Although the average consumer will hardly ever run across the name of a village on a champagne label, a dozen or so townships are responsible for the real quality of all good champagnes. The roads that run through Avize and Ambonnay and Ay, through Cramant an Bouzy and Verzenay, are lined with stone markers, like little milestones, which proudly indicate the exact vineyard holdings of the famous shippers of Epernay and Reims.
The vineyards of the Mountain, the River, and the Côte des Blancs are carefully subdivided and classified into crus, or growths, the best of which are ranked bors classe and rated 100 per cent, while the first growths (premiers crus) are rated 90 to 99 per cent, the second growths 80 to 89 per cent, the third 70 to 79 per cent, and so on down to the sixth—50 per cent and under. Theoretically, these percentages indicate the relative value of a marc (four tons) of grapes from the various crus or townships in any given year, but as might be expected there is a good deal of variation from vineyard to vineyard even in the best or worst of seasons.
The earliest champagne vineyards, which certainly produced a wine very unlike the bubbling elixir which we drink today, were probably planted on slopes along the Marne Valley during the reign of the Emperor Probus, in the third century. By the time of Charlemagne they were already famous, an with those of Burgundy they were about the first of northern France to gain anything more than a local reputation. The fact that the kings of France were traditionally crowned at Reims helped, of course, to spread the reputation of champagne among the rich and great an noble of medieval Europe, and by 1520, Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and Pope Leo X all had their personal representatives stationed in Ay, to select and purchase for them the best wines of each vintage.
Containers that we would today describe as bottles were unknown at that time; there were no corks, and it follows as a matter of simple logic that what the commissionaires bought for their august patrons at Ay was still wine, not sparkling, doubtless pink, not white, or of that rather lovely intermediate shade known in Victorian days as “part- ridge-eye” or oeil de perdrix. It was probably mediocre at best by modern standards, but it brought, per barrel, a fabulous in terms of what laborers were then paid.
All of the wines of the champagne country, particularly if the grapes are picked late and the wine fermented during the cold days of early October, have a tendency to remain more or less sparkling until the following May or June, and with the invention of corks and bottles, in the seventeenth century, a few enterprising merchants began experimenting with methods whereby their wines would retain this lively and much appreciated mousse at least through the following summer. There was a goo deal of risk involved. Sometimes the bottles exploded, and 80 per cent, or even 90 per cent, was a dead loss. They all threw a heavy sediment, and a process known as dépotage, or rapid decanting into new bottles which were then immediately corked, became standard practice.
We now know, as the good champenois of the period decidedly did not, the exact whys and wherefores of all these mysterious perversities which seemed then so baffling. Any young wine, particularly if made from grapes picked during cold weather and fermented in a cool place, will retain at least a little of its natural grape sugar and begin to ferment again when spring comes round. And all wines throw a sediment during fermentation. Today, properly made champagne has a carefully calculate pressure of between 5 ½ and 6 ½ atmospheres (from 80 to 95 pounds per square inch); breakage has been reduce to an insignificant minimum caused by rare faulty bottles, and cloudy champagne (champagne with sediment) is nonexistent.
The person responsible for the first significant progress along these lines has now passed into legend, and has undergone a sort of lay canonization among champagne producers and their customers. His name was Dom Pérignon; he was born in Ste Menehould in 1638; he became procureur of the celebrated Benedictine Abbey of Hautvillers, near Ay, thirty years later, and until his death in 1715 he remained one of the great pioneers of modern wine-making. That he was the first to make champagne sparkle is not true; that he was the first to blend the wines of various crus is possible but unlikely; that he evolved some process which made decanting unneccessary is probable but not certain. This is not to detract in any sense from his real accomplishments, which were diverse an many, and he is perhaps the only wine maker of his period whose name was writ in something more enduring than water, which, if we can believe the stories, he never drank.
An almost equally important contribution to the art of champagne production was made by a much less illustrious individual named Muller, employed by the house of Clicquot, in 1818 or thereabouts. He invented what is known in France as the pupitre (pulpit) an in America as the French rack, one of the basic tools by which champagne, as we know it, is made
For the making of champagne, whether in France or elsewhere, is an extraordinarily complicated, slow, an expensive process. There are plenty of short-cuts: You can pump carbon dioxide into still wine, just as soda water is made; you can re-ferment your wine in large tanks and bottle it under pressure —but if you make it thus in France you cannot call it champagne and you have to put the significant words “cuve close” on the label; in this country, it has to be marked “fermented in bulk,” which means the same thing. The words “méthode champenoise” (which can be used in France on wines of any origin if they are made as champagne is made) and the term “fermented in bottle” (a free English translation of the French) serve to distinguish wines that are made by the traditional method from the many produced to attract and delight people who want “something that bubbles an is cheap.”
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