On Champagne: A tapestry of tales to celebrate the greatest sparkling wine of all…

By Tom Stevenson

Champagne is never a simple glass of fizz… As soon as the cork flies, the first sip reveals a wine of fascinating complexity. For even the most modest non-vintage cuvée, a bevy of blending decisions, multi layers of history and the incalculable climate of this northern corner of France all come into play. In On Champagne the thoughts, opinions and conclusions of the world’s finest champagne writers gather to reveal this wine’s action-packed trajectory from the myth of its accidental discovery – not in France, we find, but in the cider cellars of England – to the development of a high-tech champagne fit for space travel. It’s a journey that starts and ends with capturing that sparkle in a bottle and along the way beguiles us with the nuances of its chalky terrain, the determination of rebels from Ambonnay to Avize, and the mystery of a champagne cellar under the sea. We meet the pioneers who created the great champagnes of the past and the personalities who are ‘greening’ this landscape, nurturing it through climate change to shape the exquisite champagnes of the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Académie du Vin Library
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913141097

Book preview

Adam Lechmere (2022)

FIZZING FORWARDS

Craftsman, Showman, Scientist, Visionary… Frédéric Panaïotis has the top job at Ruinart. As winemaker for one of Champagne’s most distinguished houses (founded in 1729), he has all the skills necessary to guide this great wine into its next quarter-century. Adam Lechmere finds out exactly what it takes to propel a grande marque into the future...

Frédéric Panaïotis, the chef de cave of Champagne Ruinart, is at pains to point out that he’s a craftsman, not an artist. You might distinguish the two like this: a craftsman makes the same thing over and over again, only better each time; an artist makes something different every time. The description works to an extent, though as Panaïotis says, in Champagne ‘it’s not exactly the same because you can change over the years’.

Ruinart is part of the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) empire and a stablemate of Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug, Moët & Chandon and Champagne Mercier. All these houses have their unique personalities but Ruinart has the distinction of being the oldest (in 1729 Nicolas Ruinart was the first to set up a company to export champagne), and the only one to use exclusively Chardonnay grapes in its vintage wines.

It’s a venerable institution. Nicolas Ruinart’s uncle, a Benedictine monk called Dom Thierry, was a contemporary of Dom Pérignon himself; legend has it that Nicolas was inspired by his uncle’s tales of a wondrous sparkling wine. Ruinart’s foundations lie not only in the apocryphal stories handed down from generation to generation, but also in the bedrock of Champagne: chalk. The house (in common with a handful of others) sits on miles of chalk cellars – the famous crayères of Reims – hewn out by the Romans and now home to hundreds of thousands of bottles.

With such a history (literally) underpinning it, there should be something immutable about an institution like Ruinart, but it’s more complicated than that. While the job of the chef de cave is to achieve consistency of style, they must also ensure that that style evolves. ‘Modernity is as important as tradition. You might aim to be modern, but if you don’t change, then after five years you’re not modern any more. You need to be on the move without making a revolution, but slightly and consistently evolving to achieve your goal.’

Frédéric Panaïotis’ dream career changed the night his uncle brought a bottle of 1976 Richebourg to dinner. He no longer wished to be a vet to lions and tigers; wine was now his fantasy, champagne his mission.

It’s rather like the famous analogy of the swan: serene and unruffled on the surface while underwater its legs are paddling for dear life. Panaïotis gives an example of the sort of fine-tuning his job necessitates. When he became chef de cave in 2007 he decided the dosage (the additional shot of wine and sugar that’s added before corking) was slightly high in the Blanc de Blancs and ‘R’ de Ruinart, the two non-vintage cuvées. The wine was a little too sweet – ‘I thought it was becoming a little too comfortable,’ is his phrase. ‘It was around 12 or 13 grams per litre so I brought it down to nine grams. Then I started getting letters from our older customers.’

So he quickly readjusted the sugar level. ‘I went back to 11, and then began to gradually lower it. We’re now at seven grams per litre for the non-vintage, and we may go even lower, to six or five.’

Dosage levels are changing across Champagne. ‘The balance of the wine is changing and we can do the same job with less dosage,’ Panaïotis says. There are many reasons for this. Climate change is one of them: it is now easier to achieve ripeness, harvests are routinely earlier, and grapes are brought in with lower levels of acidity. ‘The wines are not as lean as they used to be, so we need less sugar to balance them out.’ Then there are changes in the vineyard, such as more use of cover cropping, resulting in more competition for nutrients which means thicker-skinned berries. In short, Panaïotis says: ‘We’re getting better at winemaking.’

Winemaking is an incredibly precise business, but it is only a part of the job of the chef de cave. Ask Panaïotis to describe a typical day and he laughs. ‘There’s no such thing. It can be anything.’ On the day we meet over Zoom, for example, he has been in the vineyard surveying progress on Ruinart’s biodiversity project: the planting of 25,000 trees and shrubs in its Taissy-en-Champagne vineyard. ‘Then later on today I will be tasting this year’s releases and writing the tasting notes.’

On other days he might be meeting with Ruinart’s resident artist. At the time of writing, this year’s appointment has not been announced (‘It’s someone super-famous’); in 2020 it was the British artist David Shrigley. Panaïotis will spend a good deal of time with whoever is appointed. ‘We’ll visit the cellars and the vineyards, there will be lunches, dinners. I met David in London a couple of times.’ He finds the process fascinating. ‘An artist has such an acute visual sense, whereas for me it’s more the nose and the palate. Talking to the artists is a source of inspiration to me.’

If meeting an artist is inspiration, then the actual blending of the vins clairs, the base wines – this happens before the second in-bottle fermentation takes place – is ‘excitement’. ‘The whole year coming to the glass to see how well we’ve done, what nature has given us.’ Sessions take place between October and December, with the team typically tasting 25 to 30 samples over an hour. During the winter they will taste up to 350 samples. It’s a routine, Panaïotis says. ‘I don’t want to share our secrets but we’re looking for purity and precision, no trace of oxidation or lactic character, though a bit of reduction is normal and even welcome in the early stages.’

The team also looks for the key differences in style between the non-vintage wines (the Blanc de Blancs and Brut, and the ‘R’ de Ruinart) and the vintage wines (led by the flagship Dom Ruinart). The non-vintage, Panaïotis says, should be a ‘9am to 9am’ wine – one that you can drink at any time of the day or night. ‘They have to be clean and dry but lovely and bright, with a rounder and softer balance, in order to be perfectly approachable in two-and-a half-years when they go on the market.’ For vintage wines, ageing capacity is key.

Then there is harvest, which Panaïotis describes as the most challenging part of his job. ‘The days are very long, you have so little time, you have to deal with human factors and natural factors, and you have to make quick decisions under stress that have huge impact.’ Ruinart owns 25 percent of its vineyards (unusually for Champagne) and so Panaïotis has a measure of control over growing conditions – but for the rest of the vineyards he has to call on his diplomatic skills. ‘You have to be very good at managing those relationships – the grower has to trust you and you have to trust them.’ Here, though, as in every aspect of the life of a vigneron, things are changing: the sons and daughters of long-established growers are now taking over; a new generation that ‘knows more about sustainability, about new methods in the vineyard’.

The chef de cave, then, understands craft, and art, sustainability, biodiversity and diplomacy. He must also be a scientist – the great Champagne houses are obsessive collectors of data, especially if they are part of an operation the size of LVMH, which last year opened the Robert-Jean de Vogüé Research Centre in the Champagne village of Oiry, a €20-million project dedicated to research around sustainability. ‘We are at the cutting edge of science. We use every single technology possible to understand what we do, and how to reproduce it. Intuition is all very well, but intuition backed up by science is robust and dependable.’

Frédéric Panaïotis believes that to move champagne forward, its vineyards need to go back in time: at Ruinart, trees, shrubs and hedges are being reinstated as natural wildlife corridors, reconnecting the vines to the local Montbré forest. Fauna vital to the health of the land is flooding back.

And he must be something of a showman as well: the chef de cave is an ambassador for the brand. Some take to it as to the manor born: Richard Geoffroy, the former head of Dom Pérignon, was an indefatigable traveller, famous for his philosophical musings as he entertained critics from London to Shanghai. Panaïotis is the same, if not as gnomic as his old colleague. ‘I spend maybe 25 percent of my time thinking about the markets and promoting Ruinart. It’s something I always have in mind because I see my job as not only making champagne, but also bringing happiness, giving people a good time. I enjoy that part of it.’ He’s delighted to be travelling again after the pandemic – he says a trip to Japan, or China, or any one of the house’s many markets, is another valuable source of inspiration. ‘There’s no better way of understanding what’s going on than travelling, and being open and curious.’

For Ruinart to evolve, it’s obviously crucial to have a curious, enquiring mind at the top. It’s something of a paradox: the very history of the house must carry it forward. ‘I’m always thinking, how can I embrace the future? You have to have a vision as a winemaker, especially for a house like us, which is so old. We have to work out what is the future for the next generation.’ He is cellaring wines now that he will not see reach maturity – ‘We’re laying the ground for the next generation so we have to make sure it fits’. Perhaps ‘futurologist’ is another responsibility that should be added to the job description.

Fiona Morrison MW (2022)

JEWEL IN THE CROWN

Fiona Morrison falls in love with the Vieilles Vignes Françaises, Champagne’s most mysterious wine, from a tiny walled plot of Pinot Noir vines in the Grand Cru village of Aÿ. Treasured possession of the house of Bollinger, this is a site that’s been admired for its wines since medieval times, but is it the age of these ‘vieilles vignes’ or the precious nature of this terroir that confers such luxury status?

My first encounter with this champagne was when I was handed an anonymous glass. It was like a blind date. I had absolutely no idea what I was about to meet. The colour was rich, golden; not burnished or coppery, just warm and glistening. The nose was gentle, discrete, quite floral but there were tantalizing, intense notes of lime, nougat, blossom and quince.

I kept on wanting to go back to the glass. At first, smelling it was enough: hazelnut here, linden and fennel there; fleeting glances of orange peel and cinnamon. Then I became inextricably drawn in by the flavour, fascinated by the structure and the impressions that the champagne left in my mouth – salt, fruit, tingling sherbet sensations, and at the end of the palate a wild savouriness that I found utterly beguiling. I couldn’t wait for the second date…

Before then, I do some research; I go to Aÿ to inspect the old vines – the vieilles vignes of the wine’s name. I expect old, gnarled, twisted trunks with rugged barks and sturdy branches. So imagine my surprise at being greeted by rows of skinny, tall, gangly Pinot Noir vines. I have difficulty hiding my disappointment from my hosts at Bollinger.

I scratch my head, not wanting to appear stupid. Theses vines look young, I’m told, because they are young. But the vine canes are from last year’s growth, so the term vieilles vignes is surely a misnomer? Is this some devilish Bollinger marketing ploy? Mais non. These adolescents are trained so that the year after they have produced grapes, they are bent down and replanted into the soil leaving three fledgling buds above ground. The next year, the wood that is buried develops new roots and those three buds develop new canes which will bear that year’s grapes. This is a very old, traditional method of vineyard training that I have never seen before. It is called marcottage (layering) or ‘en foule’ (meaning ‘in a crowd’); an appropriate enough term because over the years, as the canes are folded back into the ground, together the vines move slowly through the vineyard, like Macbeth’s Birnam Wood. The ‘old’ in these vieilles vignes refers not to the age of the vines but to this ancient method of vine propagation.

The magic of these vines is that they are ungrafted; they are grown on their own rootstocks, unlike most of the world’s grape vines which have been grafted onto American roots to save them from the killer bug, phylloxera, which decimated the vineyards of Europe in the 19th century. If it has its chances, this aphid can still wreak havoc today: one of the three parcels of the Vieilles Vignes Françaises, Croix Rouge, tragically succumbed to phylloxera recently and is no more. Usually, ungrafted vines can only survive in sandy soils as the bugs get asphyxiated by the grit. I bend down, searching for the tell-tale, coarse, beachy grains. Again, to my surprise, instead of sand, I find some dusty topsoil and the classic chalky rock of the region. Another mystery to solve.

So, whose hairbrained scheme was it to preserve these vines ‘en foule’? History points its finger firmly at Lily Bollinger, one of the redoubtable widows of Champagne who kept their houses running throughout the difficult war years and beyond. Persuaded by British wine writer Cyril Ray, who always loved this vineyard, Lily decided to save these special Pinot Noir grapes and make a separate cuvée in 1969. Interestingly, the fruit from these vines ripen earlier than grafted vines, so Bollinger is often ready to pick here before the official start of the harvest. In the height of summer, as I am standing in the Clos Chaudes Terres – a tiny 15-acre plot behind the Bollinger house – I see that the grapes have already begun to change colour to a deep magenta. This is the best known of the Vieilles Vignes plots which total only 36 ares (a little less than an acre) yielding around 2,000 bottles each year. These delicate vines need lots of loving care. Where it usually takes 500 hours a year to manage a hectare of vines in Champagne, for these parcels it takes 1,500 labour hours to bring the vines to fruition.

The unusual trellising method, in which last year’s wood is buried under the soil, is one of the keys to protecting the vines from phylloxera as well as encouraging the development of organic matter. Another key to the magic is that these two remaining parcels are ‘clos’, surrounded by walls which shield the vines, keeping them well aerated and exposed to the sun (hence the Terres Chauds or ‘warm soils’ name). Slightly elevated temperatures mean the vines can suffer from lack of water. All sorts of efforts are taken to preserve the climatic balance using permaculture, where straw is spread under the vines to protect them from the sun; fruit trees are planted around the clos to encourage biodiversity, giving life to an insect population and shade to the vines; small sheep graze in the winter months to add manure, and horses are used to till the soil to keep it strong. If all these methods sound medieval, they are. Yet very efficient and precise too, and if they add to the nostalgia of the Vieilles Vignes so much the better.

The ‘Vieilles Vignes Françaises’ may not look ‘old’, but, behind the high stone walls of the château, safe from all aphid predators, their ancient root systems continue to yield Pinot Noir grapes for what many believe to be the finest blanc de noirs champagne in the world.

Talking to Charles-Armand de Belenet of Bollinger brings me fully into the 21st century. He talks about the research projects and laboratories. He speaks about trials to understand the magic of the Vieilles Vignes: where does that incredible salinity in the mouth come from? Why is the maturity level of these vines so high? How come the terroir of the clos is more pronounced than the vintage differences? It is easy to imagine why today’s oenologists are so fascinated.

So, is it worth all this effort for a couple of thousand bottles of champagne every few years or so? At north of £1,000 a bottle, the answer is probably yes. De Belenet smiles ruefully and stresses that it is wonderful to be a part of living history in growing vines in this forgotten style. Later, as I am lucky enough to sip a prized bottle of the 2008 vintage, with its notes of quince, figs, brioche, sea salt and summer blossom, I delight in the fact that an important part of Champagne’s heritage is being preserved in such an extraordinary vineyard. Was it love at first sight? Perhaps, and this is a relationship I would like to continue.

Elin McCoy (2022)

HOMAGE TO THE WIDOW

In no other wine region have women played such a visible and formative role. Many of Champagne’s grande marques – Veuve Clicquot, Pommery, Laurent-Perrier and Henriot among them – bear witness to those who have conquered markets, blazed trails and created the wines that now bear their names. Elin McCoy traces the widows, pioneers and winemakers who have shaped Champagne’s early history and those who bring acclaim to its leading houses today, finding that their influence is shining as brightly and continuously as ever…

In 2020, Vitalie Taittinger became president of her eponymous family Champagne house. Her earliest memories of growing up in the region are smelling autumn on walks in the woods and sipping leftover warm bubbly from the tables in the salon after the grown ups had adjourned to the dining room. When she took over, her father left two letters on her desk; one proclaiming his full confidence in her, the other telling her to take all the hard decisions she would have to make with her heart.

That same year, Julie Cavil was named the first female chef de cave at the prestigious Champagne house Krug, one of the top winemaking jobs in the region. She’d shadowed Eric Lebel, the former chef de cave, for 13 years, absorbing intangible aspects of craftsmanship, his intimate knowledge of vineyard plots, the taste and smell of reserve wines from many vintages. And she now leads a six-person winemaking team of three women, three men, each bringing something unique to this famous marque.

Both their stories are part of a larger comeback tale as well as something new in Champagne: a generation pushing to create a more equitable future for women in the cellar, the vineyard and the boardroom, and convey a new idea of bubbly to drinkers.

The 19th-century pioneers

Yes, men have owned and managed the vast number of wine estates in the region throughout history, and they’ve also mostly been the winemakers. But Champagne’s past has included a surprising number of strong-minded women who built famous grandes marques and exerted a profound influence on the region’s wines through bold investments in technical innovations that resonate today. Highly attuned to the desires of consumers at the time, they revolutionized marketing, just as their female counterparts are doing today.

The route to their responsible positions, though, was highly traditional, through the untimely deaths of young husbands, with no grown sons to leap in. For 100 years, and more, running an estate almost required becoming a widow first.

I’ve always been fascinated by Champagne’s forward-thinking widows, starting with Widow Clicquot. In old drawings and paintings, she appears solid and formidable, a broad stately figure with a lace cap on her hair, layers of petticoats and dresses, and a serious, impassive look on her face that seems to say: ‘Don’t mess with me. I know what I’m doing.’

Today, things are different; belonging to a Champagne family helps, and, for many, formal education in oenology is essential. But determination still turns out to be a must.

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin created Veuve Clicquot from the modest wine maison owned by her husband, François Clicquot, after he died in 1805 from typhoid fever. Only 27 at the time, she insisted on holding onto the enterprise despite her doubting father-in-law, ran it while looking after her young daughter and rebranded it under her own name: Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin. Her future-oriented innovations and canny business decisions made it a success. In the dark days of the Napoleonic Wars, she experimented, eventually inventing the riddling process to improve her wines’ clarity and taste that’s still standard procedure today. In 1811, the year of the Great Comet, she created the first vintage champagne, Le Vin de Comete, and risked shipping more than 10,000 bottles to Russia to capture the market there. She astutely snapped up vineyard after vineyard. By 1821, she was producing 280,000 bottles annually, and her fizz was a staple of royal entertaining.

Ever since, she has been a touchstone for the important role women have played in Champagne: a reminder that a glass ceiling was broken there more than 200 years ago.

More entrepreneurial, innovative widows followed. Young, newly widowed Apolline Henriot founded Veuve Henriot Aîné in 1808 and created its first cuvée by consulting a book on winemaking written by her great uncle, a monk. Louise Pommery, whose husband died in 1858, was left with a new wine venture and a new baby. She saw a way forward by shifting from producing red wine to sparkling and responded to the English thirst for dry champagne by creating the very dry Brut style that is by far the most popular one today. By building an elaborate château to welcome visitors she kickstarted wine tourism.

In 1887, the widow was 35-year-old Mathilde Emilie Perrier, whose husband, Eugene Laurent, had inherited the Champagne house where he was cellar master. Mathilde combined their names to create Veuve Laurent-Perrier and developed the first zero-dosage champagne a century before the style grabbed attention.

Wars also pushed women to the forefront of Champagne brands as men went off to fight, leaving women, as usual, to keep things going. The female connection at Laurent-Perrier picked up again in 1939, when Marie-Louise Lanson de Nonancourt bought the house. Her sons joined the French Resistance; she shepherded Laurent-Perrier, walling up her stock in a cellar to hide it from the Germans.

Lily Bollinger’s husband Jacques, who died in 1941, had been coaching her for 20 years, cross-examining her on which vintages she preferred and why, writes author Cyril Ray in his book Bollinger (1971). It was a bad time for Champagne, but she was determined to preserve what her husband had entrusted to her. She was called Madame Jacques, which tells you she started as simply a stand-in for her husband. But she bicycled around the vineyards, asked questions, inspected vines, and launched the idea of a late-disgorged cuvée in 1967 with the 1952 vintage.

In the late 19th century, points out Kolleen M Guy, author of When Champagne Became French (2003), using the word veuve, or ‘widow’, on labels turned out to be a huge plus, key to the way champagne was marketed. In a rapidly changing world, the word provided ‘a sense of continuity with the past and a certain nurturing reassurance’. So powerful was it as a marketing tool that many male-owned firms created labels featuring the names of fake ‘veuves’ as well as using labels with images of Queen Victoria in black mourning.

The connection between women and champagne echoed widely in French culture. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, made fizz fashionable by insisting it was the only wine that left a woman more beautiful after drinking it. Her breast, supposedly, was the mould for the long popular champagne coupe.

Bubbly even became something of a gendered drink. Although Louise Pommery created the first very dry cuvée, it was sweet ones, contends Guy, that were considered ‘particularly appropriate and respectable for ladies to drink’ in the late 19th century. Men drank dry.

But the grandes marques luxury brands are only one of the region’s several worlds.

As they do on farms everywhere, women and daughters played an integral part at small family houses that made bubbly from their own vineyards. Women helped with the harvest, kept the account books, performed administrative tasks, fed the harvest workers. Often, they were ‘invisible’, given little credit for their work. Few took on skilled jobs in the vineyards, or in the cellar. They didn’t vinify.

And so it went.

There were always exceptions, such as the family-owned J Lassalle artisanal house on the Montagne de Reims, one of the first independent growers to be sold in the US. After Jules Lassalle’s widow, Olga, took over the estate in 1982, a tradition of une femme, une esprit, un style was established. Now the third-generation woman, Angeline, is the winemaker, preserving what the house describes as a delicate, feminine style.

The early new wave and the 21st century

Fast forward to the 1990s. With a generational shift in the region, things were changing. Champagnes from small, independent producers and growers who had decided to launch their own labels – so-called farmer fizz – were on the rise, finding their way outside France. Daughters of owners were establishing themselves in important careers outside the region. The easiest roles for women to grab at a Champagne house were in marketing, but when it came to a woman running the show, that still happened primarily because of dire family circumstances.

That’s the story of Anne Malassagne of family-owned, century-old grower house A R Lenoble, with 18 hectares of vines. When her father became ill in 1993, she was 28, on a fast track in Paris as a financial director at L’Oréal. She was the only family member able to take over, though she had no idea how to make wine. ‘It was really difficult,’ she told me a few years ago at a conference held at A R Lenoble. ‘I had to fight for credibility.’

It was an era in which women struggled for their voices to be heard.

Carol Duval-Leroy, whose husband died in 1991 at the age of 39, once said that no one thought she could succeed when she didn’t sell to one of many potential buyers; but she’d promised her husband to keep the house family owned. She had little support for her decision. Yet she eventually became the first female president of the Association Viticole Champenoise and promoted the first woman in Champagne to chef de cave – at her own house.

These women, and others who headed their own houses, such as Evelyne Boizel, helped spur change in the 21st century.

Based on her experiences, Anne Malassagne decided that what was needed was an all-female organization to make women more visible, promote them as professionals, and offer guidance for how to move up in the industry when you have children. So began La Transmission: Femmes en Champagne. Her first attempt, in 2011, fell flat. When she tried again in 2016, joining up with dynamic Maggie Henríquez, then head of Champagne Krug, the idea resonated, possibly because a new generation was coming into positions of influence at their family properties. It was a place where they could speak ‘without power