The Wine

THE RESTRAINED RICHNESS of champagne wines owes a lot to the cold climate of northern France. Over time the region's wine makers have created their own techniques to overcome the cold winters and short growing seasons. The fact that the grapes ripen very slowly has its benefit too, as the grapes have time to pick up important favouring components. But when the grapes are harvested, they are rarely ripe enough to make table wine without the addition of inordinate amounts of sugar. The producers have gotten around this by making a wine low in alcohol and then putting it through a second bottle fermentation to raise the alcohol and add the bubbles.

The bubbles in champagne are a natural phenomenon that is today a managed affair. The second fermentation in the bottle causes the bubbles. When the cork is removed, the result is upwardly mobile bubbles of carbon dioxide making their escape.

Three grape varieties are used in Champagne — Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Pinot Meunier dominates the vineyards, growing on about 40% of the total acreage It is easier to grow and is less prone to frost damage. This grape makes up the base wine for all but the very finest champagnes and is grown only in Champagne. Pinot Noir is second with about 35%. It is responsible for the depth of fruit and longevity of the wine. Chardonnay accounts for the remaining 25% and adds lightness, elegance and breeding to the blend. The lack color in most champagne is the result of a gentle pressing, so as to extract the juice but not the color of the black grape skins.

The chief difference between the various Champagne brands or houses, is in the making of the cuvéee, or the blend, as introduced by Dom Pérignon. A house builds a reputation based on the particular style of blend of its nonvintage wines. So each year the wine must be consistent. The large houses store millions of gallons of wine from various vineyards and grapes for blending purposes. It is reasonable to assume that once you find a house style you like, it will be available year after year as long as that house exists.

The theory of producing a great champagne is to blend together the best qualities from each of the best grapes grown in the region. The blending of the still wines before the second fermentation called the assemblage and the wine and sugar that is added after the second fermentation and aging called the dosage, are the two most important steps in the determination of the house style.

In especially good years, some vintage champagne is produced. Some feel that the extra depth in taste is well worth the extra cost of these wines. Eighty percent of the contents of vintage champagne must contain grapes from the declared year. Not all of the grapes from a declared year go into vintage champagne. Twenty percent are held back to be used for blending purposes.

The sugar content of the dosage added after the second fermentation will determine the wine's style and relative sweetness. Thus you will find champagnes labeled by their sugar content. They are as follows:

Extra Brut, Brut Sauvage, Ultra Brut, Brut Intégral or Brut Zéro — These wines are bone dry with less than .6% of residual sugar per liter. In this case the dosage is of the same wine and not the usual solution of cane sugar and still wine. This wine is rarely made.

Brut — This is the most popular style of champagne.

The best blends are always reserved for the brut and is the mainstay of the business. It has less than 1.5% residual sugar and is very dry.

Extra Dry, Extra Sec — Sweetened with 1.2 to 2% residual sugar per liter, it is dry. It goes well with desserts and wedding cakes.

Sec — Although it means "dry" in French, it means "moderately dry" or "slightly sweet" as it pertains to champagne. It has 1.7 to 3.5% residual sugar per liter.

Demi-Sec — This style is distinctly sweet or medium sweet and is rarely seen in the United States. It contains between 3.3 to 5% residual sugar per liter.

Doux — This is the sweetest style of champagne. It is very sweet and is more of a dessert-style wine. It has a minimum of 5% residual sugar per liter.

Occasionally you will find Blanc de Noirs. This style is made entirely from black grapes but is white. It offers a wine that is fuller than those with Chardonnay in the blend. More often you will encounter a Blanc de Blancs. This wine is made exclusively from the Chardonnay grape and is the most delicate of champagnes. As only 25% of Champagne is planted with Chardonnay, it is generally a more expensive option.

Champagne is bottled in 10 different sizes:

Quarter bottle

– 18.7cl / 6.3 fluid ozs

Half bottle

– 37.5cl / 12.7 fluid ozs

Bottle

– 75cl / 25.4 fluid ozs

Magnum (two bottles)

– 1.5 litres / 50.8 fluid ozs

Jeroboam (four bottles)

– 3 litres / 101.6 fluid ozs

Rehoboam (six bottles)

– 4.5 litres / 147 fluid ozs

Methuselah (eight bottles)

– 6 litres / 196 fluid ozs

Salmanazar (12 bottles)

– 9 litres / 304.8 fluid ozs

Balthazar (16 bottles)

– 12 litres / 406.4 fluid ozs

Nebuchadnezzar (20 bottles)

– 15 litres / 508 fluid ozs

 Only the half-bottle, bottle and magnum are always released in the bottle in which they underwent the second fermentation. For this reason and because it is the largest of the three, the magnum is the preferred size. The three largest sizes are rarely made today.

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The History of Champagne

CHAMPAGNE WAS A REGION long before it was a sparkling wine. The region lies at a crossroads of northern Europe – the river valleys leading south to the Mediterranean and north to Paris, the English Channel and Western Germany – and thus has been the setting of many dramatic events in the history of the French nation. As a convenient access point, it has been for hundreds of years, the chosen path of many invaders including Attila the Hun. The Hundred Years' War and the Thirty Years' War brought repeated destruction to the region as armies marched back and forth across its landscape. By the 17^th century, the city of Reims has seen destruction seven times and Epernay no less than twenty-five times.

But crossroads also bring trade. Champagne gained importance in its own right, during the middle ages as a center of European trade. The medieval counts of Champagne were wise enough to encourage commerce and strong enough to protect the traveling merchants. They created the then famous, Fairs of Champagne. Though these fairs were mainly about cloth, they were of obvious benefit for the wines of Champagne as it gave them easy exposure and access to important wine markets.

Champagne also benefited when the cathedral at Reims was chosen in 987 AD, as the coronation site for the French king Hugh Capet and establishing Reims as the spiritual capital of medieval France. In fact, thirty-seven kings of France were crowned there between 816 and 1825. The monasteries in Champagne with the economic assistance of the crown, were to make wine production a serious venture until the French Revolution in 1789.

Before the mid-1600's there was no Champagne as we think of it. For centuries the wines were still wines and were held in high regard by the nobility of Europe. But the cool climate of the region and its effect on the wine making process was to play an important part in changing all of that.

We owe a lot to Dom Pérignon as any inventor owes those who have come before him. He is not however the inventor of champagne as is often thought. Pierre Pérignon was a Benedictine monk who, in 1688, was appointed treasurer at the Abby of Hautvillers. The Abby is located near Epernay. Included in Dom Pérignon's duties was the management of the cellars and wine making. The bubbles in the wine are a natural process arising from Champagne's cold climate and short growing season. Of necessity, the grapes are picked late in the year. This doesn't leave enough time for the yeasts present on the grape skins to convert the sugar in the pressed grape juice into alcohol before the cold winter temperatures put a temporary stop to the fermentation process. With the coming of Spring's warmer temperatures, the fermentation is again underway, but this time in the bottle. The refermentation creates carbon-dioxide which now becomes trapped in the bottle, thereby creating the sparkle.

For Dom Pérignon and his contemporaries, sparkling wine was not the desired end product. It was a sign of poor wine making. He spent a great deal of time trying to prevent the bubbles, the unstableness of this "mad wine," and the creation of a decidedly white wine the court would prefer to red burgundy. He was not able to prevent the bubbles, but he did develop the art of blending. He not only blended different grapes, but the juice from the same grape grown in different vineyards. Not only did he develop a method to press the black grapes to yield a white juice, he improved clarification techniques to produce a brighter wine than any that had been produced before. To help prevent the exploding bottle problem, he began to use the stronger bottles developed by the English and closing them with Spanish cork instead of the wood and oil-soaked hemp stoppers then in use. Dom Pérignon died in 1715, but in his 47 years as the cellar master at the Abby of Hautvillers, he laid down the basic principles still used in making Champagne today.

Although sparkling Champagne was only about 10% of the region's output in the 18th century, it was enjoyed increasingly as the wine of English and French royalty and the lubricant of preference at aristocratic gatherings. Its popularity continued to grow until, in the 1800's, the sparkling wine industry was well established.

The face of the industry really began to change when Louis XV allowed the transport of wine in bottles in 1728. A year later, Ruinart became the first recorded Champagne house. By 1735, a royal ordinance was instituted to dictate the size, shape, and weight of champagne bottles, the size of the cork they should use and that they be secured with strong pack thread to the collar of the bottle. Claude Moët founded, in 1743, what was to become the largest champagne house today, the House of Moët.

The complexity and capital intensity of making champagne ultimately lead to the replacement of the monastic and aristocratic growers with the champagne merchants. With their capital, the merchant's or maisons, had to ability to perfect the otherwise still unpredictable fermentation process, age, distribute, market and export the wine.

Dégorgement was first practiced in 1813. It was perfected in 1818 by the Widow Clicquot's cellar master Antoine Muller. He developed a process of "riddling" the wine in order to get the sediment of dead yeast cells into the neck of the bottle so it could be removed without the time consuming task of decanting each bottle. This process also saved most of the gas.

The 1820's and 30's saw the use of corking machines and wine muzzles. Finally in 1836, a pharmacist in Châlons-sur-Marne, M. François, invented an instrument, called a sucere-oenomètre, to measure the amount of sugar in wine. With this invention, the amount of sugar needed to stimulate the second fermentation could be reliably determined, and the bottle burst-rate dropped to 5%. It was now a little more safe to take a spring walk through a champagne cellar.

In the 1920's four well known houses were established – Bollinger, Irroy, Mumm, and Joseph Perrier. By 1853 total sales of sparkling champagne reached 20 million bottles up from just 300,000 bottles at the turn of the century.

World War I again brought devastation to the region. The early months of the war saw a rapid German advance into northern France and during the fall of 1914, they were camped south of the river Marne. By 1915 they were driven back just north of the city of Reims. The enormous caves – Roman chalk quarries – beneath Reims that were used for the storage and production of champagne, now became shelters from the 1000 days of bombardment the city endured from 1914 to 1918. After the war, the city had to be completely rebuilt.

The years after the Great War were difficult. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Prohibition in the United States, and then the Great Depression saw the champagne market dry up. The champagne houses stopped buying grapes, so the growers formed the first champagne cooperatives at this time. With the ending of Prohibition in 1934, the industry began to turn around. The influential head of Moët & Chandon, Robert-Jean de Vougë, was most instrumental in securing its future. He proposed that the purchase price of champagne grapes be set at a level that ensured a decent living for the growers, and in 1941, during the German occupation of France, became the driving force in persuading the Germans to establish the very successful Comité Interprofessional du Vin de Champagne – C.I.C.C.

Since World War II champagne sales have climbed upwards, nearly quadrupling between 1945 and 1966. Champagne has trickled down the social scale and is no longer considered just a luxury. Today, more champagne is being drunk, by more people, than at any previous time in history. The new millennium looks good for champagne.

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Grape Varieties

The world of wine has hundreds if not thousands of grape varieties to play around with. This week we will be focussing on the four most important of each type

RED WINE

1. Cabernet Sauvignon: The master grape which is always a safe bet when making good to great wine. This grape produces rich, full bodied wine which is high in alcohol. Black fruit flavors are dominant along with some coconut, vanilla and chocolate aromas. This grape is usually used to make some great blends due to its strong characteristics which forms the body of the wine. The best varieties come from France and USA.
2. Shiraz: This grape provides a medium- full bodied wine and exhibits good acidity. The flavors which dominate would be black cherry, smoke, tar, truffles, meat, herbs and a lot of pepper. The pepper flavor ultimately gives Shiraz the stereotype of being a spicy wine and the best friend to spicy food. The best Shiraz is found in Australia.
3. Merlot: This wine is medium bodied in texture, exhibits a lot of fruity aromas and it gives a very velvety feel once drunk. Despite its medium bodied characteristic's do not undermine this wine- this wine can exhibit high alcohol and can age for decades. The best varieties can be found from France
4. Pinot Noir: This grape delivers the lightest bodied wines which is mainly due to its thin skin. Red fruits dominate the flavor tones of this wine such as strawberries, raspberries and cherries. The wines delivered are low in alcohol but very complex in its aromas. The best Pinot Noirs can be found in France, USA and now New Zealand.

WHITE WINE

1. Chardonnay: This grape is the master of all whites offering rich and flavorful wines which are medium bodied in texture but rich in colour. The world of Chardonnay is complex and can be divided into the fruity styles which is rich in sweet tropical fruits like melon whereas the more concentrated style from the Old world gives us more acidic wines with a strong citrus fruit flavor. This wine responds well to being aged in oak barrels which gives it its vanilla and oaky features. This is one of the few white wines which age well and improve with time. The best types can be found in USA, France and Australia.
2. Sauvignon Blanc: This grape provides us with a light bodied and crisp wine which has very strong mineral features from the Old World side but amazing fruity features from the New World with intense flavors of grapefruit dominating this wine. This wine has high acidity and low alcohol. The best Sauvignon Blanc comes from New Zealand.
3. Riesling: This wine is an amazing example of extreme complexity in terms of aromas and flavors which can differ from country to country. The best Riesling's originate from Germany where the wines are more sweet, low alcohol, spicy and a dominant taste of honey. This wine can serve the purpose of a dessert wine as well.
4. Pinot Grigio: This grape produces a medium bodied and extremely balanced wine which is high in acidity and makes you think of citrus fruits the moment you first sip it. The best Pinot Grigio hails from Italy.

two world's of wine

The world of wine is divided into two divisions:

Old World Wine is the category which includes wine made entirely in Europe- France, Germany, Italy, Spain. Their wines are usually more delicate in nature and have a more earthy mineral taste with medium alcohol. The old world usually prefer sticking to traditional wine making practices and rating systems.

New World Wine is the category which includes all wine making countries outside of Europe- Australia, USA, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand. Their wines are usually more fruity in taste with high alcohol. The new world is more experimental in terms of making wine and use more technology and new practices such as using screw cap bottles, their rating systems do not boast the same esteem and recognition as their competitors.

How to spot one by simply tasting?
A nice way to identify which world the wine comes from, simply by tasting, is to see whether the wine leaves more of a sensation either on your tongue or on your cheeks. If you feel more of a sensation on your cheeks then the wine is most probably from the new world and....you guessed it- Old world wines leave more of a sensation on your tongue. Go ahead and try, you will be pleasantly surprised!!!