Champagne Part 3: History - When Champagne Became Bubbly (the Contributions of Dom Pérignon)

To say that the evolution of the wines made in Champagne into the bubbly beverage it is today can be attributed to three people is very reductionist, but here goes.
There are many accounts of how Champagne became bubbly, but one of the books published in 1882 by Henry Vizetelly called CHAMPAGNE: with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France is a good place to begin. It is freely available via the Project Gutenberg online and is filled with 350 beautiful illustrations. This ebook will take you on a journey back in time in Champagne.
Early in the history of Champagne, the vintners noticed that their wines had a tendency to froth and sparkle. Initially, this 'kind of wine which is always in a fury, and which boils without ceasing in its vessel’¹ was not very highly regarded, in fact, effervescence was considered to be a flaw. Sparkling wine could not be served at mass, the wines must be still.
In fact, all wines begin their life by sparkling because during the course of fermentation, yeasts convert the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Our current knowledge of how yeasts conduct fermentation, allows us to reason that because the harvest of the grapes in Champagne occurred in late autumn, the yeasts were only able to conduct a partial fermentation before going dormant. When the weather became warmer in spring, the yeast resumed fermentation causing the wine to effervesce resulting in the observed fury and boiling of wine in spring. This was the state of Champagne in the early 17th century.
The story of sparkling champagne begins with the history of the Benedictines of Hautvillers in the 17th century. Tradition said that about the middle of the seventh century St. Nivard, Bishop of Reims, and his godson, St. Berchier, saw a snow-white dove and regarded the dove as a miracle and an omen to erect an abbey where the bird had landed.

During the course of history, Hautvillers was sacked by the Normans when they ravaged Champagne, and was twice destroyed by fire—once in 1098, and again in 1440—each time it rose phoenix-like from its ashes.
The Benedictines of Hautvillers were equally renown for their wines and vineyards. Being the true enologist of the time, they were on equal footing with the monks of Bèze to whom we owe Chambertin (the favorite wine of Napoleon I) and to the Cistercians of Citeaux for the perfection that is Clos Vougeot.
Fast forward to 1636. By that time, the Benedictines of Hautvillers were cultivating 100 arpents (an old French unit of land area equivalent to 3,420 square meters, about 1 acre) themselves.

In 1668, a young Benetictine monk, Dom Pierre Pérignon was appointed to be the business manager for the Abbey of Hautvillers. In this role, he was responsible for the tithes paid either in wine or grapes by the neighboring cultivators to the lord abbot.
It was also Dom Pérignon’s duty to superintend the abbey vineyards and supervise the making of the wine. Upon receiving the tithes of wines, Pérignon noticed that one kind of soil imparted fragrance and another, generosity, while other wines were lacking in both qualities. Pérignon decided that the best result would be to 'marry' or blend the wines from the various vineyards, a practice that continues in Champagne today. This is only one of the many 'firsts' that Dom Pérignon introduced. Among his many accomplishments are the following:⁴

• Succeeded in obtaining for the first time in the Champagne a perfectly white wine from black grapes
• Used only the best grapes and discarded those that were broken
• Pruned vines hard in the early spring to prevent overproduction
• Harvested in the cool of the morning
• Pressed grapes gently
• Kept the juice from each pressing separate
• Stored wine in bottles to limit oxidation
• Began the practice of using corks to stopper the bottled wine

Although Dom Pérignon did not create sparkling Champagne, his contributions were numerous and most importantly laid the groundwork for the creation of sparkling Champagne. He is therefore credited as being the 'Father of Champagne'.
I find it to be so interesting that many of the practices that Dom Pérignon developed are still being followed today.
Reference:
1. Henry Vizetelly, CHAMPAGNE: with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France, 1882, pg. 35.
2. Illustration: Church of Hautvilers, Henry Vizetelly, CHAMPAGNE: with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France, 1882, pg. 36.
3. Illustration: Dom Pérignon, Henry Vizetelly, CHAMPAGNE: with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France, 1882, pg. 39.
4. Don and Petie Kladstrup, Champagne How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times, HarperCollins, 2005, pg. 25-26.

New Tab on Champagne

I took a little winter vacation from blogging. I am back but easing my way back into writing. This winter, I have been on a quest to learn all (with liberties to "all") about Champagne, the region and the bubbly. I found that I did a lot of previous blogs on Champagne so I collated all of the blogposts under a new tab called Champagne.
You can find it here:

Please check it out!

First Art Featuring Champagne

Ever since my husband discovered that he can shuck oysters, we have been enjoying Oysters and Champagne.
Ever on my quest for the deep dive into Champagne, I came upon yet another interesting and amazing tidbit that I would like to share. In 1734, the Directeur des Bâtiments, informed Jean-Francois de Troy that King Louis XV would like him to do a painting. The result was the first painting that featured Champagne, done in 1735 and called Le Déjeunier d'Huitres or The Oyster Lunch.

If we enlarge the painting, a few details come into view: The glances of the men as it follows the flying cork (bouchon), the man holding the knife that cut the string that held the cork in place, the shape of the Champagne bottle, and the shape of the Champagne glasses.¹

In the foreground of the painting, the Champagne is being chilled in an ice filled rafraichîssoir. At each place setting is a small bowl with a cone-shaped glass slanting downward. Glasses of champagne were drunk in one gulp then turned over in a bowl to let the substantial amount of sediment drain out. The next gulp of Champagne was always served in a fresh glass.

Some things have changed since 1735: The sediment that Champagne drinkers had to dispose of in this painting became less of a problem when riddling or remuage was invented by Veuve Barbe-Nicole Cliquot in her quest to provide her Champagne with clarity in the glass.²
I hope to develop all this and more, in my deep dive into Champagne blogposts to follow.

Reference:
1. Don and Petie Kladstrup, "Champagne How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times", HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, page 40-41.
2. Natasha Geiling, Simthsonian.com, The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry, November 5, 2013.

2012 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay Napa Valley

We were invited to our friend's home for dinner last week. Our friend asked us if we wanted to have some white wine that he had already opened and taken out a cup of it for cooking. You know what they say about using wine for cooking---use only wine that you will drink. Our friend said that he is running really low on white wines so this is what he pulled out!
Since my husband and I are growing Chardonnay and trying to figure out how to vinify it, tasting this 2012 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay was a great experience for us. First of all, there was really no indication of oak notes on the wine, which for me is a positive attribute. If this Chardonnay was barrel fermented, the oakiness was very well integrated into the wine. The one word that my husband used to describe this wine was "awesome". He really liked it!
The Chateau Montelena Vintage Notes for this wine recalled the perfect weather for ripening grapes, harvesting this vintage a full 3 weeks earlier than usual. The wine was barrel aged for 10 months in 100% French oak of which 8% was new barrels. The alcohol level was 13.6%.
This called to mind the famous 1976 Judgement of Paris which was made into the film "Bottle Shock". This was a blind wine tasting in which Napa Valley wines were tasted side by side with wines from France. In this tasting, the 1973 Chateau Montelena placed first and in the process put California wines on the world stage.
For a very interesting and timely updating of the Judgement of Paris, please read this article: The hidden figures behind the Judgment of Paris
which appeared in the San Fransisco Chronicle, written by Esther Mobley, October 24, 2018. (Spoiler Alert: Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher and Joanne Dickenson DePuy)

Champagne Part 2: Geology

Disclaimer: This blogpost is not about the terroir of Champagne. Instead, it is about the geology of the region and why certain types of soils are good for growing grape vines.
Jennifer Hugget wrote in her research article: According to Chappaz (1955) ‘The winegrowers of old, although ignorant of the geology, always stopped their vineyards right at the contact of the two Chalk formations’ – the Belemnite (Campanian) and Micraster (Santonian) biozones and became an accepted ‘fact’, without any questioning as to why the vines should perform so differently in adjacent chalk zones of similar mineralogy.¹
What this vignette says to me is that these winegrowers had very keen powers of observation. Even though they knew very little about the underlying geological features in their vineyard, it was to the soil that they attributed the differences they saw in the growth of their grape vines.
But, what is it about Champagne that is so good to grape vines? It all begins with the Paris Basin and the geological history of this feature. After looking online for a long time, I found this image that is truly a picture worth 1,000 words. On the left side is a color-coded timeline, on the top is the view of the Paris Basin from space and on the bottom is a cross section of the Paris Basin.²
To understand what is so special about the Paris Basin, we'll have to travel back in time. The area around the Ile de France or the Parisian Basin was once an inland sea that covered most of France until about 70 million years ago. The sea was teeming with various marine organisms, such as sea urchins, sponges, starfish and in particular belemnites (an extinct relative to the cuttlefish/squid).
Marine sedimentation in the Paris Basin began in the Permian(oldest) and continued into the Tertiary(newest). During that time, more than 3000 meters of sedimentary rocks acummulated in the basin center. About 30 million years ago an earthquake at the center of the basin caused the dried up seabed to break up and rise some 60 meters. The broken up subsoil contained huge deposits of the sea creatures fossilized remains that varied in depth between 100 to 300 meters.

      Map is from Geocaching, Le Champagne et la craie.²
The vineyards of Champagne grew on this bedrock where gravels, clays, silts, pebbles, meet the marl, clay limestone, sandstone, and conglomerates. The main part of the vineyards follows the 125 kms irregular line of the coast called Falaise de l’Ile-de-France from l’Aisne, to the northwest of Rheims to the Seine in Nogent.
The Chalk hills in Champagne are capped by soft, Paleocene sands and muds, which are locally lignitic. These sediments have been washed down the chalk slope, as far as the base of the Belemnite zone.¹ Champagnes chalk soils can be sub-divided into two biozones based on the range of fossil material. The uppermost zone is ‘belemnite’ (an extinct relative to the cuttlefish/squid) dating from the Tertiary period and the lower zone ‘micraster’ (sea urchin/starfish) from the Cretaceous period.
Coming full circle to the beginning of this blog, it was this difference in soil composition that made the early winegrowers decide what type of soils their grape vines grew better on. But, geology is only one of many factors in wine quality and, in most cases, the influence of the bedrock is only indirect. There are other factors to take into account, especially the viticultural methods, that probably are the most important control.
References:
1. Jennifer M. Hugget, Geology and wine: a review, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 117, June 2005, p. 239–247.
2. Mangenot, Xavier & Gasparrini, Marta & Gerdes, Axel & Bonifacie, Magali & Rouchon, Virgile. (2018). An emerging thermo-chronometer for carbonate bearing rocks: Δ47/U-Pb. Geology. in press. 10.1130/G45196.1.
3. Geocaching, Le Champagne et la craie.
4. Geotourism, Paris Basin - The Geological Foundation for Petroleum, Culture and Wine. 4. The World of Fine Wine, Wine and the Mists of the Distant Past: Geological Time Explained, Issue 48, 2015.

Progress of Our Cabernet Franc

This blogpost is a companion story to our Progress of Our Cabernet Sauvignon story (while I continue to dig into the geology of Champagne---pun, pun).
We harvested our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc on October 20th. While we turned our Cabernet Sauvignon into a rosé, we thought that the Cabernet Franc did have the flavor profile to turn into red wine.
On November 9, we racked the wine into a 5 gallon keg using a nitrogen push and the leftover wine was put into a one gallon glass jug and stoppered.
On January 18, 2019 we took out a small amount of the wine and did a sulfur dioxide test and tasted it. This is the color of the wine after just one racking and keg aging.

During our tasting on November 9th we thought that the wine tasted like "jet fuel". When my husband says this, it is a good sign. During the months from November to January, the wine had evolved and now we are tasting typical Cabernet Franc flavors. To me it had flavors of black raspberries and a note of cedar. I do think that we have some of the vegetal methoxypyrazine flavors, a little green bell pepper. I do like the clarity of the wine. We hope to bottle this in the not too distant future.

Amazing Champagne Story: Mercier Blending Barrel

I'm doing a deep dive (for me) about Champagne and wanted to follow up the post Champagne Part 1: Location with something about the geology of Champagne but I got side tracked by rereading Champagne by Don and Petie Kladstrup. The paragraph on page 120 caught my eye:
     Mercier, who founded his own champagne house when he was only twenty, was a man of boundless energy ("I sleep fast," he explained) and unlimited creativity. He caused a stir at the 1889 Exposition when he arrived with a team of twenty-four white oxen hauling the world's largest wine barrel, a cask what took sixteen years to build and contained an equivalent of two hundred thousand bottles of champagne. The barrel was so huge that roads had to be widened and houses had to be bought up and demolished in order to get it from Épernay to Paris. ¹
If the above description is unfathomable and defies imagination, when I went to Google "Mercier Champagne Barrel 1889 Exposition" I came upon this link: Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne and on that site, they had this:

I also learned that the barrel was not necessarily constructed for the 1889 Exposition but was made because Eugène Mercier needed a container big enough to allow blending on a grand scale so that he could provide his clients with wines of a consistent character year after year. There is more amazing information on the Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne and I urge you to read the extraordinary steps Mercier took to get his barrel to the 1889 Exposition in Paris. It is truly jaw dropping!
The question is, did this amazing barrel survive? The answer is "yes" and it is on exhibit at Champagne Mercier in Epernay.

I am filing this story on my Esoteria Tab with the other amazing wine relics such as:

• The Vix Krater
• The Heidelberg Tun

References:
1. Don and Petie Kladstrup, "Champagne How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times", HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, page 102.
2. Grandes Marques & Maisons de Champagne.

Champagne Part 1: Location

I can't believe that it is already February in the New Year! Drinking and enjoying Champagne with oysters is one of the joys of life, so it is incumbent upon any Champagne drinker to know much more about this delightful drink, of which I am one. So this winter, I decided that I am going to dedicate some serious time to researching all about this bubbly liquid. Also, we have been trying our hand at making Pétillant Naturel so I thought it might be a good idea to review how Champagne is made and how it differs from Pétillant Naturel.
Champagne is a sparkling wine that comes from Champagne region of France. Its vineyard boundaries have been defined by France’s appellation system (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée or AOC) since 1927.¹ EU law and the laws of most countries reserve the term "Champagne" exclusively for wines that come from this region.
Champagne is situated 90 miles northeast of Paris, one of the most northerly latitudes in the wine world. Champagne lies over a chalk plain (a major influence of the terroir) and is split by the River Marne.
The Champagne region consists of 5 main regions, split into 17 sub-regions:²
I love this map of Champagne because the inset map shows where the Champagne region is located and the map itself shows all of the 5 main regions in Champagne and it's relationship to the other regions.

All five regions have their own distinct personalities to contribute to the land of Champagne.^3,4
• Montage de Reims

Located along a ridge that starts south of the city of Reims and curves back around toward Epernay, the Montagne de Reims has some of the most diverse soil in Champagne, making it home to all three major grapes in the region. However, the Montagne de Reims is most known for Pinot Noir, and its many Grand Cru villages are the sources for ripe, high-quality grapes used in the wines of large Champagne houses.
• Côte des Blancs

The Côte des Blancs specializes in the white grape, Chardonnay. Running south from the city of Epernay, the soil of this east and southeast-facing slope (or “côte”) has a higher amount of limestone-rich chalk than elsewhere in Champagne. This creates grapes with high levels of acidity – a natural fit for Chardonnay and Blanc de Blancs bottlings.
• Vallée de la Marne

Located along the Marne river west of Epernay, the Vallée de la Marne is Pinot Meunier country. Because this region is prone to frost and is more dominated by clay and sand rather than chalk, Pinot Meunier works best, as it buds late and ripens early. Some Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are planted here as well. While not as “new” as the Côte de Sezanne and Aube, the Vallée de la Marne is still evolving in its identity outside of being merely the land of Meunier.
• Côte des Sézanne

Located just south of the heart of Champagne production, the Côte de Sezanne is like a baby Côte des Blancs. While well-suited to Chardonnay, the Côte de Sezanne’s soil isn’t as dominated by chalk. Therefore, wines are slightly lower in acidity but slightly higher in aromatic intensity. The Côte de Sézanne falls somewhere in between the “big three” regions and the Aube, identity-wise; it doesn’t have classic status, but there isn’t as much buzz around innovation and artisanal production.
• Aube

Looking at a map, it might not be initially apparent that the Aube is part of Champagne; it’s actually closer to Chablis than it is to Reims and Epernay! The Aube, and its sub-region of Côte des Bars, is an up-and-coming region close to the city of Troyes, known for its terroir-driven grower-producers who are pushing against the mold when it comes to traditionally-accepted vinification methods. Pinot Noir dominates the vineyards of the Aube, as this is a warmer region with less chalk in the soil.

The majority (over two thirds) of the vineyards are found in the Marne valley.³
In doing this research into Champagne, I learned rather belatedly about the vineyards where the Krug Wines that we were treated to in 2013, were located. (The “Clos du Mesnil” sourced from a walled vineyard in the center of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, located in the Côte des Blancs.)

References:
1. Terroir & appellation: The Champagne terroir.
2. Cellar Tours.
Text comes from:
3. Courtney Schiessl @takeittocourt, ViNEPAIR, Definitive Guide to Champagne + Map.
Maps come from:
4. Wine Folly Champagne Map.