Exploring a Few of the Countless Avenues Through the Bubbles of Champagne

A recent trip gave way to a previously unrealized truth: Even in the strictest wine appellation, winemakers have a lot of creativity to flex at their disposal.

Via Wikimedia Commons
Bollinger advertisement from 1923. Via Wikimedia Commons

Tasting wines after traveling to their regions of origin is the best way to understand them. A recent trip to Champagne gave way to a previously unrealized truth: Even in the strictest wine appellation, winemakers have a lot of creativity to flex at their disposal.

To explore a broad swath of the industry in only two days, four carefully selected wineries were visited no more than 30 minutes apart. Each was representative of a different commercial makeup: Champagne Bollinger, a maison; Champagne Bereche & Fils, a grower; Champagne Jacquesson, a sort of maison-grower hybrid; and Champagne Chavost, one of about 130 cooperatives left in the region.

They all produce different styles of Champagne. Their shared attribute is an intense enthusiasm for their specific methods of production. From farming to pressing, vinification, and maturation of the still wines, to blending, aging, closures, sulfur levels, and dosage of the finished wines, there are seemingly innumerable choices to make.  

It’s important to note that farming decisions dictate the quality, while vinification techniques have the greater effect on the style of a wine.

All four companies are committed to producing the highest quality of grapes. Even the co-op, iterations of which usually are considered to have lower thresholds, has an organic vineyard and is working with all its members to move in that direction. Bereche isn’t certified organic; it takes a pragmatic approach, preferring to spray the more effective synthetics in poor vintages, rather than risk losing a year’s crop. Jaquesson is sustainable and still tinkering around with the four pruning methods the region allows, just to make sure it is realizing its optimal potential.

The presses are where the parties tend to disagree. Jacquesson swears by the traditional basket press, a laborious process with grapes being squished against wooden slats into a holding tank below. This means full oxygen exposure right at the beginning, which they claim leads to stability, longevity, and a powerful structure.

Bereche is in camp pneumatic press, wishing to see as little oxygen exposure as possible at the beginning with a long, but gentle, automated cycle. Raphael Bereche says it helps to retain the delicate fruit and floral aromas of his grapes.

To make Champagne, you start by fermenting a still wine, or vin clair. Then comes bottling and adding liqueur de tirage, a combination of yeast and sugar, for a secondary fermentation inside the bottle, one byproduct of which is CO2, or bubbles.

The vast majority of vin clair are made quickly, with inoculated yeast in stainless steel tanks. Oddly enough, all four of these properties use a more traditional approach of fermentation and some maturation in neutral wood barrels. Keep in mind this isn’t for oaky flavors but the gentle ingress of oxygen, to coalesce the structure for an integrated mouthfeel.

Bollinger is the only property in all of Champagne to still employ a full-time cooper to manage its barrel program. It also uses a unique system of aging some of its reserve wines in magnum, claiming the small, reductive environment adds further complexity to the Special Cuvée. It’s hard to doubt the quality, incredibly creamy texture, and complexity of its non-vintage wine.

As for blending, the hallmark of Champagne, it’s an art form used to distinguish each estate and an ingenious method of creating consistency no matter what the vintage brings. Normally the best grapes and vin clair are destined for the more expensive cuvées like a single vintage, tete de cuvée, rosé, etc.

Jacquesson felt this was backward: Why make an inferior wine for the sake of continuity? Now it takes the drastic approach of forsaking most “special” wines (sometimes they make a separate single vineyard bottling) and produce just one wine every year. It is as perfect an expression of the current vintage as it can manage, with a touch of reseve wine for complexity. Every year it’s a singular, vinous, powerful, and captivating affair. It’s one of the best bottles in Champagne year in and year out, and always unique.

Aging sur lie, with bottles on their sides, gives Champagne the quintessential brioche-y character and mouthfeel through slow chemical reactions taking place in the bottle. This means there are minimum age requirements to ensure these notes can be achieved consistently, but Bereche, Bollinger, and Jaquesson all double or even triple (or sometimes more) those times. This contributes to the exceptional quality of all three. Champagne Chavost chooses to release shortly after the minimum requirements in order to retain more primary fruit and freshness.

Bereche and Bollinger go an extra step: All of their wines, except for the non-vintage cuvée, age under cork, rather than crown cap (the top found on a bottle of beer). Although cork does allow a tiny bit of oxygen exposure, over the long term it creates a more reductive environment than crown cap. The acidity and fruit manage to keep a youthful glean alongside the tertiary notes of development. It’s an incredibly costly and labor intensive investment to boot.

Finally, additives: Without sulfur dioxide, wines can succumb to any number of issues — from bacterial taint, or mousiness, to volatile acidity (think nail polish remover), to brettanomyces (barnyard or bandaid), or oxidation (stale fruit and soy sauce). Very few Champenoise would dare to release a wine without it, as the cost of faulty wines is just too high.

This is why it’s an impressive feature of the Champagne Chavot co-op wines. These are refreshing, lively, clean, and made without any SO2. Producers across the region have been asking the head winemaker there, Fabian Daviaux, for his secrets. For now he’s keeping them close to the chest, but the wines are a thrilling change of pace for a region with often heavy doses of sulfur throughout the process.

No matter the style — fresh, floral, tense, creamy, round, developed, powerful, concentrated, ageworthy, or youthful — there are countless avenues to explore through the bubbles of Champagne. Sometimes the boundaries of restrictive environments force more creativity from artisans in order to express themselves.This certainly seems to be true of the producers I visited, and hopefully any subsequent visits will showcase even more interesting and appealing options.


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