A Quick Guide
to Champagne
How is Champagne produced? it needs
a remarkable combination of climate and geology along
with a leavening of human ingenuity and good luck. The
natural phenomena could be described as a mixture of
chalk and chill. The chalk cliffs which stare at each
other over the English channel between Dover and Cap
Gris Nez are part of a long billowing seam roaming across
southern England and northern France. Theres nothing
light white wine seems to thrive on as much as chalk,
and around the cathedral city of Reims, north east of
Paris, the chalk manages to find those deep cleft river
valleys and tucked-away sites which can ripen wine grapes.
This is the Champagne Region and it has an average temerature
just one degree above what is needed to ripen wine grapes.
In some years the grapes never get warm enough to ripen.
But this risk is crucial to the eventual character of
the wine since, when they ripen, the struggle has given
a fresh and a lingering depth to what is still a light
wine in much the same way as a cool-climate apple or
pear or plum, fighting eternally against wind and rain,
will always taste more interesting than the fat-cat
table fruit from sunny climes
.
 
The word 'Champagne'. It dosen't just
mean a style of wine. It can only legitimately apply
to the wine coming from a very distinct, carefully delimited
part of France. Champagne can only come from the chalky,
chilly hills and valleys centred on the river marne.
But the Champagne method can be used where ever you
want to make a still wine sparkle.
Champagne and indeed all sparkling
wines are naturally still. Champagne is so far north
and the wines ferment very slowing in the late autumn,
and, if left to their own devices, usually fail to finish
off the job before the icy winter winds freeze the cellars
and put the yeast to sleep. Traditionally, most wines
everywhere used to be made to be drunk within a year
of the vintage. This meant that the wines of Champagne
were shipped off in barrels during the winter, to Paris
first, and then later to London. Spring came, the weather
warmed up and the yeasts, which had gone into hybernation,
woke up and returned to the task of fermenting out the
sugar in the juice. Nobody quite realized why it happened,
but it meant that a creamy, foaming mousse appeared
in the wine around Easter, and for six to eight weeks
in the early summer this laughing , gurgling liquided
cascaded and throthed out into barrels.
Eventually the frothing stopped of
its own accord when the yeast had eaten up all the sugar,
and it was not until a way was devised of keeping the
bubbles in the wine that Champagne could reliably be
made sparkling. Ironically, the figure who first properly
understood the process, a benedictine monk called Dom
Perignon, in fact most of his time was spent trying
to stop the sparkle. All that was needed now were new
stronger glass bottles from England, and cork stoppers
from Spain. Even so, a lot of early bottles of Champagne
burst, because the pressure inside can build up to five
or six atmospheres.
The ones that survived produced a wine
full of sparkle and also far richer in fruit and perfume
than the thin, still wines people had been used to.
Today, the Champagne method means the inducing of a
second fermentation of the wine inside the bottle, and
the consequent dissolution of carbon dioxode in the
wine under pressure. Cheaper sparkling wines are even
pumped full of gas or even given their second fermentaion
in enourmous presurized tanks. The latter needn't be
worse than the Champagne method, Its the quality of
the base wine that counts.
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