Back to Champagne
It’s been a while. In the last few years I can think of only twice when I have been to Champagne: once in the depths of a bitter winter I went to Urville near Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises in the remote Aube, and was received with huge warmth by three generations of the Drappier family; and the other time when, after the unveiling of an art installation in Paris (this is their ‘truc’) I was taken up to Reims by the firm of Ruinart and given the usual chilly tour round the ancient Roman quarries or crayères by an elegantly dressed hôtesse in order to observe some of the best champagne money can buy festering on its lees.
Once upon a time I was quite at home in Reims and Epernay, to the degree that a retired British naval officer was detailed to pick me up from airport or station and drop me back again when I had finished my rounds. He even did a spot of shopping for me if I needed it, on one occasion getting me a couple of kilos of oxtail because it had been banned from sale in Britain. Even two decades ago there were perceptible changes taking place behind the uninformative labels of the major brands and savvy smaller growers were beginning to challenge the rule of the ‘grandes marques’, as the household names are known in Champagne.
Small growers like Selosse, Larmandier-Bernier or Tarlant were beginning to find their places on the wine lists of Michelin-starred restaurants. Now some lists have largely eschewed the famous names and gone shopping in the regions, the Montagne, the Marne or the Côte des Blancs – not to mention the Aube – to find wonderful, hand-made champagnes new to a public brought up on producers like Mumm and Moët. The Aube too has been properly appraised and the Chardonnay from the village of Mongeux fetches huge prices. These smaller growers’ champagnes cost more than many of basic non-vintage cuvees from the grandes marques. Not that the latter have suffered in any way, and demand will always outstrip supply in a world where there are quite so many freshly baked millionaires chasing all the attributes of luxury.
But champagne is not sitting pretty for all that and they are aware there is a crisis brewing. Last week I went to see Philippe Wibrotte at the CIVC, the body that regulates champagne wine. Wibrotte presented a chart showing how various fuels were running out and stressing the need for champagne to reduce its carbon footprint: a particularly hard task when luxury lovers want heavy bottles and smart packaging emblazoned with lashings of gold. Climate change is a reality for winemakers. I have never heard a single one deny it. The whole idea of creating quality English wine is predicated on the evidence of rising temperatures. In Germany, temperate regions are considering planting north-facing slopes to avoid the glare of an ever hotter sun, in Champagne, the vast majority of premature, August harvests has been this century, which is not even twenty years old.
If the grapes get too ripe, the wines will simply cease to be suitable for champagne production which requires grapes picked with a potential alcohol well under ten percent. Wibrotte mentioned a project to develop new hybrids to add to the trio of grapes that go into champagne: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. If we carry on at this rate we will see harvests taking place ever earlier in August in an attempt to keep the freshness of the champagne we love. When champagne loses its characteristic ‘elegance’ we can start looking seriously at sparkling wines from the English Downs which are grown on the same chalk soils that make up the Montagne de Reims and the Côte des Blancs south of Epernay.
This time it was history that took me to champagne, the need to explain how the wine had been created back in the seventeenth century, and just why it had required some two hundred years before it became anything like the champagne we know today. Until the nineteenth century, the wines of the ‘Montagne’ remained mostly still while the majority of the sparkling wines came from the valley of the River Marne. Some villages on the Montagne like those from the cutely named village of Bouzy were famous for producing proper red Pinot Noirs which were made three or four times a decade when there was a properly hot summer. In less favoured years the wines threw a pink or yellow tint, called Oeil de Perdrix or ‘partridge eye’. Still red wines labelled ‘Coteaux Champenois’ continue to made by a few growers in Bouzy and elsewhere.
I had so many lovely champagnes last week that it would make a very long list, but the quality of one came as a surprise when we met it at La Banque, a brasserie in Epernay. I had planned that the meal should be all Bouzy: with the red wine from Bernard Tornay served with the beef. Before that I had opted for some sparkling Bouzy champagne with our salmon ‘tataki’. What caught my eye was a ‘oeil de perdrix’ from the Domaine Jean Vesselle, where the wines are now made by Jean’s daughter Delphine. The colour was a wonderfully subtle pale pink, there were the finest beads of bubbles and the aroma of ripe red fruits. It was a lovely little tribute to the living history of champagne. Long may it last.
