Vintage time on the chalky hills of the champagne country is, as everywhere, a very active and a very festive period. An hour after dawn the villages are empty—the children, like the octogenarians, are in the vineyards, and by eight o'clock the first slow loaded carts are already on their way to the vendangeoirs. The major champagne houses have such receiving stations, with presses and casks, in all the first-growth villages. These establishments are as quiet as tombs for eleven months out of the year, but during late September an early October they are busy and crowded and gay. The grapes are weighed at once on their arrival, and then pressed. The juice, whether it comes from the black, close-packed little bunches of Pinot Noir or from the looser, golden Pinot Chardonnay, is nearly colorless and extraordinarily sweet-smelling. It is drawn off into barrels and its fermentation begins immediately.
Three months later, by the time the sun has entered the house of Capricorn and the season of the grands froids has come to Reims and Epernay, when the wines have “fallen bright” and been racked off their lees (or transferred to other barrels, leaving the sediment behind), the champagne tasters and blenders begin their all-important work, an the cuvees are born. Literally, a cuvée means the contents of a cuve, or vat; in the champagne country it means a particular blend of wines, any blend, whether put together in one vat or fifty, an whether prepared to suit the English market (cuvée anglaise) or the Pope (Vatican cuvée) or the ordinary daily trade (in which case it will probably get a number, not a name). Obviously, the reputation of any champagne house depends almost as much on the judgment and skill of its blenders as on the origin of its wines, and the great fame which certain vintage wines of certain shippers have secured has been due in almost every case to a single particularly skillful or fortunate blend. Except for the little vineyard owners who call their wines Cramant or Verzenay or Ay, after the villages in which they live, and a few minor shippers (Salon, for example) who specialize in the wines of one vineyard district, all cuvées contain, in varying proportions, wines from the Mountain, the River, and the Côte des Blancs. In years when the summer has been dry and warm and the wines full-bodied, they will contain a higher proportion than usual of Cramant and Avize; in years when the wines are maigre, or thin, the blends will get more than their normal share of Verzenay and Bouzy; when the faults of the vintage are harshness and lack of charm, the wines of Ay will be at a premium.
This blending, from the shippers' standpoint, has the vast advantage of making possible the production of an excellent and fairly consistent wine in a district where climatic conditions are by no means excellent and the quality in any given village by no means consistent. Whether any such blend will be better than the best Verzenay or Ay or Cramant, made with equal skill, is, I think, at least doubtful, since not yet certainly a question which, since not yet settled, will hardly be decided in our lifetime.
Once the cuvée is made, things move very rapidly indeed. A carefully calculated amount of sugar is added to the wine, and a particularly pure strain of yeast. In poor years the cuvee will certainly include as well a considerable admixture of wine held over for the purpose from the last previous good year— whence nonvintage champagne. Whatever the blend, it is bottled at once, an sealed with what is known as a bouchon de tirage—a sound but not necessarily handsome mushroom cork, slashed vertically to accommodate a sort of iron staple, known in the trade as an agrafe, which holds it in place. The wine is then stacked, the bottles horizontal, with the necks resting on strips or laths of woo —it is then en tirage or sur latte. It is undergoing a second fermentation— thanks to the yeast and sugar which it has just received. It is becoming champagne.
A carefully controlled temperature is almost essential during this critical period if breakage is to be held to a minimum, and in this respect Reims an Epernay have an enormous advantage over most other wine-producing areas. The whole champagne country is built on a sort of calcareous soil which, a few feet below the surface, amounts almost to pure chalk, which can be cut with a knife like cheese? and yet hardens when exposed to the air. In the vineyards, this chalk is in great measure responsible for the bouquet and supernatural lightness of wines such as those of Cramant, for example. Below decks, it permits the existence of what are certainly the most remarkable man-made cellars in the world. Some of these consist of over twenty miles of tunnels, and the underground portions of both Reims an Epernay are a good deal more impressive than what meets the eye of the ordinary traveler. In such cellars there is a considerable range of temperature, though always between 45° and 65° Fahrenheit, and each wine can undergo its second fermentation under the best possible conditions, whether it is a “little” wine which will come round rapidly or a “big” wine which requires more time.
In other districts where the méthode champenoise is standard practice (bulk process sparkling wines can obviously be made in Panama or Brooklyn), other means have been used to achieve the same result—windowless buildings with thick stone walls, deep cellars, tunnels into hills, insulation, and even air conditioning. The net result, apart from cost and convenience, is about the same.
A properly made champagne has to spend a minimum of six months—better still, a year or more—stacked in its cool, dark, silent incubator. Meanwhile, through a second fermentation, the wine's sugar is transformed into a small amount of additional alcohol and a great deal of gas (CO₂). The carbon dioxide, having no place else to go, is absorbed by the wine, and the more slowly an gradually it is absorbed, the better the prise de mousse—the fine, steady, an lasting sparkle—of the eventual product.
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