This is a repost from Wine therapy from early 2007. Ive been dragged up to speed a bit more on Champagne since, but still consider it a relative area of weakness. Any errors in what follows reflect my ignorance.
I am no great Champagne maven. The wine often puzzles me, it is usually overpriced in restaurants, I suppose on the theory that if you are celebrating youve thrown sense out the window, and if you have a bit left in the bottle it doesnt keep as well as Muscadet or Vouvray. But as with many holes in my education and knowledge, I regret my ignorance and wish I understood the wines and region better.
So I was very happy to have the chance to hop in the car with Mark Ellenbogen and wander aimlessly through the countryside northeast of Paris as we followed Ken and Wts own VLM, until we got our GPS working and could find our own way--we headed east to Vertus.
I wont burden you with too many tasting notes, although we had good wine at Pierre Peters, and a bunch of very good wine at Larmandier-Bernier, whose wines Ive liked for quite a while.
But it was fascinating to get out into the vineyard. The Larmandier plots are green with grass, pruned fairly generously, and look pretty happy. They are biodynamic. Everything else we saw was moonscape with vines. And this is in Vertus, the commune whose grapes get the highest prices from the big houses *(see correction below). I was shocked when we drove down a road in the vineyard to look up in the mud between rows of vines (no sign of any other plants anywherethese fields have clearly been nuked with herbicide) to see mulch between the rows! Mulch! They have sprayed so much that they need to mulch to hold soil from erosion on the moderately steep hills, and to retain moisture, and it was later explained to me, to allow the tractors to work the area when it has rained.
Heres a pic with the Larmandier-Bernier vines in the foreground, and someone elses behind:
And another pic with L-B in foreground and neighbors mulched mud across the road:
Speaking of the price of grapes, the economic arrangements in the region turn out to be the explanation for pretty much everything we saw. As Im sure you are aware, the big negoce houses buy the significant majority of the grapes in the region. I was very surprised to learn that growers are paid based solely on tonnage of grapes and town. Unlike the arrangements in other places with lots of negoce work (California, and I believe, Rioja), there is no bonus for quality, exposition, site, or anything else. South facing, north facing, harvest at 9* potential, harvest at 12* potential, its all the same. If you harvest after the ban, and your fields are in the right region, you can sell up to your limit of grapes. I hope someone will remind me of the number, but its on the order of 100 hl/ha. Since the region has a marginal climate, pruning and so on are aimed for even higher yields, 130 hl/ha or so, in case bad flowering or frost or what have you cut the yields. If the weather turns out to be too good, and your yield would exceed even the wildly high level legally allowed, you harvest up to the maximum and leave the rest of the fruit in the fields. In California, for instance, it has long been typical that grape contracts carry specific quality terms, which used to be just ripeness but it is now common if not universal for the negoce or winery to agree to buy the whole production of a plot and agree with the grower on yields, pruning, harvest time, and the rest. I dont suppose it is quite the same in the Central Valley, but no one in the Valley is selling their wine for $100 a bottle and having major quality pretensions, either.
So the rational income-maximizing Champagne grower runs their field as a factory for grapes. Since grapes all disappear into an anonymous vat, no one is even embarrassed in front of their neighbors by producing poor quality material. Your job is to get to the maximum level of production each season. The growers can make quite a decent living selling grapes without the extra work and hassle of making and marketing the wine, so the trend is more away from grower Champagnes than towards them. As one of the folks at L-B said, The guy who used to make his own wine down the street now sells to Pommery. The harvest is over, and hes game hunting in Africa. Rather than entertaining visiting schnooks, of course.
Vitculture is all directed at maximizing the yieldit feels a bit like Communist quota-meeting, irrespective of quality. Vines are run into the ground and ripped out as their productivity declines after 30 years or so. If they are a bit beat up by machine harvesters and etc., maybe they replace them a bit earlier. If there is grass around that might compete with the vines, spray for it like any other pest.
The whole business is pretty amazingPinot Noir and Chardonnay at 100 hl/ha from places that are deserts by choice. And the chance to make it all up in the dosage. Sources of mine in Tokaji tell me one export market for those wines is to Champagne for use in dosage.
There is some controversy in the US about whether grower champagnes means anything or not. That is, small production houses that make their own wine from their own defined vineyards, just like winemaking in many parts of the world. It seems to me that it does, and that its very importantits the only way to tie the production to the product, the plot to the bottle. Quality improvements, accountability, recognition of good worknone of these are really possible under the factory system except in the vaguest way. But once you have growers making wine and selling it to consumers, you have an arrangement that can give some feedback to the system, reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, and bring on the millennium, or something like that.
Are all growers doing good work, and are all grower wines great? Of course not. Are all the big houses making crap? Certainly not. I could cheerfully drink as much 96 Dom Perignon as you want to serve me, even if they do spew a million cases a year out of the factory that produces it. If Im going to drink spoof, make it good spoof.
So buying a grower champagne is no promise of quality, but the real potential in the region lies with these vignerons. Buy the good ones. Pay extra for their winesat least you arent paying the huge advertising budget for Agent Orange. Argue about which ones are better. But this kind of market feedback into the farming is inconceivable from the big houses in our lifetimes. Although I suppose they are starting to make small luxury cuvees the way Anheuser-Busch makes its own microbrews. But their solution will surely be on the marketing side, not the farming and production side.
More on the wines to follow.
I am no great Champagne maven. The wine often puzzles me, it is usually overpriced in restaurants, I suppose on the theory that if you are celebrating youve thrown sense out the window, and if you have a bit left in the bottle it doesnt keep as well as Muscadet or Vouvray. But as with many holes in my education and knowledge, I regret my ignorance and wish I understood the wines and region better.
So I was very happy to have the chance to hop in the car with Mark Ellenbogen and wander aimlessly through the countryside northeast of Paris as we followed Ken and Wts own VLM, until we got our GPS working and could find our own way--we headed east to Vertus.
I wont burden you with too many tasting notes, although we had good wine at Pierre Peters, and a bunch of very good wine at Larmandier-Bernier, whose wines Ive liked for quite a while.
But it was fascinating to get out into the vineyard. The Larmandier plots are green with grass, pruned fairly generously, and look pretty happy. They are biodynamic. Everything else we saw was moonscape with vines. And this is in Vertus, the commune whose grapes get the highest prices from the big houses *(see correction below). I was shocked when we drove down a road in the vineyard to look up in the mud between rows of vines (no sign of any other plants anywherethese fields have clearly been nuked with herbicide) to see mulch between the rows! Mulch! They have sprayed so much that they need to mulch to hold soil from erosion on the moderately steep hills, and to retain moisture, and it was later explained to me, to allow the tractors to work the area when it has rained.
Heres a pic with the Larmandier-Bernier vines in the foreground, and someone elses behind:
So the rational income-maximizing Champagne grower runs their field as a factory for grapes. Since grapes all disappear into an anonymous vat, no one is even embarrassed in front of their neighbors by producing poor quality material. Your job is to get to the maximum level of production each season. The growers can make quite a decent living selling grapes without the extra work and hassle of making and marketing the wine, so the trend is more away from grower Champagnes than towards them. As one of the folks at L-B said, The guy who used to make his own wine down the street now sells to Pommery. The harvest is over, and hes game hunting in Africa. Rather than entertaining visiting schnooks, of course.
Vitculture is all directed at maximizing the yieldit feels a bit like Communist quota-meeting, irrespective of quality. Vines are run into the ground and ripped out as their productivity declines after 30 years or so. If they are a bit beat up by machine harvesters and etc., maybe they replace them a bit earlier. If there is grass around that might compete with the vines, spray for it like any other pest.
The whole business is pretty amazingPinot Noir and Chardonnay at 100 hl/ha from places that are deserts by choice. And the chance to make it all up in the dosage. Sources of mine in Tokaji tell me one export market for those wines is to Champagne for use in dosage.
There is some controversy in the US about whether grower champagnes means anything or not. That is, small production houses that make their own wine from their own defined vineyards, just like winemaking in many parts of the world. It seems to me that it does, and that its very importantits the only way to tie the production to the product, the plot to the bottle. Quality improvements, accountability, recognition of good worknone of these are really possible under the factory system except in the vaguest way. But once you have growers making wine and selling it to consumers, you have an arrangement that can give some feedback to the system, reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, and bring on the millennium, or something like that.
Are all growers doing good work, and are all grower wines great? Of course not. Are all the big houses making crap? Certainly not. I could cheerfully drink as much 96 Dom Perignon as you want to serve me, even if they do spew a million cases a year out of the factory that produces it. If Im going to drink spoof, make it good spoof.
So buying a grower champagne is no promise of quality, but the real potential in the region lies with these vignerons. Buy the good ones. Pay extra for their winesat least you arent paying the huge advertising budget for Agent Orange. Argue about which ones are better. But this kind of market feedback into the farming is inconceivable from the big houses in our lifetimes. Although I suppose they are starting to make small luxury cuvees the way Anheuser-Busch makes its own microbrews. But their solution will surely be on the marketing side, not the farming and production side.
More on the wines to follow.
