Excerpts

INTRODUCING CHAMPAGNE'Champagne is, supremely, an idea. In languages far removed from French, people who have never seen - let alone tasted - the wine of Champagne use the word as an image of gaiety.'John ArlottThe sparkling wines from Champagne (1) both enjoy and suffer from a double identity. Ever since the late seventeenth century when the louche aristocrats of London and Paris were first able to enjoy bottles of 'fizz' both the word and the wine have invariably been associated with celebration, with lightness of spirits, to the detriment of any appreciation of the quality of the wines themselves. As soon as it arrived on the market, even in very limited quantities, champagne was regarded purely and simply as an aid to seduction or at least a unique combination of freshness, joy, vivacity, a recognition of freedom from the constraints of everyday life.It is the only drink which has a specific social meaning - it's a recognition of what Keynes called the 'animal spirits' which are so necessary an element of a healthy economy - indeed the British Treasury includes the state of the champagne market as an indicator of the country's economic situation. Not surprisingly, it's what economists call a 'lagging indicator' - people don't indulge in a bottle if they're not confident of their immediate future. This explains the low sales so noticeable in the depressed 1930s - apart from the relief when Prohibition was lifted in the United States in late 1933 - and the swings and roundabouts in consumption since 1980, above all in Europe, where most champagne is still consumed. As J. Penn Kavanagh, then in charge of Moët's operations in the United States put it in the early 1980s 'champagne is a barometer of consumer confidence and sense of well-being, and right now people are not celebrating.'Over the past thirty years - fortunately for those concerned not only with the actual but with the potential quality of their wines - the Champenois have started to try to define it as a distinguished wine in its own right and to insist that it is several different wines. As discussed in Chapters 9, 10 and 11 on the vineyards, the grapes and the wines, they are improving quality in every aspect of production, from the cleanliness and environmental state of the vineyard, through the presses they use, to the minimum time the wines have to mature before being sold. As a result, they are offering a wide range of well-made wines, sometimes made from a single grape variety, even a few from the sort of individual vineyards which are normal in any region offering wines of a superior quality, and are advising drinkers on their suitability to accompany every type of food. They are also, and crucially, far more honest about their wines - and the grapes they contain - than they were in the past. As Richard Geoffroy, in charge of producing 4 million bottles of Dom Perignon, the world's most successful luxury wine puts it 'we are reinventing ourselves'.Curiously, one of the major changes this has involved is the removal of two 'snobberies', which has resulted in the rehabilitation of both the Pinot Meunier grape variety and the Aube region. To be fair, the Aube, which is nearer Burgundy than Reims was not able to produce wines worthy of the appellation until the 1960s after the Gamay grapes which had dominated the region had largely been replaced by Pinot Noir. But as we will see in Chapter 10 the bias against Meunier was mostly due to sheer technical incompetence.They are able to make such dramatic changes because there is a true 'Champagne community' formed of the growers who provide the grapes and the couple of hundred merchants who offer the wines, usually under their own name. Despite intermittent and perfectly comprehensible arguments, this interdependence, which characterizes the historic relationship between growers and firms, is taken for granted in a way that is unique among France's winemaking regions. As the winemaker at one cooperative told me: 'everyone needs everyone else.' He is not alone; as one grower put it, 'without the major brands champagne would not exist,' although, says one chef de caves: 'the quality is too dependent on them'.It is those major brands - a couple of dozen of them - who set the pace, the tone, of the region and they still depend more on their reputation as brand names than on the exact nature of the wines they are selling. Even the most sophisticated of drinkers, did not - indeed still do not - demand details such as whether they rely more on Chardonnay than Pinot Noir. Consumers have tended to choose the brand that suits their tastes, whether that it is for lighter more elegant wines like Pol Roger or more substantial beverages like Krug or Veuve Clicquot. Moreover, today the majority of drinkers in major markets like France, Britain and Germany buy exclusively on price or on the reputation of the supermarkets where most champagne is now sold.The changes, in the vineyard, the wines - and the Champenois' attitude to them - are partly a result of the growing competition from other sparkling wines made in the same way from vineyards outside France. Even Benoit Gouez, the winemaker from Moët says that he can tell champagne from the best non-champagne only four times in five. These wines come from an increasing number of cool climate vineyards, from Tasmania to California, but perhaps the most serious rivals are being produced from south-facing slopes in southern England in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, where the grapes are grown in the same type of chalky soil as is found in Champagne. The area under vines is rapidly increasing, albeit from a tiny base, but is most unlikely to pose a serious threat in the near future.Whatever the motives behind the changes, the conversion from creators of romantic bubbles to serious winemakers is rather belated, to say the least, but it is founded on another strain in the Champenois mentality, for the drink is an astonishingly dense and contradictory mass of phenomena. It was the French writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann who quoted one serious winemaker as saying that 'others merely create bubbles, while we, my dear sir, make vin de Champagne.' Despite its frivolous associations, for some people it has always been, to employ the French term, a 'serious' wine. The Krugs, high priests of the religion of champagne, often use the words 'severe' and 'severity' in connection with their wines.But those frivolous and emotional meanings inevitably associated with champagne are never going to disappear. As a noun it may merely describe the finest of all sparkling wines, but the name has also been used as an adjective or adverb. 'That peculiar champagney feel of mountain air,' wrote one Victorian author. 'A warm sweet air, light with brightness and champagniness,' exclaimed another. The mere sight of a bottle invariably provides an impression of a special occasion, an impression heightened by the formality, the ceremony, the excitement of opening the bottle and controlling the resultant fizz. Unlike lesser beverages, drinking champagne is never a matter of routine. Champagne fascinates not only wine lovers, but also historians - social, economic, political - and linguists, physiologists, physicists and chemists as well.Enthusiasts have been varied, with such distinct personalities as Maynard Keynes and Dorothy Parker both regretting that they had not drunk enough champagne. Inevitably Oscar Wilde got in on the act, 'Pleasure without champagne is purely artificial,' he proclaimed, while Francis Bacon wished 'Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.'The roll-call of authors writing about champagne includes Voltaire, Thackeray (appropriately, in his Book of Snobs), Pushkin and even Harold Pinter in No Man's Land, while in 1945 Agatha Christie published a story entitled Sparkling Cyanide, which involved a 1928 bottle of Veuve Clicquot. And while champagne has featured in many films - most notably in the James Bond series where he generally drinks Bollinger - Alfred Hitchcock's silent film called simply Champagne has been forgotten even by his multitude of aficianados. But none of these authors - or enthusiasts - remarked on the quality (or lack of it) of the wine itself, the word was all, a matter of feeling of sentiment rather than appreciation of the wine as such.Unfortunately, most of the hundreds of authors and poets who have written about champagne have concentrated on the wine from the moment the bottle is opened and its contents drunk. 'Literary' authors have never come near to comprehending the underlying nature of the drink. Nothing is more disheartening than to plough through the many poems and essays on the subject: the mood, the essence of champagne, have proved to be too intangible, too evanescent, to be captured in words. Poets and essayists alike go jarringly, self-consciously playful when confronted by the word. The more strenuously they attempt to be light-hearted, the more stubbornly leaden their efforts. Even the most fervent Byronist will not be too happy with the master's famous couplet from Don Juan:Champagne with its foaming whirls,As white as Cleopatra's pearlsVery few musical scores or songs of any worth - and as far as classical music is concerned virtually none - have found favour with posterity even though one French estimate claims there have been two hundred of them (2) including such trifles as the 'Pommery Waltz' and 'La Valse de Clicquot'. Even the two attempts by Johann Strauss, the master of light-hearted music, his 'Champagne Gallop' and 'Champagne Polka' are not reckoned among his more successful compositions, while 'The Night they invented Champagne' has not lasted even though it was first sung by Maurice Chevalier.The only musical form which has greatly benefited from its association with champagne (and vice versa) is jazz. Champagne - mostly from Mumm - was so common in the brothels of Storyville in New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century that it was simply called 'wine', and was an acknowledged inspiration to the players - 'Wining Man' is one of the finest products of the time. But then jazz musicians, unlike literary persons, are unpretentious, recognizing the best but not making an undue fuss about it. It was entirely appropriate for Perrier-Jouët to launch its Belle Epoque luxury champagne at a party held to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Duke Ellington who was also a hero to that most austere of champagne makers, Paul Krug, who spent his honeymoon following the musician around the United States.Perhaps the word, the wine, and its associations are too complex and paradoxical to be distilled into a single poem. Perhaps writers have concentrated too exclusively on its original role (which it has not entirely abandoned), as an aid to seduction. The reason for that role is brutally simple. The alcohol in ordinary wine is not released until it reaches the stomach. But champagne (and other, lesser, sparkling wines for that matter) are different. In the words of Patrick Forbes: 'The moment it comes in contact with the rough surfaces that line our mouths the resulting friction causes the carbonic acid gas suspended in it to force its way out in the form of bubbles - and each of these bubbles carries away with it a drop of alcohol.' (3)This effect is hidden by the tingling of the fizz, and, hopefully, its lovely fruity flavour on the palate. But it is real enough: 'Chaque fois qu'un bouchon de champagne saute, une femme se met a rire.' ('Every pop of a champagne cork sets a woman laughing.') The effect is also unexpected. Other sparkling, refreshing drinks, like brandy and soda or whisky and soda, may contain less alcohol than a glass of champagne, but anyone drinking them assumes that they are indulging in a far stronger beverage and are therefore far more prepared for their effects than they are before accepting a glass of champagne.Yet champagne has managed to become a wine for respectable people to drink, albeit with a knowing recognition that it is special because of its louche associations as well as because of the fizz. Drinking champagne is still perceived as a self-consciously naughty deed in a good world. The Anglo-Saxon attitude towards champagne is perhaps best expressed in Hilaire Belloc's famous lines:The accursed power which stands on Privilege,(And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)Broke - and Democracy resumed her reign:(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).Belloc was certainly cynical, but also right in identifying champagne as a sovereign lubricant in times of political turmoil. After the unprecedented victory of the socialist President Mitterrand in 1981 a 'Reserve Exclusive du Parti Socialiste' was produced. But it can serve a similar purpose in times of trouble. 'Between the crisis and the catastrophe,' said the French Ambassador to Washington during an international financial conference in 1931, 'there is always time for a glass of champagne.' (4) Perhaps the finest tribute paid to its restorative qualities was that by Richard Wagner in a letter to his friend Paul Chandon de Briailles a few weeks after the disastrous first performance of Tannhauser in Paris: 'Believe me, that magnificent wine you sent to my house proved my sole means of mending my broken spirits, and I cannot speak too highly of the effect it had on me at that moment when there was so much I wanted to forget.'Champagne is more than an emollient for distressed composers or victorious politicians. Its role as a universal vehicle of rejoicing, or consolation, is greatly helped by the fact that it is the only alcoholic beverage which is enjoyable to drink at any hour of the day or night: a 'champagne breakfast' can be eaten either at the end of a night's festivities or after a good night's sleep. Patrick Forbes claimed that it is best drunk in mid-morning. But one can argue for any other time of day or night, with or without food. Even contemplating a glass of champagne has a tonic effect, while drinking it is an infallible, albeit temporary, cure for any malaise. Drinkers feel that the sparkle in the wine somehow infuses their whole being.George Leybourne, the music-hall artist who sang 'Champagne Charlie is my name', went on 'Moët drinking is my game' - and would change the name of the brand in return for the appropriate fee. Where champagne is concerned, there is no such thing as a free song, let alone a free drink. For it is made and sold by a hard-headed, hard-working, rather cold-blooded bunch of people, fully aware that no one needs to drink champagne and that its glamorous patina needs constant polishing. It is their story I tell in this book, their efforts to produce, improve, sell and protect their wine. They can never let up. The selling has to be continuous.The essential paradox at the heart of champagne is that it is a serious drink which is usually consumed carelessly on occasions which positively inhibit the appreciation of its qualities. It is often drunk more as a ceremonial libation than as a wine: swigged from the bottle after football matches or Grand Prix motor races, or sipped at wedding receptions.One of the ways in which champagne is different from, and unquestionably superior to, lesser sparkling wines is that it first won fame as a still wine, indeed competed with the fine wines made from the same grapes in Burgundy 160 kilometres to the south. For a century and a half after the Champenois discovered how to exploit the bubbles, they, and their more discriminating customers, continued to prefer their still wines.Champagne, like every other fine wine, is the final and seemingly miraculous product of a whole compendium of forces, from the geology, the history, the climate and the economics, to the vines and their cultivation, the wine and its making, the people and organizations involved, enough for a book far longer than mine. My own effort divides naturally into the two ways of approaching the region of Champagne. If you come at it from the north, you begin to understand the geography, the geology, why and how the wine is made in one particular spot, the impersonal forces which have shaped its destiny, and the viticultural and oenological efforts which go into it. But if you begin (as I do) by coming into Champagne along the Marne valley eastwards from Paris, you can make a start at grasping the history of the region and the people and forces which have made it a worldwide phenomenon.Any proper historical study helps to illuminate the present. But one of the particular excitements in writing about champagne is that the past is all around you. For four centuries champagne has shaped the landscape and the architecture of town and country alike. Physically, the vineyards are often in the same place as they have been for hundreds of years while the buildings are an amazingly eclectic mix of historic (and pseudo-historic) styles. But history also intrudes where the wines themselves are concerned. Most obviously, Dom Perignon is not just a part of the region's history. The role he played over three centuries ago is still of passionate concern to the people who sell the wine today.Footnotes1. I use capital letters for the region, lower case for the wine.2. In Les Arts de l'Effervescence, an essential source.3. Champagne: The Wine, The Land and The People, London, Gollancz, 1967.4. There is an even more lugubrious version of the saying when one tsarist officer, captured by the Bolsheviks, remarks how 'between the arrest and the execution there is always time for a glass of champagne.' Excerpted from The Story of Champagne by Nicholas Faith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.