All wine throws a fairly heavy sediment during fermentation, and champagne, even during its second fermentation, is no exception. If you pick up an hold to the light a bottle that has been en tirage for six months or more, you will see along its lower side a shadow, or mask, of dépôt. It was this that use to make decanting necessary, and it is this (since no one wants to drink a cloudy champagne) that is now dispose of by other methods, thanks to Dom Perignon, Monsieur Muller, and a hundred other nameless technicians who devoted their lives to the problem.
It was discovered, perhaps by accident, that if a champagne bottle is store on a slant, its neck down, and if it is shaken and turned daily for a period of months, the sediment will slide, ever so slowly and gradually, down toward the cork. The splash marks of white paint often seen on the bottoms of champagne bottles are guides used in this process:The bottles are placed in their “pulpits” or French racks (an inverted V of heavy planks with a hole for the neck of each bottle) where a trained workman daily lifts them an inch or so, shakes them, and, guided by the splash marks, turns them about a twelfth of a turn, and puts them back.
After four to six months of such treatment, the wine is clear, and the sediment is a gray layer against the inside of the cork. The bottles are then carefully carried, neck down, to a “brine table,” the necks are plunged in a freezing solution, and the inch or so of wine nearest the cork is frozen. The iron agrafe, or staple, is then removed an the pressure inside the bottle blows out the cork, and the frozen wine and sediment with it. This process is known as disgorging, and it is followed by one even more important, known as dosage.
All champagne, up to this moment, is bone-dry, so dry that only a few cuvées of great years would be agreeable, un- of dosage consists in adding to each bot- of dosage consists in adding to each bottle, before it is finally recorked, a small quantity of liqueur. The basic elements of such liqueur, although many formulas are secret, are sugar, old wine, and fine brandy, and it is the amount of liqueur added which determines whether a champagne goes to market as brut or extra dry or sec. In general, a brut is supposed to contain no more than 1 ½ per cent of liqueur, an extra dry no more than 2 ½ per cent, but champagnes for the Russian and South American markets have been dosed as high as even 10 per cent or more. By and large, the better the wine, the less dosage it requires and receives.
Although the British statesman, Canning, once remarked that “the man who says he likes dry champagne simply lies,“ the English preference is traditionally and definitely for the driest wines produced. Americans are supposed to like champagne a little less dry, and the French, very sensibly, will not allow themselves to be pinned down. They drink a sweeter champagne (a sec or demi-sec) with dessert, after other wines, at the end of a meal, and very good it is, too, served under such circumstances. They will select a brut (the driest of all) or an extra dry to drink straight through a meal, or to serve before dinner instead of a cocktail, or to use at a party or a wedding reception.
In view of champagne's enormous popularity and prestige, it is hardly surprising that efforts have been made to produce a similar wine in almost every country where grapes are grown. I have even been told by preasants near Bari, in southern Italy, and by growers roun Villafranca del Panadés, in northern Spain, that the French shippers came annually to these regions from Reims and Epernay to buy the wines out of which they made their champagnes. It is, I suppose, hardly necessary to say that this is the sheerest nonsense: French champagne, rigorously controlled, comes only from the Champagne district of France.
It is definitely a fact, however, that some of the others can be very good indeed, and if they are made by what the French themselves describe as the méthode champenoise and show their national origin on their label, they certainly have a legitimate claim to the name champagne. Such wines have been an are being produced in Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and the United States. With Chile, we ourselves are producing about the best.
The first sparkling wine produce commercially in this country came from the banks of the Ohio River near Cincinnati and was made by Nicholas Longworth from the Catawba grape. It was to this that Longfellow had reference when, in one of his less inspired moments, he wrote:
Very fine in its way Is the Verzenay And the Sillery, soft and creamy, But a taste more divine Has Catawba wine, More dulcet, delicious, and dreamy.
By the latter part of the nineteenth century, American champagne was being made in half a dozen different states, with New York, California, Ohio, an Missouri in the lead, in about that order. Most Eastern champagnes, then as now, were made predominantly from native American grape varieties; the less goo California champagnes, then and unfortunately now, were made from whatever grapes happened to be available.
This is certainly not the place to attempt to settle the old, old argument about the relative quality of Eastern an California champagnes. Certainly those made from Pinot grapes in California are nearer their French prototype than those, however excellent, made from Delawares and Catawbas in Ohio or on the shores of New York's Finger Lakes. Which—forgetting France—is the better wine is for you, Messieurs and Mesdames, to decide.
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