year to year and Geoffroy takes care to allow it to mature for at least ten years but is always marked by a ripe, rich but not cloying complexity and an obviously harmonious blend of the Pinot Noir and the Chardonnay. The most recent wines exploiting the brand’s name are a rich and drily fruity rosé and an older wine called Plenitude – previously named Oenotheque – representing proof for Geoffroy that ‘super-premium is just extra age in bottle’ and judging by the 1996 vintage – generally a rather disappointing one – he’s right.

  Unfortunately, Dom Perignon has introduced an element of bling by selling wines labelled under the name of a personality, such as Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld and Jeff Koons. But, luckily for the reputation of champagne there is only one wine, Armand de Brignac the champagne backed by the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, which is offered in an opaque metallic bottle as an item of pure bling. But to be fair it is well-regarded by experts and is produced by the small but respected family firm of Cattier in Chigny on the Montagne de Reims.

  One curious new aspect to these super-premium wines is that for the past twelve years they’ve been traded to a much greater extent. Previously they were included merely as a sort of appendix to wine auctions. Then Live-Ex, which is the global marketplace for the most expensive wines started to include them alongside the best burgundies and above all the classed-growth clarets which account for three-quarters of the volume of trade. Champagne started at a mere 1 per cent, rose to a perfectly respectable 5 per cent within a few years, dropped back during the financial crisis and is now back at 6 per cent, roughly the same as, say the Super Tuscans. More interesting is the gradual broadening of the trading which was, not surprisingly, originally dominated by Dom Perignon and Cristal. Now such wines as Belle Epoque and Salon are regularly traded. Perhaps the market can help educate palates.

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT – AND CHAMPAGNE


  Suddenly the Champenois have woken up to the fact that in producing different types of wine they are also producing a drink suitable to accompany a variety of foods – a thought that doesn’t seem to have occured to them in the previous three hundred years of the drink’s existence. Of course, as with everything connected with the drink, snobbery can intrude. I once overheard a discussion about the types of caviar with which it is suitable to serve champagne.

  The basic rules were laid down some time ago by Serena Sutcliffe. She urged us to: ‘begin with those where the Chardonnay predominates and serve a black grape champagne with a first course, or non-vintage as an aperitif and a vintage later.’ She could also have said you should simply start with the lightest of champagnes. In theory blanc de blancs are the lightest, but even they vary. The lighter, even acid younger ones may do as an aperitif or with a light fish dish, but there are deeper ones (like Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne, one of the most complex champagnes on the market) which go very well at the end of a meal, a sort of super-sorbet before the dessert and the coffee.

  The idea is so novel that there are few definites, and all I can provide are simply jottings apart from the general rule: that with exceptions – like that of Comtes de Champagne – the greater the proportion of Pinot in the blend the later in the meal it should be served while the sweeter champagnes should be reserved for their historic role of accompanying desserts.