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Champagne Guide

When it comes to this famous wine region, there aren't many different appellations to remember. In fact, there is just one: Champagne. The Champenois, as the producers are known, are fiercely protective of this name, and do not shy away from taking legal action against anyone who uses it incorrectly. Hence, if you see a bottle with the word 'Champagne' on the label, it acts as a guarantee that this wine has been produced in this cold, northern French region, and nowhere else. It also almost always ensures a hefty price tag. Unfortunately, like all appellations, it does not ensure quality.

Making Champagne

Effectively there are just three grapes used to make Champagne. There are tiny quantities of a few other obscure grape varieties planted and legally included, but for our purposes we shall concern ourselves with the three important ones. They are Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. The first two are black grapes, the latter is white.

Firstly, most houses will take a selection of still wines made from the grapes of more than one area, as this far north it is not commercially viable to rely on just one or two individual vineyards. Most Champagne is white, and may be made from any combination of the three grapes above. The pulp, and therefore the juice, of the two black grapes is white, so a white wine is obtained form these grapes by gentle pressing and taking the juice off the skins before they have had time to impart any colour. Once the wines are assembled, the cellar-master of the house will decide how they should be blended, before the bubbles are created by the Méthode Champenoise.

A recipe for making fizz (Méthode Champenoise):

Step 1: take one bottle of still wine, appropriately blended so as to maintain the house style. Ensure the glass is thick and strong to resist the increased pressure that will be created in the bottle.

Step 2: add a dose of sugar solution and yeast, known as liqueur de tirage, and seal the bottle with a good fitting cap - like a beer bottle cap.

Step 3: wait for the yeast to ferment the added sugar, creating more alcohol and, more importantly, carbon dioxide. As this gas cannot escape and is held under pressure, it will dissolve in the wine. This is where the bubbles come from. The pressure inside the bottle is now perhaps 80-90psi, equivalent to three or four times the pressure in the tyres on the average car.

Step 4: leave the wine for some time, perhaps several years. The lees (dead yeast cells) will impart richness to the wine.

Step 5: gradual turn and tap the bottle over time, so that eventually it is facing neck down, with the dead yeast cells sitting in the neck. This is known as remuage, or riddling.

Step 6: dip the neck in freezing brine to create a frozen plug of wine, containing the dead yeast cells, in the neck of the bottle. Pop the cap and the plug, complete with lees, flies out. This is known as dégorgement.

Step 7: top up with a dosage of sweetish wine, seal with a cork, wire capsule and foil, and sell it for a handsome profit.

Many wine writers talk about a famous old monk, called Dom Pérignon, and they credit him with the discovery that wines could be made fizzy by second fermentation in bottle. This is of course, absolute nonsense. It was an Englishman, Christopher Merret, who discovered this. If Dom Pérignon is to be credited for anything, it should be the introduction of the cork stopper, an event in which he did play a role.

Champagne Regions

This isn't vital information, unless you are a true Champagne expert, so I'll deal with it quickly. There are just five main regions within Champagne where the grapes are grown, and where the houses source their grapes will influence the quality and style of the final product. It's not really of much use to the general consumer, however, as you won't find these names on the label.

Champagne Map Firstly, the Montagne de Reims is the most northerly area, and is planted mainly with Pinot Noir, mainly on north facing slopes. Wines produced here are firm and austere. The Côte des Blancs is a mostly east-facing region south of Epernay. It is almost entirely planted with Chardonnay, and produces a wine much less hard than the Montagne de Reims. There is a little Pinot Noir planted in the very south of this region. The Vallée de la Marne runs west-east, and is planted with all three grape varieties, although the Pinot Meunier dominates. Furher south is the Côte des Sézanne, primarily Chardonnay country, and finally the Aube, the southernmost of all five regions, is planted mainly with Pinot Noir. This latter region is quite a distance further south than the other four, and is thus warmer, so it is planted with mainly Pinot Noir.

The Wines

What determines how much you pay for a bottle is the style of wine inside it. A non-vintage (often abbreviated to NV) wine is a blend of wine from several different years. They are blended so as to maintain a house style, and this is the entry level for Champagne. Vintage wines are produced from a single year, and most houses will only release a vintage wine if they deem that the grapes harvested that year are of sufficient quality. Accordingly, they are more expensive than the NV wines. They are identifiable simply by the presence of a vintage year on the label. Prestige cuvées are released by some of the top houses, and here quality can be excellent. Some examples include Dom Pérignon (Moët et Chandon), Comtes de Champagne (Taittinger), Belle Epoque (Perrier-Jouët), Dom Ruinart (Ruinart), Bollinger RD and Grande Année (Bollinger), Cristal (Roederer), La Grande Dame (Veuve Clicquot), Cuvée Winston Churchill (Pol Roger - named after the Prime Minister, who had a penchant for Pol Roger as well as cigars), among others. I taste many of these wines in this Prestige Cuvée Champagne tasting.

To be really helpful, acknowledging the fact that NV wines do taste different from year to year, regardless of how well the house style is maintained, the now sadly deceased Daniel Thibault introduced cellaring dates to the NV wines at Charles Heidsieck, and I wouldn't be surprised if more houses follow suit. The wine in the bottle is still a blend of wines from several years, the year on the label indicating only the year which the finished, blended wine was laid down in Heidsieck's cellars to mature. But the date allows us to differentiate between bottles containing different blends, and with different amounts of bottle age. I once popped in to one wine merchant and found the 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 on the shelves. Without the cellaring dates these would have looked like five bottles of identical NV wine, which in truth they most certainly were not.

Other points of interest include the rosé Champagnes, which may be made by either allowing the wine to stay in contact with the red grape skins for a while (the saignée method), or by adding in a little red wine to colour the product. The terms Blanc de Blancs and Blanc de Noirs indicate wines made solely from white grapes (Chardonnay) and black grapes (Pinot Noir and Meunier) respectively.

As an aside, you may notice as you are inspecting the label, the letters NM (most commonly) followed by a number. There are four levels of producer in Champagne, and in all cases the level of producer is indicated on the bottle by the letters NM, RM, CM or MA, followed by a unique number. The most important producers are the négociant-manipulants, these being large companies which buy in, blend and produce very large quantities of wine. The other three levels are récoltant-manipulants (growers who make and sell their own wine), co-opératives-manipulants (the co-ops) and marque-auxiliaire (used for own label Champagne).

My top wines: Good quality grand marques include Bollinger, Veuve-Clicquot, Charles Heidsieck (particularly in the 1990's, under the now deceased Daniel Thibault), Piper Heidsieck (Daniel Thibault was also involved here, now Regis Camus is in charge), Perrier Jouët, Pol Roger, Jacquesson, Billecart-Salmon, Roederer, Lanson, Taittinger, Bollinger, Laurent-Perrier, Krug, Moët et Chandon (Dom Perignon more than the vintage and NV wines), Salon, Vilmart, Gosset and Ruinart, among others. Duval-Leroy has seen improved quality over the last 10-15 years, and there are some good wines to be found here. Don't forget the individuals, those that tend their own vineyards and bottle their own wines; look for Pierre Moncuit, Arlaux, Gatinois, Dumangin and Serge Mathieu, among others. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Vintages

The most recent truly great Champagne vintages were 1996, 1990 and 1985. Other good vintages include 1995, 1989, 1988, 1983, 1982 and 1979.