The Second Glass

Whenever I’m discussing Champagne I always think of the scene in Wayne’s World when the snooty guy schools Wayne and Garth, along with millions of adolescents about the difference between Champagne and sparkling wine.  “Actually all Champagne is French, it’s named after the region. Otherwise it’s sparkling white wine,” he said.  I never forgot this, but I still feel like a looser when I repeat the phrase.

Champagne has elitism written all over it, and for good reason.  The stuff is starts at difficult and quickly climbs to ridiculous as far as price is concerned.  Names like Dom Pérignon and Cristal are brands most people recognize but few have tasted.  For the price of a single bottle of Cristal one could buy two cases of tasty Spanish cava.

It’s true, Champagne is expensive – starting at about $30 for a decent bottle – but it isn’t meant for everyday use.  Champagne is a special occasion drink.  It comes out for anniversaries, New Years Eve, birthdays or special celebrations.  It also tastes amazing, and in my opinion, is always worth the money.  Plus, you can’t beat Champagne drunk; you’re not just the life of the party, you ARE the party.

So what makes Champagne so special?  Sparkling wine is made all over the world, what makes this tiny region in France different?  The answer is a simple combination of latitude and soil.  65 millions years ago this region of France was at the bottom of an ocean but eventually the sea receded and left behind a very rocky, chalk filled soil.  In fact, calling it soil would be a stretch.  The vineyards are essentially white gravel peppered with seashells.  This porous, mineral-rich soil imparts its character into the grapes and helps give Champagne its distinctive flavor.

As far as latitude goes, Champagne is one of the northernmost growing regions in the world, located 90 miles northeast of Paris.  Although early frosts are common, the close proximity to the sea keeps the temperatures just moderate enough to produce a lot of high quality grapes.

Surprisingly, sparkling wine is a relatively recent invention.  Early versions of sparkling wine began coming out of Champagne during the 1700’s but the style that we are familiar with today wasn’t developed until the late 1800’s.  It all started because the Champenois made crappy wine.  It wasn’t really their fault- poor weather and difficult soil plagued early attempts. This, however, was the least of their problems.  The wine wasn’t just crappy, but also frothy and mildly fizzy.

Because of the cold temperatures of northern France, the unspent yeast in the bottle would go dormant over the long and cold winter.  When spring came around, the yeast would start working again, causing mild carbonation.   This wasn’t just a bad thing; it actually scared the living hell out of the Champenois people. It also made them look like the red-headed stepchild compared to their neighbor and archrival Burgundy.

Lucky for Champagne there were a number of very dedicated (and mostly celibate) people were set on kicking Burgundy’s ass.  Every wine drinker is familiar with one of these people, Dom Pérignon. Dom Pérignon didn’t invent Champagne but he and his fellow Benedictine monks played a large role.  After spending years trying to make wine like Burgundy, the Champenois finally conceded defeat and decided to roll with the strange frothy and foamy wine their region produced.  And so, the major Champagne houses, Moët and Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Pommery and Perrier-Jouët, set out to create the style of Champagne we drink today.

The process by which Champagne is made is one of the most complex in all of wine making.  As with all wine it begins with the grapes.  There are only three grapes grown in the tiny region of Champagne: chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier.  Roughly 15,000 small, independent farmers grow the grapes each year and sell them to the 110 Champagne producers, known as Houses.  Most of the Houses have 99 year contracts with specific growers, so things don’t change much from year to year.

Non-vintage Champagne, however, is the most popular and widely sold style and well worth the effort and expense.  Veuve Cliquot and Moet and Chandon’s White Star are prime examples.  Bottles such as these don’t contain just one kind of grape from one vineyard– they are actually a blend of 30 to 60 different still wines, called a cuvee.  For the non-vintage bottles these wines even come from different years, this means that the wine maker has to blend all of these immature, still wines together.  Predicting how the wines will change over the next few years of aging in order to make it taste the same as it did the previous year is no easy task.

Once the cuvee has been made, it is time for the second fermentation, which will add the bubbles.  Yeast and a liqueur de triage – a blend of sugar and wine – is added to the cuvee and it’s bottled.  When the yeast eats the sugar, it produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, which builds up in the corked bottle and dissolves into the liquid, giving it “carbonation”.  The yeast is still in the bottle, which makes the wine cloudy, just like a hefeweisen beer that also has the yeast in the bottle.

No one wants to drink a cloudy wine so wine makers developed a way of removing the yeast.  The bottles are aged in the miles of deep limestone caves that were dug out to make the ancient cathedral and city walls of Reims and Eperney.  Stored at a 45-degree angle in A-Frame bottle holders, the bottles are riddled each day, or twisted a quarter of a turn and slightly upended.  This eventually forces the yeast to make its way down the neck of the bottle, closer and closer to the cap.  When the time is right, the neck of the bottle is put into cold brine, which freezes the yeast.  When the bottle is turned upright and the cap removed, the frozen yeast shoots out of the bottle.   Et voila!  The wine is crystal clear and 100% yeast free.  Since about a ¼ inch of liquid has been removed, it is replaced by a blend of wine called liqueur d’expédition.  This style of making sparkling wine is referred to as Méthode Champenoise and it is considered to be the best way.

Most Houses make a vintage champagne each year as well, which means the cuvee, blended from a few different still wines, is also made, but it all the grapes come from the same year.  The finer labels, such as Dom Pérignon, Krug and La Grande Dame are selective in the years they produce.  During bad years these labels may not produce a wine at all.  Vintage Champagne is generally acknowledged to be superior to non-vintage Champagne.

The process is complicated, but in my opinion, it just adds to the allure.  As bourgeois as the image of sitting around sipping Champagne is, this wine truly has the history and terroir to make it authentic.  I’m not saying that Champagne isn’t over priced; I’m just saying that after drinking a bottle, the last thing on my mind is how much I paid.