A Tour of Champagne Country

What's On in France, 26 April 1998

Pour it on your cornflakes, smash it across the prow of your new yacht, gulp it from the high-heeled shoe of your favorite actress, the choices are endless, but the drink is always the same – Champagne. Not necessary the same champagne, but no celebration is worthy of the name without the bubbly beverage from North-eastern France.

No substitute will do. The people who make Champagne are quick to point out that perfectly good sparkling wine is produced all over the world. They know, of course, that theirs carries a name which is probably the best known in the world of alcoholic drinks. The only time they get worried is when their exclusivity is threatened. The people who tried to sell a bogus bubbly under the name of ‘methode Champenoise’ met the might of Champagne producers head on, and are now forced to sell their wares as ‘methode traditionelle’. Like the well known fizzy drink from Altanta, Champagne likes the world to be in no doubt that it and only it is the real thing.

Where?

Champagne can only be made from grapes from a small, slightly hilly area about an hour and a half’s drive from Paris, centred on the town of Reims. It’s not the most impressive sight, at first. North and east of here are the flat, featureless plains of Belgium and Northern France. The most impressive geographical feature of the area is a small hill called the montage de Reims. The countryside is carpeted with orderly rows of vines, wineries and occasional follies erected for publicity by a Champagne producer.

Champagne’s real wealth is underground. The area has often been in the path of Europe’s invading armies, and was bombed and shelled almost to the ground during the Second World War. The town’s magnificent Gothic Cathedral was badly damaged, but with the help of the Carnegie foundation it has been restored to something like its former glory. During the borbardment, the population of the town shetlered in the miles of cellars cut into the chalk under the town- which now shelter over a billion bottles of champagne.

Besides the cathedral, and various cemeteries and other relics of the war, there is only one reason to visit the region, or perhaps over a billion, if you count each bottle individually. For those who would normally feel guilty about drinking champagne solidly for several days, a visit to Champagne is the perfect excuse. It’s not indulgence here, it’s a cultural education. All the major champagne houses offer a guided visit to their caves, or cellars, with a free glass or two of their best-known brand thrown in.

The visit to the cellars of Mercier, France’s favourite Champagne, is one of the most touristy, but also one of the most fun visits. A lift takes visitors down past a series of life-size dummies enacting scenes from the history of the company. A laser-guided train then takes them around the cellars, which is a pleasant relief after a tiring day of walking around other caves. This is also a visit that children might enjoy, even if they are too young to have acquired a taste for the booze.

For the most spectacular cellars, Taittinger have a good claim. They store rack after rack of bottles in underground pyramidal chambers, called crayaires, from which stone for buildings above ground was once quarried. The cellars also include the 15th century crypt of the church of St. Nazaire, with gothic vaulting and mysterious inscriptions cut into the chalk walls. It is the cave which makes the smallest concessions to tourism and the increasing ly industrial nature of champagne production.

For a less touristy experience, without the size and slick showmanship of the large houses, it is more rewarding to visit the smaller proprietaires. These are often the best places to stock up with bottles of excellent Champagne, at very reasonable prices. Our guide recommended several, including Alfred Graçian, who still matures all his wine in oak barrels. None of the major houses except Bollinger and Krug do this, but their products will be a lot more expensive. Part of the fun in a place like this is to explore on your own, and most smaller producers will be happy to welcome anyone at a minute’s notice. They may not speak English, though.

If you feel the need of a good lunch to soak up the morning’s champagne before a hard afternoon of more tasting, the Auberge Saint-Vincent in Ambonnay offers an excellent range of regional dishes. Some of their recipes, like the Foie Gras flavoured with Ratafia, use the produce of champagne houses themselves. (Ratafia is another drink made from Champagne grapes, but fortified with more alcohol). Other dishes are the fruit of research into the recipes which were being used in the region decades ago, but which have largely disappeared from most dining tables. As Anne-Marie Pelletier, who runs the restaurant with her husband Jean-Claude told us, some of customers remember their grandmothers cooking these dishes, but have never had them since. The auberge also functions as a small hotel. Also recommended are Cafe du Palais in Reims, who serve among other dishes an wonderful Oeufs a la Neige, and the Cave de Champagne in Epernay.

The obvious thing to drink with these is more champagne, but if you can’t face it the region also offers a beautifully different range of red wines. The most famous comes from the appropriately named town of Bouzy, made from Pinot Noir grapes fermented in a different way from other red wines to produce a supple, quiet mouthful, but nonetheless packed with fruity, spicy flavours- a perfect antidote to Champagne.

How Champagne is made

Champagne is a victim of the French art of making the simple complex. Dom Perignon, a 17th century Benedictine monk was officially credited with inventing it, but it was more a story of evolution. The most distinctive feature, the bubbles, were not his idea. During the 18th century, the wine was shipped in large quantities to England, where it arrived slightly fizzy. The English developed a taste for the sparkling wine, and the corks were developed to meet the demand.

The wine is usually made from a mixture of up to three different cépages or varieties of grape: Chardonnay, a white grape, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, which are black grapes, but which can be made into either red or white wines. The grapes can only be grown on the 35,000 or so hectares which are the official vineyards of the Champagne region. They have a poor, chalky soil, which is ideal for producing wine.

The wine is pressed, and only the first pressing can be used to produce the better champagnes. The juice at this stage is known as ‘must’. It is poured into steel tanks, where it ferments for the first time. The temperature is strictly controlled. Yeast turns the sugar to alcohol, and then settles to the bottom of the vat. The result is a number of different ‘crus’- young wines, each made from the grapes of a particular parcel of vines. They have their own characteristics, but they cannot be bottled on their own. It is here that the art of the winemaker comes in. He will taste all the crus, and decide how best to blend them into a finished wine.

The major champagne houses try to achieve, as nearly as possible, the same taste in most of their wines every year. They often add a proportion of reserve wine, kept from the years before, which smooths out annual variations, and ensures that a bottle of Laurent Perrier from one year retains the distinctive quality of the previous year’s vintage.

The wine is left for some time for the different components of the blend to get used to one another. Then it is ready for a second fermentation, to make the wine fizz. It is poured into bottles with yeast and cane sugar, and stored in the cellars where the wine ferments ferments again. The carbon dioxide, a product of the fermentation process, builds up inside the bottles, and makes them fizz when they are opened.

The yeast settles out of the wine as a dirty brown deposit. The most laborious part of the Champagne production process is removing this without letting all the bubbles escape. This is ‘remuage’, a process that is still done by hand in many champagne houses. The bottles are placed in special racks, called pupitres. They start off horizontal, and every day, a man rotates them and pushes them up a little bit. It takes three years to train to do this job, but a skilful remuer can do 40,000 bottles in a day. After two months, the bottle had been gradually shifted until it is upright, and the yeast has slid quietly down into the neck of the bottle.

The wine can be stored, upside down, for years. Taittinger still have some bottles from the last century in their cellars, but all the cellars include a small ‘vinothèque’ where a small part of each years’ vintage is kept. Strictly for research purposes, of course; None of it is sold.

Before it is packaged and sold, the neck of the bottle is dipped in a solution at -25°, to freeze the yeast into a little block of ice. This is pulled out with the cork, another very skilled job, leaving a bottle of clear, yeast free Champagne. More sugar is added, to sweeten the wine this time, and the bottle is topped up and corked.

A Family Affair

Champagne is largely a family business, and even in the largest houses, they strive to keep it that way. ‘A champagne’, as one producer told us, ‘expresses the wine maker’s spirit, his character’- and many people in Champagne say similar things. Different producers have very different ideas about what a family business is, though. Bernard de Nonancourt, for example, is the head of Laurent Perrier, who control one of the largest champagne groups, which produces over six and a half million bottles per year. It is still run as a family concern. He took it over from his father in 1949, and in the next fifty years, built production up from less than 100,000 bottles. His two daughters also work for the company. We met them in the stylishly decorated meeting room of the large farmhouse style headquarters of the company. M. de Nonancourt did all the talking, while his daughter sat beside him, quietly, and explained what I was talking about when he couldn’t understand my French.

They try hard to keep the staff happy, and maintain the quality of their champagne. They buy a large proportion of their grapes from small growers, so they have to be on good terms with them, too. That way they can be sure of grapes from the best parts of each plot of land.

At the other end of the scale is the Dethune family. We met them in the pretty farmhouse where Paul and his wife produce around 30,000-35,000 bottles a year. Their son, Pierre, will take over the business when they retire, but the succession is often a worry for smaller producers. They were reluctant to invest in their business until Pierre had finished his military service, and they were sure that he wanted to make champagne.

They sell 45 per cent of their grape production to larger producers, and make the rest into wine. ‘We’re trying to reduce the amount we sell,’ says Madame Dethune, ‘but it’s a question of money’. Obviously they would rather make those grapes into wine themselves, but wine won’t bring in any money for four or five years, so they sell some of the crop for cash.

Small producers often grumble about the bullying tactics used by the large champagne houses, but it is to them that they owe their existence. ‘Without the large producers,’ explained one restaurant owner we spoke to, ‘Champagne would be just another small region, producing more or less what they produce in Burgundy. It’s only the big producers and their promotion that makes Champagne special.’

This is a bit harsh, perhaps. Crack open a bottle and pour a foaming glassful, and the magic should be obvious enough.