The earliest examples of sparkling wine were due to faults that occurred everywhere wine was produced. They would have been the result of an unwanted refermentation or possibly even malolactic conversion. None of these faulty wines were fully sparkling, and most were probably not even remotely nice. They would have been as welcome then as a fizzy Bordeaux first growth would be today. Occasionally, a pleasurable fizzy wine might be noted, possibly because it was still quite sweet—and so the myths of extraordinarily early sparkling wines would begin.
But to understand the emergence of Champagne’s sparkling wine, it’s important to first consider the development of the region and its earliest, still wines.
Before the Roman conquest of 57 BCE, the region known as Champagne today did not exist. It was merely part of what the Romans called Gallia Belgica, the most northerly segment of a fragmented group of Celtic kingdoms known collectively as Gaul, representing an area roughly equivalent to that of present-day France. To the Romans, Gaul was Gallia Comata, or “Hairy Gaul,” so-called because the Gauls wore their hair long and grew thick, droopy moustaches.
Gaul and Gallic are not only synonymous with France and French but with Celt and Celtic, too, although the Celts were not restricted to Gaul, nor did they originate there. Celtic tribes were contemporaries of the earliest Greek and Roman people. But while the Romans regarded Celts as barbarians, the Greeks considered them to be extremely civilized.
Whereas students of wine might be familiar with the Roman invasion of Gaul, students of history are equally familiar with the fact that the Gauls had invaded Italy almost 250 years earlier. During the fourth century BCE, Gaulish warriors poured through the Alpine passes to occupy much of Northern Italy, which then became known as Gallia Cisalpina. The Gauls soon began probing further south, and in 390 BCE, after defeating the Romans on the outskirts of Rome, they looted the city itself. After a series of decisive Alpine counterattacks throughout the third century BCE, the Romans eventually retook Gallia Cisalpina and, in 118 BCE, conquered Gallia Transalpina (later renamed Gallia Narbonensis), which secured the passes between Gaul and Roman Italy. This explains the Gallic influence that persists in Northern Italy and the Latin bridge of Occitan-based local dialects that connect Italy with Spain through Provence and Roussillon.
The Gauls were not one people, but consisted of many tribes. When Caesar invaded Gallia Belgica in 57 BCE, the leading Celtic tribe in the Champagne region-to-be was the Remi. Realizing that they were no match for the Romans and their machines of war, the Remi immediately allied themselves with the Romans, who fortified their primary oppidum (protected settlement), which they called Durocortorum, meaning “round fortress,” and made the capital of Gallia Belgica (this is modern-day Reims).
Vitis sezannensis is the earliest known example of Vitis, the genus to which all grapevines belong. A fossil found at Fleury-la-Rivière was carbon dated to 58 million years ago, when Champagne was a hot and humid forest nestling against a tropical beach patrolled by the Campanile giganteum, a giant form of sea snail more than 40 centimeters long.
While this demonstrates that Champagne might be the oldest known location of the vine, this region is not the oldest in terms of either viticulture or winemaking. In fact, Vitis sezannensis died out at the end of the Riss glaciation, more than 130,000 years ago, and by the time that even the crudest attempts were being made to ferment grape juice into wine (pre-5400 BCE), there were no vines whatsoever in Champagne and had not been for more than 100,000 years.
According to the observations of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century BCE, “the frigid climate of the uncultivated north of Gaul forbade production of either wine or oil,” and certainly the Celtic tribes of Gallia Belgica drank beer, not wine. This casts doubt on sources that state it was the Romans who brought viticulture to Champagne, especially as such claims lack documentary and archaeological evidence. There is nothing to substantiate the oft-quoted notion that the Porte Mars in Reims was erected in celebration of the directive issued by Emperor Probus in 280 CE to replant the vineyards of Gaul. Some authors use this to infer that vines were planted in Champagne, but other experts believe the Porte Mars archway could have been built well before Probus. Even the detailed stories about vineyards belonging to Bishop Rémi (better known today as Saint Rémi) are nothing more than stories, written centuries later.
The first conclusive mention of vines growing in Champagne is from 651 CE, when Grimoald the Elder wrote to the Benedictine Bishop Remaclus. In this letter, Grimoald reveals that King Sigebert III of Austrasia gave Remaclus two monasteries, one at Malmundariensi, the other at Stabulensi (now Malmedy and Stavelot in Belgium); a villa at Germiniacum (the so-called lost village of Germigny-Pend-la-Pie in France, now called Germiny); two mills on the River Suippe; and two vineyards, one at Boterio (the whereabouts of which is unknown), the other at Terune (now called Terron-sur-Aisne, some 50 kilometers northeast of Reims). Although it is unlikely that Terune was the only vineyard in this part of Gaul at this time, and it is clear that many other sites in the region were far better suited to viticulture, no evidence of vines growing elsewhere in Champagne at the time or earlier exists. Terune is thus the earliest-known Champagne vineyard. It is not until the ninth century that any greater extent of viticulture in the region begins to emerge. In a letter written between 848 and 856 by Pardulus (790–857), Bishop of Laon, to Hincmar (806–882), Archbishop of Reims, he mentions the wines of Épernay, Chaumuzy, Marne, Reims, Ville-en-Tardenois, Merfy, and Cormicy. Obviously, one personal letter would never encompass every vineyard known locally, but this letter reads as if most of the hillsides of Champagne are covered in vines.
It is, of course, feasible that the Romans could have planted vineyards in Champagne, as for them, viticulture was not so much the product of a cultural habit as essential for military logistics. Although small volumes of famous wine had always been consumed for pleasure by the rich and privileged throughout the empire, basic wines of almost any provenance were essential to keep the Roman army alive and on the move. The further they ventured from the heart of the empire, the more difficult it was to be assured of clean drinking water, so wine was used to sterilize locally sourced water. Nevertheless, the amount of wine required was enormous, amounting to 5,000 liters a day for a single legion. The Romans thus planted vineyards wherever they could. But vines did not grow in colder climes, where they were forced to import wine or supplement the rations with locally brewed beer. It is therefore not unreasonable to postulate that the Romans were the first to cultivate the vine in Champagne, and maybe the evidence will one day support this. But they probably considered the climate too uncertain to divert resources when beer was readily available from the Remi in Gallia Belgica.
Another possibility is that viticulture spread in tandem with early Christianity, which required wine for the sacrament of Communion. Such a scenario could have occurred at any time after 250 CE, when Rome appointed Sixtus as the first Bishop of Reims. But these are all simply possibilities, with no hard evidence until 651 CE.
The Roman Empire waned in the third and fourth centuries, when its protection of border provinces began to weaken, giving rise to waves of invasions from the east. Lying at a strategic crossroads for invading armies, Champagne was subjected to bands of looting hordes, the most ferocious led by Attila the Hun.
In the spring of 451 CE, half a million Huns and their allies swept into Roman Gaul. Attila was not stopped until September of that year. It was one of the bloodiest battles of human history, in which over 200,000 men (300,000 according to Hydatius) were killed by hand-to-hand combat in less than 24 hours. Victory fell to the Roman commander Aetius, but only after he had desperately allied his legions with the forces of the Empire’s declared enemies: the invading Franks and, particularly, the Visigoths, whose king Theodoric I had been a thorn in Aetius’s side since 426.
The word Champagne is derived from the Latin campania, which means “land of fields” and infers a flat plain. It was first used as campania felix, or “fortunate field,” to describe the fertile land south of Rome (now known as Campania), the city’s breadbasket in ancient times. The Romans used the word campania for other flat areas within the empire, such as Campania Pannonica for the Great Hungarian Plain and Campania Remensis for the flatlands belonging to the Remi tribe.
The intrigue behind Attila’s first and only defeat on the battlefield is heightened by the fact that Aetius had been a childhood friend of Ruglia, Attila’s uncle and future leader of the Huns. Aetius had relied on mercenaries provided by Ruglia as the backbone of his military force in Gaul, a practice continued by Attila after he and his brother Bleda assumed joint leadership of the Huns. The Visigoths and Franks, not the Huns, were Aetius’s natural enemies, but in 445, when Attila killed his own brother to attain sole leadership, he forbade Huns from supporting the Romans. Consequently, when Attila invaded Gaul, Aetius not only lacked the backup of Hun mercenaries, but he was forced to fight no less than half a million of his former allies. Faced by such overwhelming numbers, Aetius had no option but to seek help from his sworn enemies, the Visigoths and Franks. With their help, Aetius managed the unique accomplishment of defeating Attila. However, he was probably not unhappy to hear that the nephew of his childhood friend had escaped with his life, and he would have delighted to discover that Theodoric, the King of the Visigoths, had not. Theodoric’s son Thorismond ruled the Visigoths for just two years before he was murdered by his younger brother Theodoric II. Although the Visigoths continued to be a powerful force, due to infighting and division, they never posed a significant threat to Rome or, indeed, the Franks thereafter.
With the influence of the Visigoths diminished, the Franks seized the opportunity to dominate Gaul and within just 30 years, Clovis (465–511) had been established as the dominant Frankish chieftain. He united the fragmented clans, established an expanding kingdom around Durocortorum, and, in 486, defeated the last Roman authority in Gaul at the Battle of Soissons. Clovis was head of the most powerful Frankish dynasty, the Merovingians, and has since become widely recognized as the first king of an emergent France. The population was still overwhelmingly Celtic, made up of many Gaulish tribes, but it was the Germanic Franks who were firmly in control. And so it was that the Germans not only became the first aristocracy in France but also gave the country its name.
Christianity came to the Franks when Clovis was baptized by Bishop Rémi in 496. There had been Christians here, as elsewhere in the Empire, since the middle of the third century, but it was by Clovis’s example—in fulfillment of a vow made in battle—that the heathen Frankish warriors accepted baptism from Rémi.
The Frankish empire was pan-European, reaching its apogee under Charlemagne (747–814) when he was crowned emperor of a revived Roman Empire in the West by the Pope Leo III on Christmas day of 800. He was succeeded in 814 by his son Louis the Pious (Louis I of France), who was the first in a long line of French kings to be crowned at Reims. As this traditional privilege grew, so did the fame of Reims. With it, the popularity of Champagne’s wine began to spread.
In the 10th century, the peace of Champagne was shattered by 10 violent years of political battle as the house of Vermandois fought for the bishopdom of Reims. Bloodier, longer, and also fought over Champagne soil was the struggle between Hugh Capet and Charles of Lorraine for the French throne. Reims suffered four sieges in 60 years; Épernay was pillaged half a dozen times and burned twice. Hugh Capet executed the most proficient sacking of Épernay during the harvest of 947, when he set ablaze the entire region and carried off all its wine. Herbert II of Vermandois established the county of Champagne in 923 and eventually secured the bishopdom of Reims for his second son Hugh, while Hugh Capet paved the way for his son and namesake to be crowned king of France in 987.
For a brief period in the province’s history, its affairs became entwined in the broader struggle for the monarchy. Between 1019 and 1023, Champagne fell into the hands of Eudes II, the Count of Blois and Chartres, who had a few years earlier annexed Sancerre. The power of Blois-Champagne now threatened the Capetian rule, whose royal domain of Paris and surrounding districts was encircled by Eudes. However, with the death of Eudes in 1037, the properties of Champagne were divided among his descendants and the strength of Blois diminished.
Champagne was reunited with Blois in 1125 under Thibaut IV, who became Thibaut II (“the Great”) of Champagne in the process. He was the second most powerful man in France. Only the king held more power, and a tense rivalry developed. The conflicts that ensued, first with Louis VI and then with Louis VII, ended only when Adela of Champagne, the heir to the countship of Blois-Champagne, married Louis VII and gave birth to the future king of France, Philip Augustus (Philip II of France).
Thibaut IV of Champagne, the son of Thibaut III and Blanche of Navarre, was born after his father’s death at Troyes in 1201. During four years of his early life, he lived at the court of King Philip II, to whom he did feudal homage in 1214. After the king’s death in 1223, he pledged his support for Philip’s son Louis VII—but deserted him at the siege of Avignon in 1226. When Louis died a few months later, Thibaut aligned with a league of dissident barons who opposed the regent of France, Louis’s widow Blanche of Castile, but he soon abandoned the barons and reconciled himself with Blanche.
The most important contribution made by the counts of Champagne to the history, fame, and wealth of their region was the creation and promotion of its great trade fairs. In times of war, Champagne’s uneasy location between the Frankish and Germanic kingdoms rendered it prone to invading armies, but the counts realized they could turn this geographical burden into a hugely lucrative advantage in times of peace, because it was also the intersection of well-worn trade routes across Europe. By setting up a series of fairs offering a protected trading and financial infrastructure to rival that of any great trading city, the counts of Champagne cut in half the traveling time of every road-weary medieval merchant.
Cleverly, the counts also guaranteed that local traders would not benefit from any special privileges that the great city merchants enjoyed. The key trading centers of Europe were all at the mercy of very powerful, local trade guilds, who effectively controlled the wealth of their respective cities. They expected privileges, including discrimination against foreign merchants. Conversely, the four cities around which the Champagne fairs rotated (Bar-sur-Aube, Lagny, Provins, and Troyes) were not at the mercy of wealthy local merchants, and so it was relatively easy for the counts of Champagne to impose a level playing field for all traders. This was a huge incentive for foreign traders and, with half the distance to travel, assured the success of the Champagne fairs.
Thibaut the Great is rightly acknowledged as the founding father of Champagne’s trade fairs, but local fairs associated with saints’ days already existed not just in Champagne but all over France, and they had been prolific for centuries. They were, however, very small and short, centered on feasts and entertainment, to which local markets had become attached over time. But between 1125 and 1150, Thibaut developed a select few of these small celebrations, starting with the May fair of Provins, and built them into the great commercial fairs of Champagne by using non-discriminatory terms for traders to attract the most important merchants from Spain, Italy, England, the Low Countries, and other parts of France. Thibaut and the counts of Champagne who followed him not only ensured the same terms for all but also guaranteed the safety of those attending and introduced a dedicated judicial system that effectively policed the fairs. Inevitably, copious quantities of Champagne wine were consumed by the large influx of visitors, which enabled the vineyards to flourish as never before, spreading the fame of Champagne’s wine throughout the growing markets of Europe.
In theory, the fairs were held only six times a year. But as each fair lasted for at least six weeks, followed by a break to allow merchants to move on to the next, and with “runaway” fairs spinning off in neighboring towns, the great Champagne fairs were virtually a permanent feature.
As the fame of the (still) wines of Champagne spread, their commercial importance for Reims (spelled Rheims at this juncture, but Reims has been used throughout this text for consistency) manifested itself, and the courtiers en vins emerged. In 1323, the appointment of these wine brokers by the city’s municipal authorities was unsuccessfully opposed by the archbishop of the city, whose vested interest in local winemaking had traditionally earned him a healthy income. His resistance was doomed, because the position of the courtiers was confirmed by several royal decrees. A royal charter dated July 1412 gave the municipal authorities the sole right to appoint courtiers in Reims and expressly mentioned that Champagne wines formed the city’s prime source of trade. This charter also attempted to curb the sharp practices of courtiers who took commission from both seller and buyer.
In 1337, Edward III of England launched his assault on the French crown. This began the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), and Champagne became one of its principal battlegrounds. Charles IV of France had died leaving no male heir, and the contest opened between two rival claimants: Philip VI of Valois, Charles’s cousin, and Edward, whose mother Isabella of France was the daughter of Philip IV. Ostensibly to recover lost English possessions, Edward’s invasion of France followed almost immediately in the wake of Philip’s unopposed seizure of the French throne. King John II (“the Good”) succeeded Philip VI, his father, in 1350. After a series of English victories during which John was captured (Battle of Poitiers) and imprisoned in England (where he lived regally and even had his own court orchestra), Edward led his army on to Champagne. In 1359, Edward stormed Reims in a bid to be crowned king of France in its cathedral, but his attempt failed. However, by the Treaty of Brétigny, Edward received sovereignty over Calais and an expanded Aquitaine—almost a quarter of France—plus three million gold crowns in return for the release of John II and renouncing his claim to the French crown.
The plague returned to France in 1361, and the devastation it imposed, coupled with the laxity and incompetence of the English administration, weakened England’s grip on French territories. The Hundred Years’ War resumed, and the French succeeded in reclaiming most of Aquitaine, leaving only Calais and a thin coastal strip under firm English control.
The increasing price of Champagne wine was fueled by the trade fairs, and the coronation in Reims stimulated viticultural expansion in the second half of the 14th century. A list drawn up by Richard Picques de Besançon, Archbishop of Reims from 1376 to 1389, reveals that almost every village within a 30-kilometer radius of Reims was planted with vines.
Further expansion of Champagne’s vineyards suffered a temporary setback in the early part of the 15th century when the Hundred Years’ War with the English resumed yet again. King Henry V of England and his heirs had been declared successors to the throne of France by the Treaty of Troyes, which King Charles VI of France signed in 1420. Although Henry was the grandson of Charles VI (through his mother, Catherine of Valois), it’s unsurprising that an English king inheriting the throne of France was aggressively disputed. Further, the French king who made that decision was also known as Charles the Mad. He suffered from fits of insanity, including the belief that he was made of glass and liable to shatter. A later complication was that Henry V died just weeks before the death of Charles VI, making a two-year-old Henry VI the heir to the French throne in 1422.
Although Charles VII was excluded from succession by the Treaty of Troyes, he was recognized as king in the south of France, and bitter struggles for sovereignty continued. The tide turned for the French when, under the inspired leadership of Joan of Arc, Charles was taken to Reims to be crowned king in the cathedral in 1429. The triumphant coronation and surge of patriotic fervor that followed in its wake led a worried Duke of Bedford, the English regent in France and uncle of Henry VI of England, to call for his nephew’s own coronation on French soil.
French successes faltered, however, when Joan of Arc, failing in her attempt to wrest Paris from the English in 1430, was captured and burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431. On December 2, Henry VI was crowned king of France in Saint-Denis, Paris. But this did little to consolidate control over a country claimed but not subdued. When Duke Philip of Burgundy broke from his alliance with the English to pledge support for Charles VII at Arras in 1435, the days of English rule in France were numbered. Inspired by the martyrdom of Joan of Arc and backed by the forces of Burgundy, the French expelled the English from all of their former possessions with the exception of Calais, bringing the so-called Hundred Years’ War to a successful conclusion after 116 years.
Relative peace ensued in Champagne, although it was not until the coronation of Louis XI in 1461 that the reunified French nobility was able to express its new solidarity. The coronation at Reims was a truly grand occasion, with all the major peers and bishops throughout the realm in attendance at one of the most expensive banquets ever lavished on a French king. Barely one month later, the city’s generosity was rewarded by a special royal tax levied on its wines to fill the king’s empty coffers!
In Reims during the early 16th century, visiting heads of state were often given wines of various growths from the Montagne de Reims and the Vallée de la Marne to compare with wines from the king’s own vineyards at Aÿ. The fame of Aÿ was at its peak, and its wines were set apart from other growths; as beautifully understated by Paulmier in his treatise De vino et pomaceo (Paris, 1588), Aÿ was “the ordinary drink of kings and princes.” According to Henry Vizetelly in his History of Champagne, many nobles went to the expense of having their own special buying commissioners stationed in the village to secure the finest vintages of this royal wine.
It is also from Aÿ and from this date that the oldest surviving Champagne house can be traced. In 1531, Jean Gosset was Lord of Aÿ, and his son Claude Gosset was a vigneron. As no documentary evidence exists to establish whether Claude actually traded his wines, the House of Gosset is deemed to have commenced with Pierre Gosset, from a later generation in 1584, when the records show that he both made and sold wines.
Toward the close of the 16th century, however, Champagne harvests suffered greatly from extraordinarily bad climatic conditions. According to Jehan Pussot’s Mémorial du temps, the price of wine varied enormously: it could be sold as cheaply as the 1579 vintage, when it was merely at 5 sols 6 denier per queue (a cask of 96 gallons) and almost undrinkable, yet could peak as high as 126 sols 8 denier in 1587, when the wine was very good but scarce. The vicissitudes of climate and harvest continued into the 17th century, and Pussot goes on to record the contrast between the abundant vintage of 1604, when the vignerons were “at their wits’ end for vessels to contain their wine,” and the devastating harvest just three years later, when conditions were so poor that it “had not been known within the memory of man.” Such vacillating fortunes of harvest were to become the norm for Champagne. Perversely, this is one reason Champagne can produce exceptional sparkling wine.
Wine made accidentally sparkling due to unintentional refermentation or some other fault is of no particular interest to a wine historian. The earliest humans might have come across a bunch of grapes that had fallen into a hollow of a rocky outcrop and started to ferment in its own fizzy juice—but while that would be a remarkable find for paleoanthropologists, it would not advance winemaking history.
Many quote 1531 as the date when the Benedictine monks of Saint-Hilaire in Limoux deliberately produced a sparkling wine by a continuation of the first fermentation. If true, this would be the very first example of the méthode rurale (or ancestrale)—but it is unsubstantiated. Limoux’s cahier des charges refers to 1531 as the date when the monks wrote about their sparkling wine (now known as Blanquette de Limoux) but doesn’t identify or quote from any such document. It does quote from a 1544 document in support of the sparkling Limoux myth, yet that document provides no evidence of sparkling wines in Limoux by that time.
The first substantiated documentation of sparkling Champagne published in French is the 1718 Manière de cultiver la vigne et de faire le vin en Champagne by, it is believed, Jean Godinot. Yet more than 40 years earlier, “sparkling Champaign [sic]" was not merely known in London but so famous that Sir George Etherege felt obliged to extoll its virtues in his popular 1676 stage comedy, The Man of Mode, his last Restoration comedy.
How do we explain this time paradox?
By the mid-17th century, the English possessed the basic technology required to contain the pressure of a sparkling wine in a glass bottle (coal-fired, strong verre anglais and the hermetic seal of cork stoppers), whereas the French did not (their wood-fired glass was too weak to withstand the pressure, and cork stoppers, lost during the Roman Empire’s decline, had been replaced by wooden bungs wrapped in hemp, which hardly kept the draft out, let alone the fizz in). Not only did the English have the technology to contain the pressure of a sparkling wine, but they also had the ingenuity to concoct a means of producing sparkling wine at will via an intentional second fermentation: the world’s first liqueur de tirage. Christopher Merret presented the paper Some Observations concerning the Ordering of Wines to the Royal Society on December 17, 1662. In it, he states:
Our wine coopers of later times use vast quantities of sugar & molaffes [molasses] to all sorts of wines to make the drink brisk & sparkling & to give them spirit as also to mend their bad tastes, all of which raysins [raisins] & cute & stum perform.
All eyes go to the first use of the word sparkling in the context of wine, but it is the last clause that is key. The raysins are, of course, dried grapes and as such would hold a plentiful supply of yeast. Although 17th-century wine coopers were ignorant of both the presence and the role of yeasts (mysteries that would remain unexplained for another 200 years), they knew how to start a fermentation and keep it going. The English were inveterate improvers; at first, they probably added raisins for flavor, but they would quickly have noticed that this addition provoked a fermentation. The clincher is, however, stum perform. In today’s usage, stum usually means “muted” or “stopped,” but in 17th-century English, it meant the very opposite. Furthermore, there can be no argument over whether this was Merret’s intended usage because he defines it himself a page or so earlier, writing, “A little stum put to wine decaid [sic] makes it ferment afresh.”
Merret does not mention Champagne or any specific wine, because at the time of his observations, the English were making “all sorts of wines . . . drink brisk & sparkling.” But just 14 years later, Etherege’s use of “sparkling Champaign” indicates that Champagne had risen above the rest to become the wine of choice when making wines sparkling. There are a few who question this interpretation, claiming that “sparkling” could allude to a bright sparkle in appearance and that Merret does not actually mention bottles. However, Merret is a man of scientific statement and qualifies “sparkling” with “drink”—not “appear,” nor “look.” Furthermore, considering Merret’s observations in the context of Etherege, whose “Man of Mode” was “off to the park with sparkling Champaign,” it seems clear that Etherege was not talking about carting Champagne around the park in a barrel. Similarly, in Samuel Pepys, Volume 2: The Years of Peril (1935) based on the Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, 1662–1679, Arthur Bryant writes:
On Sundays Pepys appears to have been in the habit of attending morning services at Covent Garden Church—a short stroll up the hill from York Buildings and across the Strand—followed by a jaunt abroad in his coach; on March 14th [1679] it was to Hyde Park, “the first time this year, taking two bottles of champagne in my way.”
In a perfect world, Merret would have described the bottling. Yet the wine coopers he witnessed probably added their dosage of molasses and raisins before delivering the wine in barrels to a taverner or merchant, whose job it was to bottle and cork the wine. Historians must follow the clues, and within 14 years of Merret, we have “sparkling Champaign” and one year later “bottles of champagne.” This suggests that there was no time paradox after all: the English imported still wine from Champagne and deliberately bottled it with sugar and yeast to make it sparkling by the repeatable means of a second fermentation long before the French had either the technology or the desire to do so.
The French had little enthusiasm for the frothy, cork-popping Champagne that so excited English palates at the time. No Frenchman expressed this distaste with greater clarity than Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis (1613?–1703), the Seigneur de Saint-Évremond. A famous French soldier, gourmand, wit, and writer, Saint-Évremond was forced to flee France in 1661 after his sarcastic criticism of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s prime minister, came to light. He made his way via Holland to London, where he was warmly welcomed by Charles II. Saint-Évremond quickly set about introducing his favorite wine to the royal court, but his efforts have has been widely misconstrued. Taittinger, for example, recently established an English sparkling wine vineyard named Domaine Évremond and referenced, in explaining the new project, Saint-Évremond and his role as an ambassador for Champagne in 17th-century England. While this doesn’t specify sparkling Champagne, that is what most would take the statement to mean. However, when Saint-Évremond arrived in London, he was horrified to discover that Champagne turned fizzy after being bottled by London merchants and appalled that England’s fashionable set adored it. To Saint-Évremond, it was an aberration of the world’s greatest wine—and he would be insulted by the association today.
The transition of Champagne from a vin tranquil to vin mousseux is hard to pin down because there always were unintentional sparkling wines, with a varying degree of delicate pétillance. In the 1694 edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie and 1721 edition of Dictionnaire Universel, the word mousse is used only in the context of beer, chocolate, and soapy water, but the 1724 edition of Dictionnaire Universel saw the introduction of a new adjective: mousseux (foaming or sparkling), for a Champagne wine that made “a lot of mousse.” Dictionaries are useful and accurate tools for historians, but they do not have immediacy. It is safe to say that well before 1724, something started happening to the strength of mousse of, first, the unintentionally sparkling wines of Champagne and, second, perhaps, its intentionally sparkling wines.
It is clear from a multiplicity of 17th-century sources that as soon as cold winter temperatures set in, there were many instances in which Champagne stopped fermenting before all the sugar had been consumed, and when temperatures rose sufficiently, the fermentation would recommence. Champagne was not unique in this respect. But the further north, the earlier and colder the winter; fermentation would have prematurely stopped at the first snap of winter, only to recommence the following spring. Unintentional sparkling wine was thus more frequent in Champagne than elsewhere in France. Merchants in Champagne considered the presence of fizziness to be a fault, which technically it was. Consequently, the French had a very different approach to the unexpected phenomenon of bubbles in their wines. Rather than regard fizziness as a source of wonder, the French viewed it as a problem and tried to rid Champagne of the very quality that English wine coopers sought not just to replicate, but to increase and glorify.
Since biblical times, there has been an awareness of the fizziness caused by a “new” wine that has not fully fermented but has continued to build up its carbonic gas. Luke 5:37, for example, states in the King James translation that “no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish.” Similar texts appear in Mark 2:22 and Matthew 9:17. In 1388, John Purvey’s revised translation of the Wycliffe Bible used the term botels. Glass bottles were unknown at the time, but the concept of a botel (also the etymological origin of bottle) was originally just a small vessel. As these texts illustrate, accidentally refermented wine was not an uncommon phenomenon even in the warmest of countries.
It was not until the early 18th century that the French actually began to encourage fizziness, but even then it was a task undertaken reluctantly. French wine merchants and connoisseurs alike despised the fashion for fizzy Champagne. In a letter dated November 11, 1711, from Adam Bertin du Rocheret, a famous vineyard owner and wine merchant in Épernay, to Marshal de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, Lieutenant-General of the king’s armies (and cousin of the famed musketeer upon whom Alexandre Dumas based his novels), Bertin du Rocheret expressed his disdain. He wrote, “I have chosen three poinçons of the best wine of Pierry at 400 francs the queue, not to be drawn off as mousseux—that would be too great a pity.” On October 18, 1713, he told d’Artagnan that mousseux was “a poor wine” and clearly understood the unintentional reason why a Champagne might be sparkling when he declared that “good Champagne . . . should flatter the palate, which mousseux never does as it smells of fermentation; hence it is only mousseux because it is working.” This follows the appearance of vins pour mousser in the account books of Champagne merchants from 1710 onward.
Initially, wines best suited to mousseux were young, green, and light. They were considered inferior and sold at lower prices than non-mousseux. But word spread in the mid-18th century, and the fashion for mousseux pushed up prices. Wines of the montagne were seldom if ever deemed suitable for mousseux at this time, and some good-to-middling wines were sold as suitable for both mousseux and non-mousseux.
More often than not, Champagne would be sold in cask and delivered with bottles, cork stoppers, and instructions to draw off the wine in January, February, or March for mousseux, or left in cask until the following August for non-mousseux. Despite a fiscal order issued on February 15, 1676, that made it illegal to transport Champagne in bottles, commercial documentation belonging to merchants like Bertin du Rocheret and certain monastic vineyards such as Hautvillers and Pierry indicate that they frequently shipped in bottle. According to Jean-Luc Barbier of the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), the number of bottles shipped, both mousseux and non-mousseux, increased from “a few thousand” in 1685 to “several tens of thousands” by 1725. Although the sparkle in early mousseux wines was weak and variable, French wood-fired glass was so delicate that even non-mousseux wines were prone to breakages when transported in bottle—and the customer always paid. The records of Dom Pérignon show that he charged his clients for the number of bottles sent, not delivered, and that breakages were often as high as 60%. (Note that Dom Pérignon didn’t invent Champagne, as popular myths suggest, but he did play an important role in its early development.)
Producers were able to increase the pressure of their wines when verre anglais became available at some point in the early 18th century. The first mention of verre anglais production in Europe was in 1680 by a glassworks called Bonhomme in Liège, not far from the northern border of Champagne, but there is no evidence of trade with Champagne. Though today Saint-Gobain has a near-monopoly of wine bottle production, when it moved in 1692 from Paris (where it was founded) to the village of Saint-Gobain in Picardy, it produced Venetian-style mirrored glass sheets, not bottles. However, many verriers inhabited the dense forest of Argonne, and most supplied Champagne with bottles beginning in the 17th century. Many historians believe that at least one of these began to produce verre anglais bottles in the early 18th century, but no evidence has been discovered.
English vintners were bottling all sorts of wines in long-necked glass bottles since the late 16th century. They were much thicker than French bottles of the same time and therefore could be laid flat and stood up to storage. But they were still wood-fired. The switch to coal was the crucial first step in producing stronger glass.
If one person must be singled out as the hero of superior English glass technology in the 17th century, it is Admiral Sir Robert Mansell (1573–1656). Fearing that the decimation of forests would jeopardize British shipbuilding, he convinced King James I to issue a royal proclamation in 1615 banning glass furnaces fired with wood. Yet navy concerns were perhaps not Mansell’s only interest. He had been involved in glassmaking since 1604, and when he retired in 1617, he built a new glassworks, then in 1623 obtained a patent from the king granting him a monopoly for all coal-fired glassware. Nevertheless, but for Mansell, the all-important switch from wood to coal would not have occurred so quickly or at such a precocious date.
Around 1630, Mansell also invented a reinforced bottle glass, which became known as verre anglais. Along with the hotter temperature of coal-fired furnaces, iron and manganese impurities in coal made glass more robust. Mansell added more iron to color the glass green, inadvertently making toughened glass. He added iron and manganese for a deep amber or brownish-black color, strengthening the product further.
Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) is generally credited with the invention of bottle glass circa 1632 and with producing the first wine bottle with a “string lip” or “string rim,” under which string securing a cork was tied. Digby’s improvements are unknown, but his bottles were likely even stronger than Mansell’s.
By 1725, there was a great deal of Champagne shipped in bottle. The decree of the Council of State on May 25, 1728, revoked the ban on transporting Champagne in bottle, allowing shipping in basketed quantities of 50 or 100 bottles. This opened up the trade of Champagne production beyond the privileged few who had managed to evade the shipping ban in the past. Champagne could finally evolve as an industry and it did—starting the very next year with the foundation of Ruinart, the first Champagne house. Then followed Chanoine in 1730, Fourneaux (now Taittinger) in 1734, Moët in 1743, Vander-Veken (now Abelé) in 1757, Delamotte (a heritage claimed by both Delamotte and Lanson) in 1760, Dubois (now Roederer) in 1770, Heidsieck (now three, technically four, separate Heidsieck brands) in 1785, and finally Jacquesson in 1798.
Many of the Champagne houses at this time were established as a direct result of the Reims textile trade. This city once possessed possibly the most important wool manufacturing industry in France, and the great textile barons took advantage of the rising reputation of Champagne by giving bottles away to their best customers. In some cases, customers would demand more Champagne than wool, which encouraged some of the sharpest businessmen to diversify into this lucrative new commerce.
Although these early Champagne producers bottled their wines before the first fermentation had finished, they were faced with a demand for more fully sparkling wines and soon began adding sugar to lengthen their single fermentation. Unfortunately, none of the French verriers who supplied the emerging Champagne industry could match the consistency of strength of glass produced in England at that time, although they claimed to be able to make verre anglais. This resulted in very high levels of breakage, averaging 50% in the first few years. By 1735, a royal decree was required to establish quality criteria for the production of Champagne bottles, including their shape, size, and weight; the size of cork used; and how that cork should be secured to the collar of the bottle. This decree, however, did not affect the design of furnace used by the French, which was too inefficient (requiring 25% more fuel than English glassmaking furnaces) and failed to achieve sufficiently high temperatures, even when using coal. This technological failing combined with a continued increase in the amount of sugar added to the one and only first fermentation inflicted even higher levels of breakage, with one producer in 1746 complaining that out of 6,000 bottles of Champagne he had bottled that year, only 120 survived.
It can be imagined that “English Champagne” died out as French verre anglais improved and increasing imports of the real thing took its place. It should be noted, however, that the “real thing” was not méthode champenoise but the product of a single fermentation, the so-called méthode rurale. Most Champagnes were not the product of a true second fermentation until the mid-19th century, and there was at least one grande marque house, Laurent-Perrier, that proudly advertised the virtues of a single-fermentation Champagne (Grand Vin Sans Sucre) as late as 1889.
In the 19th century, the business of Champagne was far more ordered than it had been in the previous century, when it had merely been noted that the sweeter the wine when bottled, the stronger the mousse. At the beginning of the 19th century, a number of famous producers had established a brand identity that had required a consistency in how they produced sparkling Champagne wine. In 1837, Jean-Baptiste François articulated how that could be achieved in his Traité sur le Travail des Vins Blancs Mousseux.
François listed six conditions required for the successful production of Champagne mousseux:
Les trois conditions principales sont la présence: 1° du ferment, 2° du sucre, dans des proportions voulues et fixes, 3° d'une chaleur déterminée. Les trois conditions accessoires, consistent dans l’emploi: 1° de l’alcool ou de l’eau-de-vie, 2° du tannin, dans des quantités variables; 3° enfin, d’un commencement de fermentation avant la mise en bouteilles.
This is the earliest evidence of a rudimentary liqueur de tirage in a publicly available French document. François does not mention the liqueur de tirage by name; that term was first coined by Edme Jules Maumené in Indications théoriques et pratiques sur le travail des vins et en particulier sur celui des vins mousseux (1858). Instead, François called it the liqueur à vin. Although he did not know that yeast were responsible for fermentation, his recipe called for the use of ferment, which is the yeast-rich froth on top of a fermenting wine, to be introduced just before bottling. (As early as 1828, Lenoir wrote that “no alcoholic fermentation can take place without the presence of the ferment.”) François stated that “wines contain ferment in different proportions according to the exposure and the locality from which they come, or according to whether the year was more or less warm . . . the quantity of ferment is in direct proportion to the presence of tartaric acid.” Although François had studied the process of fermentation in detail over many years, he studied it as a chemical action, not a biochemical process and therefore could not understand what caused such fluctuations. He found them “inexplicable,” and yet as soon as the role of yeast was known, these fluctuations would be as understandable as they were inevitable. It was in 1857 that Louis Pasteur famously discovered that alcoholic fermentation was a result of yeast activity. Just one year later, Maumené peppered the aforementioned work with references about both Pasteur and yeast. Nonetheless, pure yeast was itemized as a measured ingredient of the liqueur de tirage until 1929 (Jules Weinmann, Manuel duTravail des Vins Mousseux).
François recommended a temperature of 12 degrees on the Réaumur scale (15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit) for the fermentation in bottle. Although he sensibly advised that the wine should have commenced fermentation prior to bottling, this was of secondary importance. Additionally, François stated that the wine should be fined and racked before bottling. These last two recommendations might account for the element of chance that persisted in Champagne production into the mid-1800s.
Veuve Clicquot has kept its livres de tirage (bottling log books), containing details of the blends, from the harvests since 1810. Generally, the wines were fined in January and February, racked in March, and bottled during the months of April and May, although in a few years, the bottling took place as late as June. In all of the blends, a marc de tirage from the previous year was added. Until the 1820s, each blend contained a liqueur, although what this contained was never specified. But the use of this word in Champagne in the 18th and 19th centuries suggests any liqueur would have a very high sugar content. Vin vieux (old wine) was sometimes added to the blend.
From 1822, the books note the liqueur was half spirit and half wine and was added at racking. Further, all 19th-century wines from this date were dosed with one-tenth old wine liqueur. In 1830, after fining and racking, a half-bottle of wine spirit was added to each pièce (traditional Champagne barrel). At bottling, each bottle was dosed with one-fiftieth of liqueur—an indication, perhaps, that Clicquot had learned the wine should be fined and racked before adding the liqueur, not after.
In the extensive private archives of some of the famous Champagne houses that existed at the beginning of the 19th century, there are even earlier references to the use of a liqueur de tirage in the French language. One such example is Veuve Clicquot, whose records of using liqueur de tirage date to the 1820s.
The 19th century was a period of great invention and innovation for Champagne. In particular, it saw the emergence of two practices that enabled Champagne to rise above the méthode rurale and claim the designation méthode champenoise: the liqueur de tirage, an addition of sugar and yeast at the time of bottling to promote and guarantee a second fermentation, and dégorgement (disgorgement), the act of removing sediment from the bottle after the second fermentation. Without these two crucial procedures, Champagne would not be the classic product it is today. And yet, the precise dates when these two practices first occurred are unknown, and historians have not identified any particular person responsible for either innovation. Veuve Clicquot’s recorded use of liqueur and ferment, for example, are before the first documented mention of this practice by a leading chemist. This is likely an indication of what was going on at the best great houses of the time.
The addition of a bottling liqueur probably evolved during or following the 18th-century habit of adding sugar and other ingredients to sweeten up and flavor Champagne—for drinking purposes, not fermentation. When verre anglais became available and the French actively began encouraging bubbles, rather than trying to eliminate them, it is reasonable to assume that some producers realized that the sweeter the wine before bottling, the more impressive the fizz. When no bubbles formed and the wines remained as sweet as they were when bottled, someone decided to add ferment, resulting in a crude liqueur de tirage.
The creation of a rudimentary liqueur de tirage had been a leap of intuition for the English, but it was a slow, evolutionary process full of uncertainty for the French. In 1801, Jean-Antoine Chaptal explained how the addition of sugar to fermenting grape juice raises a wine’s potential alcohol in his Traité théorique sur la culture de la vigne, avec l’art de faire le vin. But this was apparently of little help, as evidenced by Jean-Alexandre Cavoleau, who wrote more than a quarter of a century later in Oenologie française:
Wines bottled to be sparkling do not all form bubbles in the same way. There are some in which the bubbles can be seen almost immediately after two weeks in the bottle; others take several months; some require a change of temperature and these are brought back up from the cellar; some wait for the increase in the sap in August; others start just when everyone has given up waiting for them; and finally there are those that must be poured back into barrels the following year and mixed with some wine from the new harvest, which has the characteristic of being particularly sparkling, such as that made from the white grapes of the Côte d’Avize. The sparkling nature of the wine of Champagne, its initiation and its various other aspects, might be compared to an elusive deity, pursued by the most experienced merchants and vineyard owners.
Most sparkling Champagne in the 19th century was sweet to one degree or another. But until the 1920s, there was not an established regime of dosage for Champagne. Instead of brut, sec, demi-sec, and so on, different markets determined dosage. According to Henri Vizetelly, those destined for the Russian market were the sweetest of all and contained between 200 and 300 grams per liter of residual sugar, which is roughly twice as sweet as Château d’Yquem! The second sweetest markets were France and Germany. Their Champagne was sealed with corks branded “Goût Français” and carried a dosage between 165 and 200 grams. The American market was the third sweetest, and corks branded “Goût Américain” contained between 110 and 165 grams. Although the English market demanded the driest Champagne, with almost every house exporting truly dry Champagne since the 1865 vintage, most brut Champagne had 10 to 30 grams per liter of residual sugar in those days, and the proportion of such Champagne was minuscule. The vast majority of the “drier” Champagne shipped to Britain contained between 22 and 66 grams. By the late 1880s, the brut style accounted for only 5% of total Champagne sales globally. Even in Britain, just 15% of the Champagne sold claimed to be brut at the turn of the century, 25% in the 1920s, and 40% in the early 1940s. This dropped back to 25% in the late 1940s, and it was not until the early 1970s that brut Champagne actually began to dominate the market. Now, of course, the styles have completely reversed, with 92% of all Champagne sold as brut.
It was not until 1836, when Alexis-Antoin Cadet de Vaux invented a simple device called the gleuco-oenomètre and Jean-Baptiste François published his “Réduction François” (in Nouvelles observations sur la fermentation du vin en bouteilles, suivies d’un procédé pour reconnaître la quantité de sucre contenue dans le vin immédiatement avant le tirage), that accurate sugar measurements became possible. Ironically, most Champagne producers ignored the gleuco-oenomètre, whereas it was promptly snapped up in Germany, where Georg Christian, a former employee of Veuve Clicquot, used this new tool to build a powerful Sekt industry. Disgorgement of a sort happened in the 18th century, but it was haphazard. It was not until remuage was developed in 1818 that a truly effective disgorgement was possible, and that did not leak out to the wider industry until 1822. It was therefore from 1818 to 1822 that Champagne attained the potential for a robust méthode champenoise. Yet we will never be able to pinpoint its first use and, of course, some producers were still using a single fermentation at that time. It was not until 1836 that the gleuco-oenomètre was available to calibrate and refine the repeatability of the process. That many Champagne producers failed to grasp this opportunity can be discerned from the words of Armand Maizière, who as late as 1848 felt compelled to ask in his Origine et développement du commerce du vin de Champagne, “When will we understand, not by chance and without loss, the art of obtaining a great sparkling wine?”
After Madame Clicquot devised the remuage process, there were numerous 19th-century innovations, including the development of a bottle-filling machine, a corking machine, wire cages to replace string ficelage, a dosage machine, metal plaques, agrafes, and the pupitre. These devices put Champagne on a more industrial footing, increasing output by about five million bottles every 15 years. With increasing demand from the nouveau riche, production was destined to reach 30 million bottles by the end of the century, but one obstacle stood in the way: disgorgement. The à la volée method had been okay for a cottage industry run by wool merchants who regarded Champagne as ancillary to their primary textile business, but it was totally inadequate for the enormous quantities of Champagne demanded by global markets toward the end of the 19th century. What was needed was a new system able to cope with far greater capacity levels at a significantly higher speed. Fortunately, that came along in the form of the à la glace (freezing) method, invented by Armand Walfard in 1884.
Walfard’s system is still in use, though fully automated, today. In the à la glace method, the bottle is inverted after remuage, and its neck is held in a freezing brine that adheres the wine and sediment to the base of what then was a cork but is now invariably a crown cap (matched with a plastic stopper). The sediment is not frozen in a block of ice; rather, it is more like a semi-frozen slush held in place by a thin cone of wine frozen slightly harder to the inner surface of the upper neck. This allows the dégorgeur to re-invert the bottle without disturbing the sediment. When the agrafe is removed, the cork is forced out of the bottle by the internal pressure, carrying with it the slush-like sediment, while the rest of the wine remains in the bottle. Due to the freezing brine, the wine is at a much lower temperature than normal and the gas is reluctant to escape. Hence there should be no spray of foam, and the bottle may be topped up and recorked with minimal loss of pressure.
All of these developments were the minutiae through which an intrinsically superior sparkling wine was perfected. But without a raw product of unique potential, there would have been nothing to refine. Without the grapes of Champagne, the viticulturally begrudging climate, and the precise elevation found in the Montagne de Reims, the Vallée de la Marne, and the Côte des Blancs, there would be no great sparkling wine called Champagne.
By the mid-19th century, competition between the most famous brands was fierce. This culminated in a very public spat between the two largest brands, Jacquesson and Moët, over the number of sales, price, quality, and origin of their respective claims. Each house took out full-page advertorials in the magazine Le Charivari to knock each other and respond to claims. By the 1880s, however, the trade realized that sparkling wine from producers outside the region, not just in France but also other countries, was a much greater risk and began working together.
On September 19, 1882, at a special session of the Société Industrielle de Reims, Heidsieck & Co., G. H. Mumm & Co., and Giesler & Co. called for the formation of a syndicat (syndicate or union) to defend the name, honor, and origin of Champagne, a motion that was unanimously adopted. This was the earliest formalized defense of an appellation, and the first meeting took place on November 4, 1882, with 27 houses represented. Yet the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne recognized that it stood not just for those houses but for the rights of the entire trade. This was soon put to the test when in 1883 the Syndicat took collective action against German producers of fraudulent Deutz & Geldermann and Veuve Cliocquot-Ponsardin [sic]. The Syndicat very quickly established a reputation for acting firmly, swiftly, and in any country in defense of Champagne. On March 21, 1884, a law was passed establishing the legal existence of the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne, comprising 61 houses.
In 1887, the Syndicat took legal proceedings against a group of Loire producers for marketing their sparkling wines as Champagne. The court in the Loire ruled in favor of the Syndicat, stating, “Henceforth the term Champagne shall refer exclusively to wine produced in and sourced from the ancient province of Champagne, an area with specific boundaries that shall neither be extended nor contracted.” In 1890, the Syndicat played an instrumental part at the Convention of Madrid, which saw the first international agreement for a legal framework to protect appellations of origin.
Throughout the Syndicat’s first two or three decades of existence, however, membership declined. In 1912, a second, alternative organization was formed called the Syndicat des Négociants en Vins de Champagne. Those remaining in the original Syndicat took the view that they comprised the elite of the trade, and by protecting the elite, they believed they would achieve the best possible image for Champagne. The houses that established the breakaway organization were less illustrious in name and felt there was little to be gained from any organization run by the elite for the elite, and they grouped together for their own benefit.
On May 11, 1945, a merger of convenience took place between the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne and the Syndicat des Négociants en Vins de Champagne under the auspices of the Union des Syndicats du Commerce des Vins de Champagne—now known simply as the Union des Maisons de Champagne, or UMC. Both Syndicats retained their separate titles, policies, and regulations and continued to look after their own interests, but the Union provided a cooperating and coordinating organization that could enable all négociant houses in the trade to be represented should the need arise.
If the houses belonging to the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne took the view that they comprised the elite in the 19th century, they went one step further in 1964 when they immodestly declared themselves to be the Syndicat de Grandes Marques de Champagne. At that time, the membership included Ayala, Billecart-Salmon, Bollinger, Veuve Clicquot, Delbeck, Deutz, Heidsieck & Co. Monopole, Charles Heidsieck, Irroy, Krug, Lanson, Massé, Moët & Chandon, Montebello, Mumm, Perrier-Jouët, Joseph Perrier, Piper-Heidsieck, Pol Roger, Pommery, Prieur (Napoléon), Roederer, Ruinart, Salon, and Taittinger. Five new members were elected: Canard-Duchêne and Henriot (because they were taken over by Veuve Clicquot), Mercier (because it was taken over by Moët), Laurent-Perrier, and Gosset. Just how “great” some of these names were was already in doubt by the 1960s and rightly so: within less than 20 years, once-famous names like Irroy, Massé, and Montebello would be no more than sous-marques (sub-brands), while Delbeck and Prieur quickly headed for obscurity. Twelve of these houses also belonged to the Champagne Shippers’ Association, a sort of old boys’ club that sponsored young men in the British wine trade to spend a couple of weeks going from house to house to learn about Champagne. One thing they did not learn was that the official membership of the Syndicat de Grandes Marques de Champagne totaled 25 to 30 brands. Consequently, as these lucky few distilled their newfound knowledge back into the trade, the idea emerged that there were only 12 grandes marques. This suggestion used to so annoy Claude Taittinger (whose house was not a member of the association at the time) that he threatened to sue on more than one occasion.
In 1997, the Syndicat de Grandes Marques de Champagne disbanded itself. This was a direct result of a poll published in the 1991 Champagne supplement for Wine & Spirit International magazine in the UK. Every grande marque house was asked whether being a member of the Syndicat was or should be a declaration of superior quality and, if so, whether there should be some sort of quality criteria that members abide by. They were also asked whether the Syndicat should be opened up to any producer, regardless of status (only houses belonged at the time). Bollinger was almost alone in answering affirmatively to all questions. Christian Bizot, then head of Bollinger, was so ashamed of his colleagues that he declared he felt he had “more in common with the growers than the négoce” and seriously considered resigning from the Syndicat. In 1991, the Syndicat had elected a new chairman, Jean-Claude Rouzaud of Roederer, who promised a rebirth with “quality criteria and more open membership” or he would resign. As an interim move to circumvent the lack of quality criteria, the Syndicat renamed itself the Club des Grandes Marques in 1993 and cut formal links with the UMC, although each individual house remained a member. Members of the Club agreed to exhaustive audits of their procedures and processes. Eventually, it became clear that even some of the very highest quality Champagne houses simply did not have the financial, administrative, or technological resources required to guarantee the minimum level of quality criteria that Rouzaud wished to set. In 1997, therefore, Rouzaud not only resigned but also disbanded the 24 grandes marques.
Since 1994, the UMC has been the solitary legal union of négociant houses in Champagne. However, of the 299 Champagne houses, the UMC is comprised of some 100 members, no less than 75 of which claim grande marque status under the UMC’s 10-point criteria.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, many houses hired Germans, renowned for their lingual and business prowess, to sell Champagne abroad and to handle bookkeeping and other clerical tasks. Further, many members of the French aristocracy considered commerce too lowly to have their family name connected with a business, and used others, often Germans, to act as front men. These employees’ thoroughness, however, was such that they soon knew more about the business than the owners did. They conducted confidential correspondence with customers, built up contacts in all the major foreign markets, and learned the “secrets” of Champagne making. Many ended up running the firms they were employed by and eventually came to own them. Others left to start their own companies. Thus from humble clerks to captains of industry, they established a plethora of Germanic-sounding Champagne houses. Here are a few notable examples:
In 1882, celebrated British journalist Henry Vizetelly noted in his book A History of Champagne, “We cannot open a railway, launch a vessel, inaugurate a public edifice, start a newspaper, entertain a distinguished foreigner, invite a leading politician to favour us with his views on things in general, celebrate an anniversary, or specially appeal on behalf of a benevolent institution without a banquet, and hence without the aid of champagne, which, at the present day, is the obligatory adjunct of all such repasts.”
Champagne’s reputation for luxury and celebration can be traced back to the nouveau riche society of the 1890s and 1900s, the Belle Époque. The latter end of the Industrial Revolution had created a new class of conspicuous wealth, composed of those who loved to travel and relished dining out in public. Wherever they went, this new moneyed class demanded higher and more luxurious levels of service. Thus, the late 19th century saw the dawning of lavish new hotels and restaurants such as the Savoy (1890) and the Ritz (1898). For centuries, the fashion for Champagne had vied with that of Burgundy, its prime vinous opponent, so it was only by chance that Champagne happened to be in vogue in the 1870s, when the nouveaux riches began their inexorable rise and Champagne became their wine of choice, quickly making it the most chic drink in London, Paris, and New York.
Patronage by the rich, powerful, and famous gave Champagne the aura of a luxury product, and the constant toasting of business successes by these people soon made it the ultimate celebratory drink. In the decades prior to 1870, annual Champagne sales averaged less than 10 million bottles, but during the rise of the nouveau riche this increased to more than 20 million. The decades on either side of 1900 found new Champagne drinkers amongst the rapidly swelling ranks of the ambitious middle classes. The average annual sales of Champagne rose to 32 million bottles, culminating in 1910 when almost 40 million bottles were sold.
The Champagne appellation riots started out with the formation of another syndicat or, more accurately, a union of syndicats. The Fédération des Syndicats de la Champagne was founded in 1904 by growers of the Marne as an alliance against the Champagne houses buying grapes from such faraway places as the Midi. In the absence of any action by the government to stop this practice, this syndicat established various protectionist rules (which were later used as the framework for Champagne’s 1927 designation as an appellation, adopted by the Comité National des appellations d'origine, now INAO, in 1936). Eventually, the government conceded that the production area must be legally delimited to protect the quality of Champagne’s grapes, safeguard the traditional areas permitted to grow them, and guarantee the future integrity of the appellation. However, because of the continuing antagonism between growers in the Marne département (which encompasses the classic areas of the Montagne de Reims, Vallée de la Marne, and Côte des Blancs) and those of the Aube (the region south of Troyes), the government decided to dodge the issue of precise boundaries.
Aube wines had long been used by several Champagne houses, albeit quietly. But with no boundaries to the region fixed, the practice began to increase, and fears were expressed that wines from the Midi would soon find their way back into Champenois cellars. The rivalry grew acute, with the houses splitting into two camps. Those who openly used Aube wines argued that the Aube was not only part of the historic province of Champagne but that its chief town, Troyes, was actually the ancient provincial capital and once the seat of the counts of Champagne. What right, they demanded, had one part of Champagne to exclude another from using its own name? The Marne camp maintained that it would be ridiculous to include every hectare of the ancient province for purely historical reasons with no consideration for soil, aspect, or other factors contributing to the quality of wine. Furthermore, such an area would cover one-twentieth of France, stretching into Chablis, parts of the Loire, and even Belgium. Both arguments were correct, yet totally incompatible.
The government finally gave way and, on December 17, 1908, passed a bill that restricted the term Champagne to certain named communes in the Marne and Aisne départements only. This pleased the Marne growers, since the government had not ratified the Aube’s claim to be part of Champagne. Strangely, it also satisfied most Aube growers. Though they disliked being denied their heritage, the law was not enforced. They were content to refrain from pressing the point for fear that it might be and thought it better to settle for a covert continuation of business than to demand recognition.
But when growers in the Marne realized that some houses were still doing business as usual with the Aube, they became disenchanted with the 1908 law. To make matters worse, most of them were mortgaged to the hilt after the bad harvests of 1907 through 1910, while growers in the milder climes of the Aube were growing rich selling to Marne houses. Disquiet grew. On February 11, 1911, the French government brought in tougher laws specifically restricting the use of Aube grapes in the production of Champagne.
While a sigh of relief was heard in the Marne, the Aubois were indignant. When the government voiced its determination to enforce the new laws, more than 8,000 Aube growers marched through the streets of Bar-sur-Aube carrying grape harvesting baskets full of tax forms, which they ceremoniously set on fire. Everyone joined in the protest, from mayors to priests. In 36 towns throughout the Aube, an effigy of Prime Minister Monis was burned, while the town bands played and all 36 mayors resigned.
Such was the dismay of the ever-appeasing Monis government that it panicked and hastily announced its intention to annul the laws of 1908 and 1911, pitifully declaring it was “abandoning the territorial delimitations that may provoke divisions among Frenchmen.” This placated the Aubois, of course, but the Marne erupted. On the afternoon of April 11, as news of the impending annulment leaked out, growers and their supporters began to group, bugles and horns eerily sounded, and the protesters-turned-mob wreaked their vengeance on the cellars and premises of offending houses (and some innocent ones, too). It was just before dusk that day that the storm broke over the little townships north of Épernay: first the cellars and premises of producers in Dizy were sacked, then those in Damery. By the time protesters reached Aÿ, they were 10,000-strong.
The intention was to descend on Épernay, where the greatest concentration of houses were located, but a squadron of cavalry barred the protesters’ way. It was just a small contingent of a much larger military force that the Monis government had dispatched to Champagne with the strict order that Épernay had to be protected at all costs. Some 40,000 cavalry, dragoons, and infantry poured into the town. The squadron maintaining the barricade outside Aÿ numbered only 120, and although strategically placed to hold back the rioters in Aÿ, it was of insufficient size to prevent the mob from sacking and burning the premises of Ayala, Bissinger, and Deutz. According to Cyril Ray in his penetrating profile Bollinger (1971), just one house was spared, and he records that 15 years after the riots, Madame Bollinger overheard a passerby outside one of her windows say, “That’s the Bollinger house, you know: we didn’t touch it during the riots here—as a matter of fact, we lowered our flag to it when we passed!” To which Madame is supposed to have commented with pleased irony, “Probably the red flag!”
In the immediate aftermath of the rioting, the growers tried to excuse their actions by claiming that only houses that had blended wines from the Midi had been attacked, but there was no evidence of this, and even houses that were known to buy exclusively from the classic areas of Champagne had been hit. It was said that rioting was in the air, and certainly a bizarre character called Bolo Pasha, who was later shot as a German spy, was spotted egging on both sides. To this day, no one knows the precise reason for Bolo Pasha’s high profile in the Champagne riots. A fraudster, blackmailer, white slave trader, and bigamist, he was officially running some sort of “pure food” campaign, but he could have been acting for the Germans, who were trying to destabilize France, or simply representing the German-founded Champagne firms.
The Monis government had been guilty of foolish panic and the Marne growers of mob violence. One of the last acts of the short-lived Monis government was to draft a new bill recognizing both the Marne and the Aube, but as two distinct districts. The classic area of the Marne would be called Champagne, while the Aube and those districts of the Marne excluded by the 1908 decree would be known as the Champagne Deuxième Zone. Both sides seemed happy with this. Although it is unlikely that a two-tier classification could have worked in the long term, it sufficed while those involved realized just how close to civil war they had come. It was still being debated in the Senate when war broke out three years later. After the war, the French government was more cunning and dumped the entire issue of Aube wines into the lap of the judiciary. After six years of litigation, the courts decided in favor of the Aube, and in 1927, a new law quashed the deuxième designation once and for all.
Most people have heard of the first Battle of the Marne, but it is surprising how few realize that it was fought in the Champagne region—although that was never meant to be. According to the Schlieffen Plan, the Germans were supposed to roll through Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg unopposed. They aimed to drive a strong line of attack west and south of Paris before the British could come to the aid of France, and to capture the capital while the main thrust of the invasion encircled the French army in one brilliant move. Time was of the essence: Russia was expected to mobilize its forces within six weeks of any action against its ally, so Germany had to defeat France within that period of time to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. As soon as the French had surrendered, the Germans could move their armies east using the new modern railway infrastructure.
However, as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once famously stated, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ironically, it was his nephew, Moltke the Younger, Germany’s Chief of Staff in 1914, who discovered just how prophetic his uncle was; when given the order to invade, the Russian army was already mobilized. Consequently, he dispatched his 8th Army, numbering 180,000, east to protect the Austro-Hungarian flank and was left with a weakened invasion force that was just 70% of the size Schlieffen had deemed necessary to execute his audacious plan. To compensate, Moltke sacrificed the western prong to concentrate on the French army. But this was not the only part of the battle plan that went wrong. Belgium was no pushover, forcing the Germans to fight their way through that country. Once they had done so, the British were supporting French troops.
On September 3, 1914, just as German forces entered Reims after their month-long advance, the invasion began to falter. With the 8th Army in the mix and a western sweep around Paris, the odds were that the Schlieffen Plan would have worked, even with the additional burden of fighting through Belgium, but without the 8th Army, the German push was unable to maintain its momentum. Although this gave the French time to regroup, they had to act fast. The Seine was the last river to cross before the soft southern underbelly of Paris was exposed to any invading army coming from the northeast, and the stalled German forces were perilously close to taking it. It became strategically imperative for the French not merely to push the Germans back from such close proximity to the Seine, but back over the river before that, the Marne, and to establish their own forces on the north bank of that river. So, with Paris still in French hands, troops were rushed from that region by all means at hand, including 800 Parisian taxis that made multiple return trips. The first Battle of the Marne began on September 5, and by September 13, the French had liberated Épernay and Reims. It was an Allied victory of seminal importance, but it resulted in a stalemate that set the tone for the next four bloody years of trench warfare, when the lines barely moved 100 meters in either direction.
There followed one of the most grueling and protracted periods of warfare in human history, overseen by General Gouraud, who commanded the French 4th Army from his observation post in the forest above Verzy. Called Mont Sinaï by Allied soldiers, a name that has stuck to this day, it offered Gouraud an uninterrupted vista of the battleground for several kilometers around.
On the hill opposite Hostellerie La Briqueterie in Vinay is the church of Chavot-Concourt. There is nothing unusual about this church. It is picturesque, especially when lit up at night, but it is just a typical 11th-century church surrounded by vineyards. On the headstones in its small but immaculately maintained graveyard are the names of entire families that were wiped out, often on the same day, during World War I. Sadly, there is nothing unusual about that either. During the First Battle of the Marne, 80,000 French soldiers died from September 5 to 12. The Germans lost 68,000 and the British 13,000. Chavot-Concourt and other churches throughout the region record other deaths, the so-called collateral damage, which rarely get a mention. More than 340,000 French civilians were killed during the First World War.
By September 21, the grapes in Champagne were ready to be harvested, and attempting to collect grapes from the most exposed vineyards cost lives. Children volunteered. With their fathers fighting, this was something they could do to help their mothers and grandparents, who had been left to cope in their absence. At the beginning, it was a bit of fun to squeeze perpendicularly through vines and bring back the grapes without exposing themselves at the end of rows. But by October 11, the last accessible grapes had been picked, and more than 20 children had been killed by sniper fire and indiscriminate shelling.
We should never drink the 1914 without thinking about les petits enfants, but we should always drink it whenever and if ever we get the opportunity, to appreciate their sacrifice. It is one of the greatest and longest-lived vintages of the 20th century. Bollinger 1914 reserve wine stored in magnum with just a few grams of sugar to create a protective pétillance is extraordinary; it is fresher and retains more fizz than some of the surviving fully mousseux Champagnes from other houses. Pol Roger 1914 is another vinous miracle. All the existing stock of this Champagne was disgorged for a party hosted by Sir Winston Churchill at the British Embassy in 1944 to celebrate the liberation of Paris. Such a late-disgorged Champagne should have keeled over by the 1960s, but it was still in amazingly fresh condition the last time I tasted it. Only one 1914 was released directly from its cellars, and that is Moët & Chandon. Beware any bottle with the original bottling label because it will be dead, but if you know the provenance of any 1914 with the new “chalked” Vintage Collection label, be assured that every bottle I have tasted has been in extraordinary condition. This is one of the greatest living Champagnes, with a powerful and emotional story. The reason for the extraordinary consistency is the vast number of bottles that Moët & Chandon discarded when opening up almost their entire stock to find the very best bottles for their 100th anniversary release.
— Tom Stevenson
When WWI ended, almost 40% of Champagne’s vineyards had been destroyed. Yet wine was produced every year. The houses were then, as now, almost equally split between Épernay and Reims, and although the Germans evacuated their troops from Reims on September 13, 1914, they did not retreat far. From the hills, their artillery poured a relentless rain of shells onto the city. Having occupied Reims themselves, they knew all the highest observation locations, so those potential perches for the French were the first to go. Within a few months, not much was left standing apart from the bare bones of the famous cathedral and a few dozen houses. The rest of the city had been reduced to rubble. Yet not only did life continue, but so did the business of making Champagne. There is a whole different city beneath Reims in its cellars and crayères, and the surviving population retreated there. At Champagne Ruinart, which boasts such spectacular crayères that they are classified as a National Historic Monument and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, all of the above-ground buildings had been destroyed, but André Ruinart continued to conduct the firm’s affairs from one of the crayères. When further shelling damaged a water main, flooding this temporary accommodation, he simply lashed the office furniture to a wooden platform, and it was business as usual from a raft floating around a massive gallery 25 meters beneath the ground.
There were only 21 years between the two World Wars, but much happened during this time, from the collapse of world markets to the rigors of phylloxera to the rush of the Roaring Twenties, the despair of Depression, and the perplexities of Prohibition.
Collapse of World Markets
In October 1917, while the attention of France—and particularly of Champagne—focused on the progress of the battles on the Western Front, Russia rose in revolution. This had an immediate and considerable financial impact on the Champagne trade. Suddenly, 10% of the annual production had no market, as it had until then been consumed by Russia’s royal and aristocratic circles. Predictably, the revolutionary government refused to pay any outstanding bills their former masters had run up, so not only did the Champagne trade lose future sales to a formerly important market, but it suffered a loss on previous sales, which would never be recouped. If it was bad for the Champagne industry generally, it was a near disaster for houses like Roederer, whose main market was Russia.
After the Allied victory in 1918, Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were also bankrupt and unable to make significant purchases for a very long time. On January 20, 1920, Champagne’s dwindling sales took another plunge, when the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, initiating Prohibition. Nonetheless, bootleggers still managed to smuggle in substantial consignments. Prohibition was also imposed in various degrees in Canada and the formerly prosperous Scandinavian market, which further depressed Champagne sales. The one strong and steady market in the between-wars era was Britain, where Champagne had been popular since the mid-19th century, and its healthy sales there even received a boost when British soldiers returned from France with a taste for wine. This new cultural habit quickly spread through the educated middle classes, increasing the popularity of Champagne in the immediate post-war years. But when Britain went off the Gold Standard in 1931, Champagne houses found themselves receiving just two-thirds of the price they had come to expect.
All industries suffered during the depression, and with so little money about and no cause to celebrate, the demand for a luxury item like Champagne almost dried up. In 1932, the cellars in Reims and Épernay were bulging at the seams, despite a run of small harvests. There were so few buyers, it was estimated that if the current level of sales was maintained and not another grape was pressed, Champagne had sufficient stock to last 33 years. The last thing growers wanted was a large harvest, yet that was exactly what they got with the bumper crop of 1934. Most houses refused to buy any grapes, and the growers were reduced to practically giving their crops away. There was precious little that could be done, as the houses had no money to buy grapes and nowhere to store more wine if they did.
Two things happened at this juncture. First, the situation caused a division between houses and growers that became so ingrained that it exists to this day, however hard they try to put on a united front. From the 1930s, a large numbers of growers resorted to making and selling their own Champagne instead of relying purely on the sale of grapes. They had little option: either they turned their grapes into wine or let them rot. Some of the larger growers could afford the investment, but it was costly, requiring several years to come to fruition. The vast majority of growers simply could not afford the equipment, which is how and why they grouped together to form Champagne’s earliest cooperatives. Second, a lot of houses couldn’t survive, and the richest houses took them over, acquiring additional premises and—more importantly—vineyards. This was, for example, when Victor and Henri Lanson built up their vast estate. The 1930s saw the first bust of what would become recognized as Champagne’s cycle of boom and bust. Indeed, about 50 years later, Lanson itself would be taken over, stripped of its vineyards and sold on.
Unresponsive export markets led many houses to turn their attention inward, focusing on the long-neglected home market with stunning success, tripling domestic sales to 24 million bottles by 1935. On September 28 of that year, an interprofessional body called the Commission Spéciale de la Champagne was created, and because its meetings were held in the administrative center at Châlons-sur-Marne, it soon became known as the Commission de Châlons. It was composed of representatives from the Champagne houses, growers, local officials, the ministry of agriculture, and the treasury, and its aim was “to ensure the respect of local custom and tradition, the observation of which is necessary in order to preserve the quality of Champagne.” But apart from establishing an annual committee empowered to fix grapes prices each year, the Commission was unimaginative and ineffective.
Phylloxera
Phylloxera is often considered a 19th-century disaster, but for Champagne, it was very much a 20th-century affair. It first appeared in France in 1862, when phylloxera-infested vines were planted in a clos at Roquemaure (now part of AOC Lirac) in the Rhône. By 1868, Professor Jules-Émile Planchon of the Montpellier School of Agriculture had identified phylloxera as the cause of vineyards dying in the Rhône. He deduced that the infection had spread via cuttings imported from America by vignerons in search of hardy vines following the havoc wreaked by oidium (powdery mildew) in the 1840s and 1850s. It took almost 30 years for phylloxera to reach Champagne, where it was first identified in Tréloup vineyards of the Aisne département in 1890. Eventually, it became apparent that every vine in every vineyard would have to be grafted onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstock, a costly and time-consuming operation (it remained unfinished at the outbreak of WWI).
Generally, phylloxera is viewed as the greatest disaster in French viticultural history, but in some respects it has been a blessing. Prior to its arrival in France, the greatest vineyards had undergone gradual devaluation as a result of the increasing demand for wine, which had led to the planting of inferior varieties and the extension of vineyards into unsuitable areas of land. Grafting onto American rootstock led to a much needed rationalization. Only the best sites in the classic regions were replanted, and only noble vines were cultivated.
From May 1940 until August 1944, the Champagne region was occupied by German troops. The Champenois were not unprepared. Many houses were able to seal up their cellars, and those wishing to escape left for Southern France, while some of those who remained organized themselves into an effective resistance network. Various houses hid as much Champagne as they dared by sealing up some of their cellars, but they had to be careful not to attract attention, for a famous firm claiming blatantly low stocks or declaring cellars too small for its recorded production would merely invite the Nazis to make a thorough search.
During its period of occupation, the region’s wine industry was under the control of a Rhineland winemaker, Herr Kläbisch, who assumed the title of Champagne Führer. As Patrick Forbes put it in Champagne, “The news of his appointment was received with a certain relief by most people, for, if you were going to be shoved around, it was better to be shoved around by a winemaker than by some beer-drinking Nazi lout.”
The German occupation proved useful in at least one respect, as it spurred the formation of the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), which has since become a role model for similar organizations throughout France. None of these other bodies have, however, proved to be anywhere near as effective as the CIVC. The reason is quite simple: the Nazis were responsible for establishing the CIVC and sanctioned its almost-authoritarian power, while the interprofessional organizations in other regions were established by democratic authorities who, after the excesses of the war, had no intention of giving these organizations any real reach.
As for the CIVC, the French essentially tricked the Germans into giving this organization its power. In November 1940, the Vichy government abolished the ineffective Commission de Châlons and intended to replace it with another toothless organization called Le Bureau de Répartition du Vinicole de Champagne. But Robert-Jean de Vogüé and Maurice Doyard, both members of the Commission de Châlons, managed to convince the German authorities that it would be in their interest to create something far more powerful. They told them that the Commission had been unable to influence the trade on any matters raised by the Germans or issue orders on the Führer’s behalf—or indeed from any other agency of the occupation forces. De Vogüé and Doyard told the Germans that the Bureau would be no better that the Commission, and what was required, if they wanted their orders carried out quickly and efficiently, was a body with real powers. Thus, playing to the Germans’ appeal for order, two brave Frenchmen secured for the trade a buffer in the form of the CIVC, which took on the day-to-day unpleasantness of dealing with an alien administration. The Germans naturally played the major role in shaping the CIVC; its success, both immediate and since, must to some extent be credited to the invader’s reputation for organization and efficiency.
The Germans had intended to blow up the cellars of Champagne before retreating, but on August 28, 1944, they were caught napping as General Patton and his 3rd Army swept into Épernay.
Although the second half of the 1940s was a time of relative joy and celebration, sales of Champagne were slow to take off. This was primarily due to the importance of the French market, which was hindered by the troubles of the government. Global sales reached a modest peak of 35 million bottles in 1951, although that was less than the Champagne sold in 1910. Because of sluggish post-war sales in general, stocks had built up, and the CIVC requested and was granted a contraction in Champagne’s delimited area. The appellation law of 1927 recognized 46,000 hectares of AOC Champagne in 407 villages, but in 1951, this was reduced to 34,000 hectares spread over just 302 villages (under the ongoing expansion, the number of villages will rise to 357).
Sales dipped again in 1953, and so Champagne’s cyclical fortunes continued. In 1957, Champagne sales topped 48 million bottles and the cost of a kilo of grapes was indexed to the previous year’s price of a bottle of Champagne. This effectively doubled the growers’ income, but the houses were achieving record sales and could afford it—until the very next year, that is, when Champagne sales crashed yet again and, with more than a hint of déjà vu, the houses refused to purchase grapes. To prevent a repeat of this in the future, the CIVC introduced an interprofessional contract in 1959 by which the houses guaranteed to buy a minimum percentage of the growers’ harvest, while the growers undertook to sell a minimum percentage of their crop. Obviously this pleased the growers, but there would come times when the houses would benefit from the arrangement, which they no doubt realized.
Under De Gaulle’s popular leadership, Champagne sales in France rose as never before, pushing up the global total to 93 million bottles by 1967, but the bottom dropped out of the market when Paris experienced student riots in May of the following year. The next boom came in 1973, when sales surged to 124 million bottles, another all-time high, only to be followed by Champagne’s worst-ever slump in the midst of the oil crisis of 1974. In a bid to lessen the effects of the volatile home market, the largest Champagne houses decided to target export countries. Within just four years, sales were pushing well above 185 million bottles. It was another peak, but with the pressure off, French sales dove. Exports also began to falter, and within four years, global sales had plummeted by no less than 40 million bottles. Welcome to the wonderful world of boom, bust, and boom again Champagne.
The second biggest boom in history occurred in 1989, when a staggering 249 million bottles were sold. This was aided by the short-lived economic boom of the late 1980s and abetted by a number of greedy firms who sold far more Champagne than they should. The only way for such houses to sell excessive amounts was either to deplete their own stocks to dangerous levels or buy stocks from other less successful houses, growers, or cooperatives, and slap their own famous labels on. Regrettably this was and still is legal. The trading is known as sur lattes, after the point in production at which the bottles are purchased.
In March 2003, members of the UMC unanimously agreed to ban all sur lattes transactions among négociants beginning January 1, 2004, yet the demand for sur lattes was so strong in the first two months of 2004 that the price rose by 7%. Apparently, it was not possible to convert a unanimous decision into law within just nine months. As the head of one house told me at the time, “The houses agreed for the regulation to be promoted, but as long as it is not in force, they’re free to do as they please. It’s like cheating on your fiancé before marriage: it is not adultery, just indecent.” The regulation never happened, so the sur lattes scandal sadly continues.
The interprofessional contract did not allow houses any other strategy. Each house was forced by this contract to buy up to a certain volume based on its previous year’s sales, relative to the size of the actual crop. If, for example, a house sold 2 million bottles and the crop was 10% larger than average, it would be allowed to buy enough grapes to produce 2.2 million bottles of Champagne and no more. If the crop was 10% smaller, then it would only be able to buy enough grapes to produce 1.8 million bottles of Champagne. From a superficial stance, this seems fair. Champagne is a delimited wine region with a finite yield, and the contract appeared to ensure that everybody received enough grapes to continue business. But all it did was maintain the status quo, ensuring that the largest houses remained the largest and the smallest houses remained the smallest. Further, no new firms could muscle in on the lucrative industry—they would have to demonstrate sales of Champagne in the year before they would be allowed to purchase the grapes necessary to make that Champagne. The infamous interprofessional agreement had to go, and in 1990, it did, as did the fixed price.
The grapes purchased in the first year achieved ridiculously high prices as the high-volume houses desperately tried to build up stocks. It would be another three years before the finished Champagne from these grapes could start filtering onto the shelves. In the meantime, however, Champagne came under attack from the media, primarily in the UK, for its poor quality. And what could the Champagne houses say? After all, the wines were either too young or of dubious origin. It was at this point that Jean-Claude Rouzaud, the head of Roederer and new chairman of the Syndicat de Grandes Marques de Champagne, stated that he wanted quality criteria for membership and that if he could not get agreement on this, he would resign—which he did in 1997, admitting failure.
This criticism from the press hit some brands more than others, although a few escaped any blame whatsoever, some of these merely because they managed to buy better Champagnes sur lattes than they could make themselves. This anti-Champagne campaign was quickly followed by a global economic slump and the Gulf War, so few people had money to spare for luxury products and even fewer had any desire to celebrate.
It was these circumstances that set Champagne up for its most damaging crisis. But ironically, the fallout from this particular debacle would save the industry from an even worse crisis as the new millennium approached. As sales slumped, the price of Champagne dropped, and by 1993, it was at its lowest ebb, just as the first Champagne made from the most expensive Champagne grapes ever started to hit the shelves. That year, more than 30 Champagne houses made an operating loss, and the amount owed by the trade to the banks reached 15 billion francs, which was 1 billion more than the entire industry’s annual turnover.
As sales dwindled further, stocks built up, and it soon became accepted wisdom that the industry was so grossly overstocked that it needed to divest itself of 250 million bottles. Since this roughly equated to one year’s harvest, someone came up with the idea of not picking the next harvest. Not only would this redress the balance of stocks, but it would save the cost of picking, pressing, and making the wine. Other incidental savings included the cost of 250 million bottles, labels, corks, and wire cages, not to mention the 37 million kilos of sugar required for dosage. Apparently this creative accounting would instantly have turned 30 operating losses into 30 massive profits, but it fell down on one fundamental premise—that Champagne was overstocked. In reality, it was not.
If any boom was predictable, it must surely have been the millennium boom. After all, the Champenois had almost a century of boom-bust-boom to go by, and there will not be another boom of equal opportunity for a thousand years. Yet an examination of the trade press in the 1990s shows that the word millennium did not enter Champenois vocabulary until late 1995. Perhaps that was because they were still suffering from the drop in sales following the economic recession of 1991 and were preoccupied with trying to rid themselves of the perceived overstock of 250 million bottles. But in any case, they never managed to dispose of those bottles, and thus by accident, they had one billion bottles ready for the millennium. Peak sales happened in the three years preceding the year 2000, and there was barely a dip in sales in 2000 to 2001. Except for the rapid drop in sales in 2009, which followed the global economic meltdown the year before, sales have continued to soar to the point where Champagne needs at least one billion bottles in stock.
During this period, the most noticeable transformations of Champagne and its perception have included interest in grower Champagne, recognition of Champagne rosé as a permanent and important style, the lamentable proliferation of lightstrike-inducing clear glass bottles, the conversation around viticultural expansion, and climate change.
An expansion has been on the table for at least 40 years but had not truly been entertained until 2003. Over 30 years ago, I devoted just over three pages to the pros and cons of an expansion in Champagne (Sotheby, 1986). At that time, I was sitting on the fence. But by 1991, I had come off that fence and was firmly on the side of a carefully calculated expansion. Why? The Champagne appellation law of 1927 delimited 46,000 hectares in 407 villages, but in 1951, after a severe slump in the post-war market, the CIVC requested a contraction, which was granted. The INAO reduced AOC Champagne to 34,000 hectares in 302 villages. There had been in excess of 60,000 hectares of vineyards in Champagne at the end of the 19th century.
Any expansion would not actually extend Champagne’s borders. The idea has always been about looking inward, to see if there are gaps in the lacework of vineyards comprising AOC Champagne that might offer the same potential as those already planted. Certain villages simply did not apply for AOC status because none of their inhabitants were interested in viticulture at the time, yet some of these villages have slopes that are intrinsically superior to those of their AOC-classified neighbors. Anyone who has driven from Mareuil-sur-Aÿ to Louvois through the Val d’Or has seen many beautiful slopes crying out to be planted with vines, but for reasons unrelated to viticulture, these were not included in 1908, 1911, or 1919 and therefore not delimited in 1927. And no less than 17 of those villages have been quietly reclassified as AOC Champagne since 1951.
If there had been a perfect time to launch a major expansion project, it was back in 1991 or 1992, when sales had plummeted, cellars were bulging with stock, and there were still 4,000 unplanted hectares of AOC Champagne. At that juncture, no one could have accused the Champenois of making a knee-jerk decision to milk an expanding market, but they chose to wait until 2005 to announce that the preliminaries for an expansion had already begun. By that time, almost every spare hectare of AOC land had been exhausted, and demand was threatening to outstrip supply. It was a PR disaster, attracting criticism not just from a cynical wine trade press but from the general media and consumers, who all accused Champagne of naked greed. As a temporary five-year stopgap measure to increase production immediately, the maximum yield was raised in 2007 from 13,000 kilograms to 15,500 kilograms per hectare. Today, that temporary stopgap measure is still going!
On March 14, 2008, the INAO approved 40 new villages recommended by its committee of experts, and 5 more were proposed in 2010. Classification of potential vineyard sites within those villages is ongoing. Vines were allowed to be planted in newly classified vineyards beginning in 2017.
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Read the Champagne Part I: Introduction expert guide.
Read the Champagne Part II: Viticulture and Winemaking expert guide.
Compiled by Tom Stevenson (June 2019)
Edited by Stacy Ladenburger
Thanks, Fedar! The guide is updated!
"...and Edward III, whose mother, Isabella of France, was the daughter of Philip III" -- I believe the correct reference is Philip IV, not Philip III.
Hey Martin! Thanks for cathing this. It is all fixed.
Stacy Ladenburger It looks like here that the 1922 date actually needs to be 1822 according to the infographic timeline.Disgorgement of a sort happened in the 18th century, but it was haphazard. It was not until remuage was developed in 1818 that a truly effective disgorgement was possible, and that did not leak out to the wider industry until 1922. It was therefore from 1818 to 1822 that Champagne attained the potential for a robust méthode champenoise.
Truly nice reading!