by Susie Kelly
Our four-course meal was flawlessly prepared and served, punctuated by several little unexpected surprises between courses – cheesy nibbles, an asparagus cream, a pear liqueur sorbet. The young maître d’ was attentive but unobtrusive, courteous but not obsequious, and wore a huge smile. I was rather worried about him, though, because he was terribly thin, and as he was also slightly stooped he looked rather like an apostrophe. There was another, even younger man who seemed to be an apprentice, and when he thought nobody was looking he chewed his fingernails nervously.
We had never tasted a better bottle of perfectly chilled Sancerre, and rounded the meal off with coffee and a plate of petit fours taken on big squashy sofas in the grand salon. We agreed that the modest fortune we had invested here had given excellent value. If the royal couple had eaten here when they stopped for fresh horses, Louis should have been very well satisfied. Full, warm, dry and drowsy, how fervently I wanted to stretch out on the soft sofa and sink into the cushions for a couple of hours’ sleep in front of the fire. But Epernay and its champagne cellars lay ahead and so, like Cinderellas at the witching hour, we changed back into our sodden cycling clothes and set off through the vineyards.
Immediately out of Etoges we were into the heart of the champagne country. The landscape changed dramatically from rolling green nothingness to the seriously steep hillsides of the Côtes des Blancs with their symmetrically ordered vines and prosperous, flowery villages. No longer did we whirr along briskly, but rather kept changing down through our gears and pedalling faster for less forward progress. But at least the weather had taken a turn for the better, and the warm sunshine drew a steamy vapour from our clothing.
After hauling up one particularly challenging incline, we were glad to meet a friendly man dressed in white overalls and wellies. He spoke English and recommended a route to Epernay that was both scenic and level all the way. It took us through fields and woods, and finally into the heaving heart of the spiritual capital of the champagne world.
From Etoges the royal fugitives had continued their journey to Châlons. By this time things were starting to go wrong. Foolish Louis had insisted on walking in the sunshine for a while, and twice the horses had fallen, breaking their harnesses, causing further dangerous delays.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The City of Effervescence
“Remember gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne!” Winston Churchill
In the champagne cellars
CHAMPAGNE takes its name from the French region where it is produced, which the Romans rather unimaginatively christened ‘Campania’, meaning fields or countryside. The drink was born by default rather than design. Although the Champenois had been making wine for two thousand years they were never able to replicate the fine wines of neighbouring Burgundy, having neither the same climate, nor the same soil. Second-rate and erratic red wines were the best they could produce, and whilst these remained stable in their barrels through the cold winter months, as the temperature rose in spring, so did an unwanted fizziness which the wine makers regarded with dismay. But – the bubbly drink was greatly appreciated by French royalty and the aristocracy, and at the court of Charles II in England, where it was introduced by the exiled French aristo the Marquis de St-Evremond (not to be confused, confusing though it is, with the fictional evil Marquis St Evrémonde from A Tale of Two Cities).
Recognising a potentially lucrative market, the Champagne vintners were eager to find a way of stabilising their product and preserving its bubbles. The solution was to keep it in bottles, but at the time the law dictated that wine could only be transported in barrels. When in 1728 Louis XV issued a royal decree allowing bottled wine to be moved the Champagne producers opened for business on a grand scale, together with manufacturers of corks and bottles, labels and muselets, the wire caps and metal plaques that lock the corks down.
It would still take many years of trial and error to perfect the bottling technique. Until the end of the 19th century workers in the cellars were wearing protective masks fitted with grilles to shield them from bottles that were liable to detonate unexpectedly.
In Roman times Epernay was a small fishing village known as Sparnacum, from which today’s inhabitants take the name of Sparnaciens. The village grew into a town, with tanning the mainstay of the local economy until the explosion of the Champagne industry.
Due to its strategic position on the Marne, for fourteen centuries somebody or other was constantly waging war in and around Epernay or burning it down. After suffering the ravages of Imperial wars, civil wars, religious and world wars, the fact that the town is still standing at all is an indication of the resilience of the Sparnaciens.
During the Napoléonic wars the Cossacks looted the cellars, and after them the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war. Even when there was a rare lull in human hostilities, a destructive new enemy attacked in 1888 – the ingenious phylloxera insect that wiped out half the vines. It’s a nasty, minuscule creature barely visible to the naked eye, and takes many forms – from eggs to creepy-crawlers to winged beasts. The female lays two types of eggs, male and female, and these siblings mate incestuously to create a new generation. They attack the leaves and roots of vines with devastating effect, and are very bad news indeed when they appear. Early experimental treatments included drowning them with white wine, and burying live toads at the end of each row of vines. Neither of these strategies worked. The eventual solution was to graft the vines onto American rootstock resistant to the pest.
With that problem out of the way, next it was the turn of rioters to bring strife to the town. Under the 1891 Treaty of Madrid, sparkling wine could only be called champagne if it was produced within the Champagne region. In 1910 and 1911, the French government’s redefining of the regional borders led to the exclusion of certain territory previously included. This caused violent riots between infuriated producers outside the new borders trying to squeeze in, and those inside fighting to keep them out. Epernay and the surrounding villages were sacked and burned.
Then along came 1914, bringing with it a new war on a vast scale. The German invaders ransacked the cellars: some soldiers would depart for the great battlefield in the sky with a bottle in their hands, bubbles in their belly and a song in their heart.
During the harvest that year, several women and children picking in the vineyards were killed by shells. The Préfet decided that the best thing for him to do would be to run away; so that’s what he did, along with most of the municipal authorities and police, abandoning the citizens to their own devices.
At the time the mayor of Epernay was Maurice Pol-Roger, joint owner of the champagne house of the same name, and it was he who undertook the organisation and running of the town. Aside from caring for his flock, he also had to keep his business running, and to somehow harvest the grapes in between bombardments. The German army had an unquenchable thirst for champagne, and demanded it in great quantities. Maurice was quite willing and able to supply it, although for some mysterious reason the quality was unusually mediocre, and deliveries chaotic and unreliable. It is a fair assumption that he was not the only one to outwit the enemy. There are tales of misleading labels and inferior wines finding their way to the front line whilst the best bottles were stowed away out of sight to await the end of the war. Four times Maurice was threatened with execution by the Germans, but he survived the war, remained Mayor of Epernay until 1935 and, when he wished to retire, was elected Mayor for Life.
Once the coast was sufficiently clear for the absconding Préfet to slink back to Epernay in safety, Maurice threw down the gauntlet and challenged him to a duel. During a vigorous battle with swords each sustained a modest injury and honour was satisfied. Personally I think the Préfet got off rather lightly.
By 1918, after years of bombardment, the Rue du Commerce was obliterated, the houses of Chandon and Chanoine destroyed, Mercier, and Moët & Chandon badly damaged. When the war ended, almost the entire town had been reduced to r
ubble.
Still, the inhabitants could look forward to twenty years of peace before the next blow. They regrouped, rebuilt and carried on regardless. A stoic bunch, the Sparnaciens.
The enemy was back in 1939, the Germans again anxious to ensure the continued production of champagne, on which their armies marched, and they therefore adopted a relaxed attitude towards the producers. But the chalky tunnels beneath the streets of Epernay were not only used for storing bottles; they were a hiding place for stock, which their owners had no intention of handing over to the Nazis. They were also a useful place for meetings of the Résistance. At Moët & Chandon, Comte Robert Jean de Vogüé and Paul Chandon-Moët were both arrested by the Gestapo and deported for their involvement in the Résistance. Although the Comte was sentenced to death, he was instead deported to a forced labour camp in Germany. Paul Chandon-Moët was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, transferred from there to Buchenwald and Nordhausen and later Bergen-Belsen. Both men survived the war.
The Pol-Roger family were still doing their bit, too. Maurice’s daughter-in-law Odette carried messages to Paris by bicycle, a 12-hour journey. That she was stopped and questioned by the Gestapo probably had something to do with the fact that she wore an RAF badge on her dress.
By the time we arrived on our bicycles, thankfully Sparnaciens had enjoyed more than 60 years of peace and were able to sleep soundly in their beds.
Epernay seemed reticent regarding the whereabouts of its campsite, as if it was ashamed to admit to having one. All those centuries of warfare, civic “improvements” and the building of the railway resulted in the destruction and demolition of virtually every ancient building and all the town’s ramparts, leaving very little of charm. Apart from the Avenue de Champagne, it’s really rather a scruffy place. We might possibly still be looking for the campsite today if Terry hadn’t forced a police car to halt by placing himself in its path on a busy roundabout. Once the two policemen had recovered they were kind enough to draw a map, which led us by a long and circuitous route to the campsite. It was about as far away from the town as it could be without actually being in an entirely different town, but it was a very attractive site with excellent facilities.
We pitched the tent beneath an exotic tulip tree and spent another uncomfortably icy night. But when we woke the next morning it was to a glorious day of blazing sunshine, finally allowing us an opportunity to wash all our wet and smelly clothes and festoon them over the hedge of our encampment. Our hideous cycling helmets offered no protection from the sun. If my face became any more burned than it already was, it would fall off, so we went shopping and bought ourselves some big-brimmed baseball caps. Terry’s was a manly dark blue, while mine was rather glamorous – black, with diamonds all round the peak and a diamond butterfly on the front. They probably were not real diamonds, because it only cost €3, but I did think it looked rather striking. I also bought a pair of very large sunglasses, which covered half of my face, and which I hoped would help to protect my eyes. The disadvantage of them was that without my corrected glasses the whole world was completely out of focus, but with my left eye half-closed the road was just about visible.
I do rather like champagne, but not sufficiently to venture into the sub-terrain to look at it, so Terry nobly volunteered to do so. We chose to visit the Mercier cellars so he could ride the little laser-guided train through the tunnels cut into the chalky underground rock. With perfect timing – a rare feat – we arrived just as the English guided tour was setting off, and Terry disappeared into a lift that plunged him into the bowels of the cellars one hundred feet below.
The pretty receptionist was distressed to learn that as a claustrophobic I would miss the tour, but she invited me to wait upstairs and offered me a free glass of bubbly as a consolation.
Eugene Mercier, the founder of the house, was a man of great vision, with big ideas and a genius for advertising. Prior to the Revolution most of the vineyards had belonged to the clergy and nobility. Now they were in more egalitarian hands. M. Mercier believed that champagne should be within the grasp of Monsieur and Madame Ordinaire, and not just the privileged classes. Everything he did was in the style befitting his product. The entrance hall to Mercier’s establishment is dominated by the colossal oak barrel designed and built for the Paris World Fair Exhibition of 1889. Beautifully carved, with two semi-naked ladies gazing rather suggestively at each other while caressing a bottle of bubbly, the barrel has a capacity of 200,000 bottles of fizz. It took sixteen years to build, and it needed eight days, twenty-four oxen and eighteen horses to tug it from Epernay to Paris. A journey that would wreck roads and bridges and necessitated the purchase and demolition of five houses that were obstructing the barrel’s progress.
I have never been able to find a definitive explanation as to why wine and champagne bottles are named as they are. The piccolo – a quarter of a bottle, is obvious. But it seems that the -ams and -zars were named for larger than life biblical characters simply because they were larger than life. The largest bottle of all is the six-and-a-half gallon Melchizedek produced by Drappier, holding the equivalent of 40 standard bottles. Its price, not to mention weight, means it isn’t a common sight.
After Terry resurfaced, he reported that the railway tunnel that took the bottles from the cellars to the specially built railway which carried them to market was more than just a passage: its walls are beautifully carved with nearly-naked ladies, frolicking bare cherubs, and scenes of Bacchanalian romps. It seems that for M. Mercier his product and mild debauchery were inseparable. Terry had managed to take some very good photos of these carvings and some of the fifteen million neatly stacked bottles of bubbly. This, despite the ban on using the camera’s flash because it could cause the laser-guided train to career out of control. He had also captured a shot of the nearly nude that had so scandalised Parisian society when it was displayed that it had been removed and placed in the tunnel out of sight of delicate sensibilities. Admittedly her clothing is revealing and a little dishevelled; she stands holding a champagne glass raised in her left hand, and a bottle in her right, and parts of her upper anatomy have popped out into full view. Granted that she does look a little the worse for wear, but by 20th century standards she is really quite demure. If 19th century Parisians thought that was shocking, how would they react to today’s ladette culture and girls staggering out of bars and nightclubs smashed out of their heads?
When we had enjoyed a glass of bubbles, we cycled slowly down the Avenue de Champagne, previously named Le Faubourg de la Folie (The Mad Suburb), the one part of town that sparkles. Lined with grand, glittering 19th century mansions, each trying to outshine its neighbours, this is the visibly glamorous heart of Epernay, beneath whose streets the real work takes place, and the bottles slumber awaiting their moment of glory. But the road surface has more potholes per square yard than anywhere else I’ve ever been, including the poorest suburbs of Nairobi. Really, the whole street was falling to pieces! As we cycled along I wondered how strong it was, and whether there was any possibility it would cave in, as it had in 1900 when a million and a half bottles of Pol Roger were destroyed.
This hot afternoon deteriorated into yet another glacial night, which gave birth to a day of molten sun. It was June 6th. By 10.00 am our bikes were too hot to touch, and we lay on the grass, happy to do nothing for a couple of hours before cycling on to our next stop, Châlons. An English couple parked next to us insisted that we really should go up to Hautvillers, ‘the cradle of champagne’, where Dom Pérignon, the cellar master at the Benedictine Abbey, is buried. “It’s about three miles,” they said. “Only takes ten minutes.”
Slightly reluctant to abandon the cool grass beneath the tulip tree, we nevertheless felt we should make the pilgrimage. As our neighbours had said, Hautvillers was less than three miles away, but in that short distance the road climbs more than 400 feet, at an angle of about 45°. With the benefit of an air-conditioned car it would be a pleasantly scenic drive and the occupants would barely n
otice the incline. On a bicycle, in sweltering heat, with the soft, sticky tarmac snatching at our wheels, it was the next best thing to impossible.
I watched Terry’s legs pedalling faster and faster, as he changed down to his lowest gears, and his bike moved slower and slower until he was almost stationary. Even with the electric assistance of my machine I was almost rolling backwards, and I couldn’t change gears because my sweating hands slipped round and round on the handlebars. Soon we were both forced to dismount and push, stopping along the way at the observation points to recharge our energy and look out over the dozy, sunbathing vineyards and distant hills of this currently contented part of the world.
Heaving nearly 80lbs. of red-hot bike up a steep hill on a roasting day was quite beyond my puny strength, so Terry and I swapped over bikes. His is so light I can lift it with one hand. Still, even then it was a challenge, and when we arrived in the village after almost an hour of shoving and panting past seemingly endless rows of vines, every muscle in our bodies was shaking.
It takes a great deal to sap Terry’s almost infinite energy; in fact I can’t remember a single instance in all the thirty-five years I have known him, but the haul up to Hautvillers succeeded. We had started out imagining that we would sit and sip a cool glass of champagne when we reached the village; the reality was that badly dehydrated, what we each wanted were several bottles of a fizzy, brown, sugary beverage that had never been anywhere near a grape, but which did quench our thirst and restore some of our energy.
At mid-day the pretty little streets of Hautvillers with their immaculate buildings decorated with quaint wrought iron signs were deserted but for a lone tractor rumbling by, loaded with spraying equipment and covered with dust. The driver looked as hot and weary as we felt.