Arata Isozaki

The wine so produced from all the vineyards amounts to about 40,000,000 bottles of cham­pagne a year, distributed by about 150 cham­pagne firms, or houses. The industry therefore is small, even if it is world famous.

Who drinks champagne? First, the French themselves, who drink something like 27,500,000 bottles annually. Then the British, drinking 3,200,000; the North Americans 2,500,000; the Belgians 1,400,000; the Italians 600,000; and the rest of the world 4,800,000. There is room, then, for sales to expand, especially in the Middle East, Asia, North and South America and Africa, notwithstanding customs barriers.

The biggest barrier, in fact, is the conservative nature of the champagne industry itself. Gener­ally it has been slow to mechanize, slow to use modern sales methods, and slow to reach beyond the classes who have traditionally drunk cham­pagne, to the rising classes and younger age groups of the world’s welfare states, in the old countries as well as the new ones. The traditional British markets, for example, could be much expanded if the major houses turned their attention to these new consumers, reaching them through modern information methods which could break down snob association and kill the idea, created by hotels and restaurants, that champagne is more expensive than it really is. A simple investigation in the Sunday Times recently showed that a champagne party for thirty people, using non-vintage champagne at 25s. a bottle, was cheaper than the more usual whisky-and-gin party for a similar number of people. This news caused astonishment in London, Rheims and Epernay; but it could have been discovered by the wine trade years ago.

Among world-famous houses of champagne like Pol-Roger, Veuve Clicquot, Mumm, Krug, Heidsieck and so on, only one has really developed modern methods in a big way. This is the house of Mott & Chandon, the largest of them all and therefore the one most easily able to afford mechanization. Its hydraulic presses, pressing 240 tons of grapes an hour, day and night, during harvest, its methods of transferring this great volume of wine to vats and casks, its testing and laboratory devices, are all unique. In terms of labour these methods have reduced the number of workers employed in key pro­duction departments from 150 to 24, of whom 12 are apprentices. In economic terms new methods have helped to push sales to around 6,000,000 bottles a year, almost a sixth of all champagne sold, and so far ahead of any other house that Moët’s price policy largely determines the price policy of the industry.

This way, it seems, lies the future, so that smaller houses may have to combine to effect a similar modernization if they are not to go out of business.

Moet’s methods, largely born in the fertile mind of Count Robert-Jean de Vogue, head of the firm, do not depart essentially from the traditional methods of making champagne which were developed in the second half of the 17th century by Dom Perignon, cellarer of the local monastery of Hautvillers.

To understand these traditional methods we must glance again at the new champagne lying in its forty-four-gallon casks in cellars below Epernay, labelled according to the growth from which it came.

It ferments in the casks until the onset of winter stops the fermentation. Then the cellars are opened so that the cold will cause a precipi­tation which throws the impurities to the bottom and allows the clear wine to be drawn off.

Up to this point the manipulation of the wine is much the same as in other wine-growing districts. Now comes the difference. When the wine is drawn off it is blended, one growth with another, in enormous vats which are charac­teristic of champagne cellars.

Champagne is the only great wine so blended. The idea of the blend was developed by Dom Pérignon, who also introduced the cork as we know it, so that the natural carbonic gas cannot escape and bubbles can form. Nothing new has been invented in this field since his experiments clarified the wines, explained the reason for the sparkle and put the gas to work. Alt the scientific researches of the industry since then have only rationalized the principles he evolved.

The blending, or cuvee, therefore, is almost as important as the harvest itself. The heads of each firm and their chefs de cave have to be experienced tasters, knowing what the new wine from each growth will be like when it is old and what it will become when it is married with the wines of other growths.

FROM September till the spring the champagne of the autumn harvest sleeps without sparkle in casks below Rheims and Epernay. It is quite still. In February or March it is blended and bottled. Captured in the bottle, it wakens with spring and ferments. It sparkles and will go on sparkling till we drink it, five years later.

The grapes which create this wonder grow in thirty thousand strictly defined acres in an area twenty-odd miles around Rheims and Epernay. These acres are divided between 10,000 owners, called vignerons. Some of them, like the houses of Moet & Chandon, Mumm and Krug, own con­siderable portions of the land, but the average size of a holding is only an acre and a half. Many houses own no vineyards at all, buying their grapes each year from peasant vignerons.

No genius is needed to understand how vine­yards on the slopes of these tree-covered hills acquire their personality from the combination of climate and geography which makes cham­pagne what it is. Lying about ninety miles east of Paris, the climate resembles that of the French capital, generally mild in winter, variable in spring, hot in summer and calm and fine in autumn. Yet the neighboring Vosges mountains can turn this mildness into weather too extreme, one might think, for vines.

To compensate, the black and white Pinot vines (the Pinot Meunier and the Chardonnay white-grape vine) have adapted themselves to their conditions. Sturdy but less productive than vines in other regions, they form their fruit earlier and ripen more slowly over a longer period, the high sugar content of their juice yielding as much as twelve degrees of alcohol.

The hills upon which they grow shelter them from the north wind, raise them above the plains where frost is specially dangerous, and dispose them at such an angle to the sun that the chalk soil reflects its rays and gives out the maximum of heat and light. Forests near by help to regulate moisture in the air and soil, while from the soil itself—chalky and gravelly, with lime and calcium—the wine draws much of its quality. Soil, location and cultivation, in that order, determine the quality of a vineyard and its wine.

In late September or early October the gathered grapes are brought in baskets from the vineyards to the presses. It is a time of high excitement, especially when the harvest is a record for quantity and quality, as it was in 1959. Even a rather wet harvest, like that of 1960, does not lose this excitement, which seems to flow as

much from tradition as from full baskets, pound on pound and ton on ton of grapes, filling the air of every village with pungent smells.

Try to see a wine harvest. Pass through Champagne at the right moment (any cham­pagne house will tell you when) and you will sense this contact with the past. The carriage of the baskets, the bent figures at the vines are what Homer described, and Tacitus too and the reverend fathers of the mediaeval church.

The grapes are weighed and emptied into huge presses holding four tons at a time. Without crushing pips or stalks or extracting the colour from the skins the juice is squeezed from the grapes in successive presses to run into vats whence it flows into casks. Four tons usually give 572 gallons of juice, corresponding to thirteen casks holding forty-four gallons each. Of these only the first ten casks, obtained by two or three rapid turns of the screw of the wine press, will go to make the really superior wines. The remaining three casks may also by law be called champagne, but any juice besides (and there is usually quite a lot) must be sold as ordinary wine without any appellation.