Compared to champagne, all other wines, be they ever so venerable and fine and expensive, have a certain rusticity about them, like old-fashioned gardens or good country families, or sound vins du pays. They seem to belong, in a sense, to the countryside from which they come. Champagne belongs to the world.
Since 1840 (and there are no reliable statistics for earlier years), France has exported on the average nearly three- quarters of her production of champagne. From 1870 to 1914 this amounted to between a million and a half an two million cases a year. Since World War II, and to a certain extent since World War I, the international wine trade has fallen on comparatively evil days; but whether you spell it xampán,as do the Catalans, or sciampagna, as the Italians, or champagne, as most of the rest of us, whether you call it “sautebouchon” or “a drink for gods,” or (with Talleyrand) “le vin civilisateur par excellence,” this extraordinary wine remains synonymous with festivity in every country the world over.
What, one feels impelled to ask, are the reasons for this phenomenal an universal acclaim? How, in a world where people so rarely agree about anything, does it happen that they all agree about champagne? There are far better still wines than the still wines of the Champagne country. Beer, too, has its foam; if it is bubbles you are after, you can find them in a Scotch highball or an ice cream soda; any still wine can be carbonated quite cheaply and made to sparkle after a fashion. What, then, is the secret? What is champagne?
The legal definition, as might be expected, varies considerably from one country to another. Basically, however, champagne is a wine made sparkling by a certain laborious, complicated, and expensive method first developed and perfected in the Champagne district of France. Unless it carries another origin clearly stated on its label (as California, New York State, Chile, for example), champagne is properly a wine from one specific province in eastern France. If French, it must be made from certain specific varieties of grape—principally the Pinot Noir and the Pinot Chardonnay. If not French, it may be made from these or from altogether different grapes, depending on the laws and customs of the country from which it comes. It remains a fact, however, that sparkling wines made from the Pinot grape, whether French or not, are recognizably superior to all others—considerably lighter and more delicate than the Vouvrays and sparkling Saumurs of the Loire Valley (made from the Chénin Blanc),softer and better balanced than sparkling Moselles and Rhines of Germany (made from the Riesling), cleaner-tasting an less cloying than even the best champagnes of New York State (made, generally, from native American varieties, the Delaware and Catawba). Of these, and of the champagnes of California, of Chile, etc., I shall have more to say later on. Let us, for the moment, return to the birthplace of all sparkling wine.
Next to those of the Moselle an Rhine, the Champagne vineyards are the northernmost of Europe, bleak and col and windswept in winter, cursed with a climate so generally unfavorable that hardly one year in five ranks as a fine vintage. They lie some sixty miles east of Paris, on the lower slopes of a chain of hills near Reims and the Marne Valley; they overlook, on the east, that curiously unprepossessing, unfertile plain which has long been called (though never, perhaps, with so much feeling as in World War I) la champagne pouilleuse —“lousy” Champagne.
It is said that when Louis XIV visited Reims on one occasion, some twenty years after his coronation in the little city's incomparable cathedral, he was met by a deputation of citizens who brought him the choicest products of their barren countryside. “Sire,” said the mayor, who was the committee's chairman, “we offer you our wine, our pears, our gingerbread, our biscuits, and our hearts.”
Reims is still locally famous for her biscuits and her pain d'épice, her bake pears are still admirable, and she prove the value of her stout heart once and for all between 1914 and 1918. But the wine of Champagne is more than ever the one real source of wealth in a comparatively poor province.
This being the case, it is rather surprising to learn that there are less than half as many acres under vines as there were, for example, in 1830, or even in 1870. The main decline was the direct consequence of heavy fighting in an near the vineyards (and the inevitably resulting lack of cultivation and care) in 1917 and 1918. There are some 20,000 acres in production today, and since such vineyards as have been abandoned or planted to potatoes or let go to pasture were almost without exception the less good ones, it is safe to say that the average quality of champagne is higher today than it has ever been.
Traditionally, the vineyards are divided into three separate major belts—“the Mountain,” “the River,” and the “Côre des Blancs.” The first two are plante predominantly to the Pinot Noir, a black grape out of which all of the fine re wines of Burgundy are made, and the third belt to the Pinot Chardonnay, which is elsewhere responsible for Chablis, Pouilly-Fuissé, and Montrachet. It may seem surprising that 60 per cent of most champagnes and 100 per cent of some are made from a grape as dark in color as our familiar American Concord, but such is the fact. Like almost all black grapes, the Pinot Noir has a pulp which is nearly colorless and a juice which is the hue of the palest straw.
Almost all of the champagnes that go to market, including most of the best, are blends of wines from the three major districts—the vineyards of the Mountain, it is said, contributing body an power to the perfect champagne, those of the River, softness and roundness, an those of the Côte des Blancs, delicacy and finesse. This was not the case a century ago, when names such as Sillery an Verzenay and Ay and Cramant (villages, all four) were as well known on the whole as Clicquot and Heidsieck an Pommery and Moet, not only in France but in England and in this country. Some of these names have been revived in the past two decades, and a champagne de cru (a “growth” champagne which takes its name from a town, as Ay or Cramant) is almost always interesting an almost always worth tasting when you can find it.
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.”
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.
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.