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Nuggets from my Champagne notebook
The grapes of tomorrow, the best places to dine and safely negotiating a labyrinth of wine cellars
I’ve just come back from Champagne, where I’ve been tasting a lot of wine, visiting producers – and researching a piece on the First World War for Armistice Day. In the meantime, here are some nuggets from my notebook.
Chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier are the holy trinity of champagne grape varieties, but will that always be the case? Climate change is a threat to the very existence of champagne as we know it, and the technicians and viticulturalists of the CIVC (Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne) are working hard to develop “the grapes of tomorrow” – new varieties that can flourish in warmer temperatures. “Average temperatures in Champagne have already risen by one degree in the last 30 years,” says the CIVC’s Philippe Wibrotte. “While this year’s warm summer has given us a fantastic harvest, we need to be prepared in case temperatures continue to rise.” There are actually seven grapes authorised for use in champagne today and one of them is arbane. “Arbane was not used that much in the past because it matures much later than the others but today we’re thinking it might come in useful as another tool in the kit,” says Wibrotte. “We are also looking at creating new hybrids that will be suited to the new weather conditions.” That is some serious future-proofing.
I’m always asked to recommend good restaurants in the Champagne area. A local with a taste for the finer things in life offered me three tips, all of them top end: the restaurant at Château de Sacy where you’re right in the vineyard; Les Avisés, which is owned by Anselme Selosse, and has the feel of an extremely stylish private house (I’ve been here and that’s exactly true – there are beautiful rooms to stay in, too); and Racine, in Reims, where a Japanese chef cooks French food with a Japanese inflection. A couple of tasting tips. First, a champagne from a big house: everyone knows Taittinger but one special cuvée that largely flies under the radar is Taittinger Prélude NV (Majestic, £45/50 mix six / single bottle price) – a glorious, toasty, salty wine that reminds me of the savoury flavour of a bisque, cooked lemons and very good crusty brown bread. Why isn’t it more lauded? “It’s wellknown in the gastronomic world but we don’t produce much, and everything we do make is sold, so there’s not much incentive to shout about it any more,” say the Taittinger people. And if you’re looking for something off the beaten track, I was impressed with Dehours & Fils. Look out for their wines in good restaurants and bars, or visit them in France.
Champagne is one of the world’s most successful luxury brands, and the price of its wines continues to rise, despite the increase in production of (very good) sparkling wines from elsewhere in the world. It owes its prosperity in part to an aggressive programme of name protection. The CIVC looks at around 1,000 cases a year in which it considers the name champagne is being used improperly, and takes legal action on around 60, to ensure that if you see the word “champagne”, then we’re talking about sparkling wine from France, not, say, the colour of a mobile phone case, or a particularly nice type of pet food.
On every trip to Champagne I find a few moments to pop in to gaze at the intense blue of the three incredible Marc Chagall windows that were installed in the axial chapel in 1974. Reims Notre Dame cathedral has a lot of modern stained glass.
This isn’t because the originals were damaged when Reims was pummelled by bombardments and shelling during the two world wars, but because in the 19th century the clergy took the decision to take out the stained glass and put in plain glass to let more light in.
One of the glorious modern stained glass replacements is a tribute to the wine and people of Champagne. Paid for with money raised by the winegrowers and houses of the region, and completed in 1954, it depicts biblical scenes as well as grape harvesting, and wine-growing tools, and it’s tied to the landscape by representations of the churches of 44 champagne villages.
The champenois are excited about this year’s harvest, saying that both quality and quantity are high. I always take a region’s assessment of its own vintage with a bushel of salt but given the number of faces I saw breaking into broad smiles when they talked about it, I might be prepared to believe that 2018 is a decent year.
And finally, I remembered not to wander off when visiting a champagne cellar. You need a ball of string to explore the labyrinth that is subterranean Champagne in safety. There are reckoned to be over 155 miles of subterranean passageways carved into the chalk beneath Reims. Some of the tunnels were excavated by the Romans as they quarried for chalk; others were dug more recently to provide more storage space for the millions of bottles of wine ageing down. One house told me it has more than one million bottles per mile of tunnel, so if you did get lost you wouldn’t go thirsty. Though you’d be cold – temperatures are typically 50-54F (10-12C) – and damp.
Average temperatures in Champagne have risen by one degree in the last 30 years