extract from Dominic’s France: the cool climate

May & June 2006

Rising stars and bursting bubbles

Getting there

Weather, climate and the best time to visit

Landscape, terroir & grape varieties

The history of champagne wine

The champagne industry today 

Champagne and style

Only in Champagne

Wine & food

Driving, cycling or walking 

Rising stars and bursting bubbles

I once ordered “un bouteille de vin” in a Paris restaurant. “UNE bouteille,” the waiter corrected, with a grimace that said “Fumble with our language if you must, Monsieur, but please leave our genders alone!” English speakers know that assigning genders to inanimate objects is, well, a bit silly, and in this case the waiter knew exactly what I wanted. But there are occasions when mastery of French noun genders can avoid confusion. Walk into a Reims wine bar and ask for le champagne, and you will be served a flute of something delicious and fizzy; the taking of la Champagne (with a capital ‘C’) was Kaiser Wilhelm’s military objective in 1914! 

For most visitors to la Champagne (the region), le champagne is a drink associated with the large merchant houses of Reims and Epernay. In their cavernous cellars, a host of subterranean railways, video suites and light shows skilfully reinforce the image of champagne as an elegant, sophisticated and aspirational wine. 

But le champagne as we know it has a fairly short history and the region’s widespread prosperity an even shorter one. Today, Champagne is flourishing as never before, with too little wine to sell to an ever-thirstier world market, and not enough land left to plant. But at the heart of la Champagne, I found an enduring rural, familial culture, made up of the 15,000 or so growers who supply the large houses with their base wines. A growing number of these récoltants-manipulants (nearly 3000) are handcrafting delicious cuvées and selling them under their own labels. 

After exploring the large cellars of Reims and Epernay, followed by a succession of bike-related hold-ups, I decided to follow the Grand and Premier Cru villages through the heart of Champagne country, and into the cellars of some of the region’s best family estates. This is where you get to taste how champagne is really made, usually for free; and the wines in these smaller village wineries sell for as little as 13 euros a bottle (little more than 8 quid!). 

The terms ‘Grand’ and ‘Premier Cru’ have a variety of meanings in France. In Bordeaux they apply to individual châteaux, in Burgundy they delimit small parcels of land, and in both the wines are likely to be expensive. In Champagne none of these things applies. Grand Cru champagne is simply a wine made from grapes grown in one of seventeen villages, each supposedly blessed with superior, unique growing conditions. Premier Cru champagnes come from a further forty-two villages, and a slightly lower classification. 

Simplicity helps explain the global success of champagne. Drinkers might not know exactly where the wine comes from or how it is made, let alone get to grips with terms like blanc de blancs or Grand Cru, but these are all what ad-men call “hooray words”. You don’t need to understand them to know that they’re good. 

Brand Champagne has drawn its strength from the big names in the business: Moët & Chandon, Ruinart, Veuve Clicquot and many others. But as more of the récoltants-manipulants are successful in marketing their own products, the traditional relationship of mutual dependence between them and the Champagne houses becomes more fragile. Keen to expand their empires, but with no land left to buy or plant in Champagne, three of the region’s biggest players are rumoured to have invested in the chalky slopes of England’s South Downs, a terroir that is considered similar to that in Champagne.

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Getting there

There are dozens of daily trains and flights from London to Paris. The journey from Paris to Reims is only an hour by car or taxi, or one and a half hours by train. A 45-minute Paris-Reims TGV connection should be in place by the time of publication. 

Cars are easily hired from either Paris Charles de Gaulle airport or Paris Gare du Nord Eurostar terminal. From the airport, take the A1/E19 towards Paris, fork left onto the A3/E15, then follow signs for Marne la Vallée and the E50/A4. From the Gare du Nord, head east towards Place de la République, then follow signs to Charenton, joining the E50/A4 to Reims. 

The ferry makes most sense if you’re planning to restock your cellars. Champagne’s proximity to the UK has long made this a favourite option amongst Brits. From Calais simply follow the autoroute signs for Reims, a 170-mile journey. 

For cyclists travelling with their own bikes, the Eurostar will carry them for an extra £20, or you can wheel them onto ferries at no extra cost. Air travel is not recommended, as baggage handlers will show little respect to your beloved machine. Check the timetables on the net to see which French trains take bicycles.

If you wish to hire a bike once in France, be warned that you cannot do so in Reims. Either organise things in Paris, or reserve one in advance from Champagne’s only suitable bike hire centre, in Epernay: Espace Aquatique Balléo (The Swimming Baths). Parc Roger Menu (off avenue Maréchal Foch). Tel. 03 26 53 35 60

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Weather, climate and the best time to visit

By arriving in Champagne in mid-May, I had missed the departure of the bitterly cold champenois winter – les saints de la glace – by a mere few days. I decided to begin my tour of France’s cool climate in Champagne partly as it has a surprisingly low spring rainfall. Unfortunately, by the beginning of June 2006 the weather was still unusually chilly. 

The Champagne countryside has a deceptively tranquil complexion in spring. As the buds burst on the vines and leaves start to appear, so the worries of the growing season begin. The risk of rot and even of frost at this time of year is still great, so a glance at most vineyards reveals energetic spraying of the vines. The plants also need to be pulled upright and brought within their training wires as their growth becomes more vigorous, and any branches not destined to produce fruit must be removed. 

In the second week of June the cloudy skies suddenly made way for a sun hot enough to make a Bedouin swoon. Muttering began in the vineyards about the infamous 2003 heatwave, in which grapes cooked on the vines, yields were dramatically reduced and the juice lacked acidity. Grape prices were forced up, and Champagne houses needed to dig deep into their precious stocks of reserve wines. 

2003 was an exceptional year all over France, but the climate of Champagne is generally a harsh one. Feeling the dramatic seasonal temperature variation of its northern continental situation, and the cool wind and the rain from the Atlantic, the winemakers regard this as both Champagne’s Achilles’ heel and her unique strength, essential for the slow but sure ripening of grapes needed for champagne production. 

It is worth braving the weather’s unpredictability at this time of year, since you will share the place with fewer Belgian tourists than from late June, and find more wineries and restaurants open than in August. There is a festive feel in September and October around harvest time, but many of the smaller wineries will be short of the time necessary to provide an unhurried welcome.

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Landscape, terroir & grape varieties

Previous visits to the Champagne vineyard had left me with fond memories of soft sunshine, greenery and…“rolling hills”. So it was with mild apprehension that I pedalled towards the Montagne de Reims, south of the city. But at under 300 metres at its highest point, this “mountain” is a more kindly adversary than it sounds, and the wine villages are mostly bunched together along its lower slopes. 

The Montagne de Reims is the beginning of Pinot Noir country in Champagne. On the less well exposed north facing slopes nearest Reims, this black-skinned grape produces delicate, headily perfumed wines, with a strong backbone of acidity. Further south around Aÿ and Bouzy, the southern exposure permits greater ripeness, giving wines with a fuller body. The latter of these villages is well known for the production of still Côteaux Champenois wines, particularly of the red variety. Rarely exported, largely on the grounds of its expense, Côteaux Champenois Rouge from a fine producer can be a deliciously light, cherry-scented wine. The powerfully fruity, but less ageworthy black Pinot Meunier grape is also planted in smaller quantities, as is the Chardonnay. This last gives champagnes with delicate floral aromas when planted on the Montagne de Reims. 

South of Epernay the east-facing slopes of the Côte des Blancs are uniquely suited to growing Chardonnay vines. Although Chardonnay represents only about a quarter of all Champagne grapes, which fetch a correspondingly high price, this is the only grape grown in the area between Epernay and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. Here it produces wines with crisp citrus and mineral flavours, which in time develop hints of biscuit, brioche and honeycomb. 

The ripest, fullest Pinots Noir and Meunier are planted on the mainly south-facing slopes of the Marne Valley, following the river west from Cumières and Hautvillers towards Dormans and Château-Thierry. 

The secret of Champagne’s grape cultivation is the chalk, or la craye, which forms the subsoil for the entire region. This is the same chalk that continues northwest under the English Channel, rearing up in Dover as its famous white cliffs. The chalk retains valuable moisture and warmth needed by the vines during the growing season, and provides a source of nitrogen for the grapes, which aids yeast activity during fermentation. 

Topsoils vary in depth and type throughout Champagne. Deeper soils contain more clay and alluvial matter nearer the River Marne, and are stonier and shallower on the hillsides. But it is vineyard aspect and gradient, rather than soil variation, that best explains differences in terroir, and therefore wine styles, in Champagne.

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The history of champagne wine

Vines have been grown in Champagne since the 1st century AD, although champagne as we know it dates only from the late 1600s. Before then the still wines of Champagne enjoyed considerable renown in the nearby royal court of Paris, but were dogged by the habit of prematurely ending their fermentations following the harvest with the onset of the cold Champagne winter. The residual yeast and sugar would cause the fermentations to fire up again the following spring after the wine was bottled. The trapped carbon dioxide created bubbles in the finished wine, often causing the bottles to explode. 

It was the Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon, cellarmaster of the abbey at Hautvillers, who first studied the wine’s second fermentation in bottle. Pérignon’s important legacy to the region was the art of blending wines from different vineyards, grapes and vintages to give balance to the finished product. Only later did he develop a taste for the bubbles, deliberately provoking the wine’s second fermentation, or prise de mousse. 

The 17th century also saw the introduction of tougher glass bottles from northern England and the revolutionary new cork stopper from Portugal. It was the combination of these new technologies that allowed the immense pressure created by the wine’s prise de mousse to be harnessed, yielding a relatively safe method of creating the wine we now know and love. 

It was another Benedictine monk, Dom Ruinart from Reims, who introduced his nephew, Nicholas Ruinart to this new sparkling brew. Noting the downturn in his family’s drapery business, the young Ruinart decided to invest in the production of this new style of wine, creating the first champagne house in Reims in 1729. 

By now, the wine’s second fermentation in bottle was encouraged by the addition of liqueur de tirage, a solution of cane sugar and yeast, to the light, acidic still wine following its first fermentation. The bottles were then carefully stacked in the Roman chalk pits 30 metres beneath the streets of Reims and Epernay. A constant temperature of 11 degrees in these cellars caused the prise de mousse to take place slowly, allowing the development of fine, delicate bubbles in the wines. 

In the early 19th century, Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin or La Veuve (the widow) Clicquot, made the final crucial advance in the development of modern champagne. Until then, the deposit of dead yeast cells caused by the second fermentation had been removed haphazardly and somewhat ineffectively, by simply resting the bottles on their necks and waiting for the sediment to collect there for removal, or ‘disgorgement’. La Veuve invented the process of remuage, by having her kitchen table chopped in half, hinged and bored with holes. The result was the first pupitre, the device still used in many of the region’s cellars, which allows the bottles to be diagonally inverted and given a quick twist to-and-fro every few days for up to eight weeks by a remueur. This ensures that all of the sediment is pushed towards the neck of the bottle ready for its disgorgement. 

The champagne-making process has changed very little in the last three centuries, except that it is now more or less automated in most cellars. The extent of its automation depends on the winery’s size and on the principles by which the winemaker works. Stainless steel vats frequently sit alongside old oak ones, from which wine is drawn and bottled. A precise measure of liqueur de tirage is added, and the bottles are aged in cellars often with computerised temperature control systems. 

The romantic but labour-intensive practice of remuage in pupitres has been replaced in most wineries by huge gyropalettes. Each one of these enormous swivelling cuboids is able to prepare 500 bottles for disgorgement within a week. The sediment in the bottleneck is neatly collected within a plastic crown cap, and the neck of the bottle is frozen in brine solution. When the cap is removed, the pressure in the bottle forces out the frozen sediment. The wine is then given its dosage, the addition of wine and cane sugar (liqueuer d’expedition) to achieve the desired level of sweetness.

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The champagne industry today

Ask any champagne house what makes the perfect champagne, and they will proudly quote you the number of different vineyards, villages and vintages from which their wines are blended. For them, as for Dom Pérignon, this is what gives the wines their balance and consistency of style. But as I talked to the growers making and bottling their own champagnes, a different story began to emerge. Their view is that the wines produced from grapes grown only in specific villages and in single years are the ones that best represent the differences in Champagne’s terroir. 

The growers’ argument continues that the climate in Champagne today is both warmer and more predictable than it was in the 17th century, allowing the grapes to ripen more or less reliably every year in the best sites. Nobody knows which grape varieties Dom Pérignon would have used, but since 1935 champagne wines have been made only from Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. These three superior varieties have, moreover, benefited from rigorous clonal selection, further reducing the need for blending as a means of ironing out imperfections. 

Since the 18th century, growers and merchant houses have co-existed and co-operated in a state of uneasy interdependence. In the early 20th century, the phylloxera louse arrived in Champagne, decimating its vineyards; and in 1910 the growers’ plight worsened when the harvest failed completely. The houses reduced the price they were prepared to pay for grapes by more than half, buying cheaper grapes from outside the region with which to make their champagnes. The poverty-stricken growers duly rioted in the streets of Epernay. 

The modern relationship is indeed a complex one, and is in a constant state of flux. The merchant houses, or négociants-manipulants, have brought the region its renown, allowing the smaller récoltant-manipulants to sell their own wines successfully under the Champagne umbrella. The latter group recognises their debt to the houses, and most still rely on them to buy the majority of their grape harvests. Conversely, without the growers, the houses would have few or no grapes from which to make wine for their champagne brands. 

Another group, the co-operative cellars, completes the trio of champagne producers. Co-ops began to develop in the hard days of the 1930s as a means by which individual growers could combine to make, label and sell their own wines. Today, co-ops like Jacquart in Reims, Nicholas Feuillatte in Chouilly and Champagne Mailly Grand Cru rank among the best-respected producers.

All three groups are represented by Champagne’s all-encompassing and extremely dynamic trade body, the Comité Interprofessionel des Vins de Champagne (CIVC).

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Champagne and style

The majority of champagnes are the grower’s or the house’s non-vintage ‘brut’, generally a blend of the three permitted champagne grapes. Blanc de blancs wines must be made exclusively from white Chardonnay grapes, whilst Blanc de Noirs are white champagnes made only from Pinots Noir and Meunier. Brut simply means that the wine is dry. 

White champagne can be made from red grapes because the pigment is in the grape skins rather than the pulp. The grape bunches are handpicked and placed carefully into small boxes, then pressed quickly so that the juice has no contact with the skins and is therefore not stained. 

Champagnes that are dosed with a greater concentration of sugar before bottling are labelled sec, demi-sec, dry or rich. But for many, the purest expression of champagne is in its brut zéro, or brut sauvage incarnation, in which no sugar is included in the wine’s dosage. 

An elite minority of champagnes carry the date of a single year, when the growing conditions that year are thought to justify the bottling of such a wine. These vintage, or millésimé, wines must be matured on their lees, the dead yeast cells from their second fermentation, for at least 3 years, compared with only 15 months for nonvintage wines. To confuse, however, many of the best producers mature even their non-vintage wines for 3 or more years, and plenty of small growers bottle single vintage wines with less than 3 years lees ageing, which therefore cannot bear a vintage date. 

The roller-coaster fashion for rosé champagne will mean that, in many cellars, vignerons may even be short of tasting samples to show you! Champagne is the only French region in which a rosé wine can be made by blending white base wines with red. But an increasing number of producers are making champagne rosés by the saignée or ‘bleeding’ method, using only Pinot grapes, macerated for a short time on their skins before pressing.

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Only in Champagne

Virtually unheard-of on foreign markets are Champagne’s once more famous still red and white wines, sold under the Côteaux Champenois appellation. These are fresh and light-bodied wines, mostly sold in local restaurants. Further south in the Aube département, the fullbodied still dry Rosé de Riceys is made from Pinot grapes, and is a fine partner for rustic champenois cuisine. 

A popular apéritif is Ratafia de Champagne, a blend of unfermented grape must and grape spirit. Marc de Champagne is the fiery local eau-de vie, distilled from pressed grape skins. Fine de Champagne is the rather gentler distillation of the juice from the final pressing of champagne grapes and the disgorged sediment from the wine’s bottlenecks.

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Wine & food

The chefs of Champagne are divided between the ones who ‘cook local’, and those who use fresh ingredients from the region, but deny the worth, or even the existence, of cuisine champenoise. 

Champagne’s prosperity came fairly recently, so the region has traditionally served a very rustic table. Smoked ham and rich, pungent tripe sausages called andouillettes are supplemented around harvest time by potée champenoise, a hearty stew made with several different meats, sausages, autumn vegetables and potatoes. 

Fresh river fish are a big part of the champenois diet, particularly pike, pikeperch and trout. The best restaurants change their menus in harmony with the seasons, and during my visit in May and early June the smell of local white asparagus filled the Champagne kitchens.

When haute cuisine arrived in the region, it introduced gastronomic wonders from diverse areas of France. Many distinguished chefs did greet my request for ‘cuisine champenoise’ with a shrug, whilst using Côteaux Champenois wines and Ratafia as a base for delicious sauces, serving locally reared champenois escargots and lentillons roses, the local pink variety of lentil which, confusingly, turns brown when it is cooked. 

The Champagne region is famous for its soft, creamy cow’s cheeses. The best known, brie de Meaux, does not actually come from Champagne, but its proximity and its heritage (it was said to be a favourite at the table of the Emperor Charlemagne) make it a popular choice on restaurant cheese boards. Chaorce, from the Aube in the south of Champagne, is a delicious mild oozing cheese; the more pungent Langres is often flavoured with the fiery Marc de Champagne.

The people of Reims indulge their sweet teeth with the city’s famous biscuits roses, delicious pink oblong macaroons, which you can buy in most patisseries. But why not visit Maison Fossier, Reims’s main producer of this speciality, at their boutique near the Cathedral. 25, cours Jean-Baptiste Langlet. Tel. 03 26 47 59 84 

Champagne is an excellent apéritif; further stimulating the appetite of the touring cyclist, but it can also pair well with food. Light non-vintage champagne is best kept with salads and subtly flavoured fish dishes, although fuller wines from villages south of the Montagne de Reims and the Marne Valley partner with correspondingly full-flavoured foods. Vintage wines can cope with varying intensities of meat, but their complex flavours are often best expressed on their own. 

Blanc de blancs is traditionally a fish wine. The highly fashionable champagne rosé goes well with richer, sweet sauces as well as the local red fruit-based desserts, often incorporating biscuits roses de Reims.

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Driving, cycling or walking

You will encounter fewer cyclists in Champagne than in many French regions, as the area has been slow to exploit this form of tourism. In Reims particularly, I would advise the use of pavements: you might hurt a pedestrian, but at least you won’t be killed by a car! But the wider Champagne region has plenty to offer the cyclist, with pretty villages, rolling vineyards and tranquil forests to pedal through. 

If it’s flat land you’re looking for, however, you may be in for a surprise. Whilst Champagne is no Alpine cyclo-purgatory, the Montagne de Reims and the Côte des Blancs will in places challenge the novice rider. Champagne makes sense as a short week’s tour, but the daily itineraries are amongst the most challenging in my book, ideal for the more energetic wine lover! 

The advantage of arriving by car is that you can stock up on the stuff, with a substantial saving on UK prices. Added to which, a car provides greater flexibility, allowing the tour to be extended or shortened with ease. You will not have to book the rural accommodation so far in advance, since the lack of any in one village will simply require driving to another nearby or back to Reims or Epernay. 

Signposted vineyard trails are not so common in Champagne as they are in many wine regions, but there are plenty of vineyards to amble around and pretty villages to discover on foot. The nature reserve of the Montagne de Reims is a particular treat for wildlife enthusiasts.

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