Dan's Papers - June 29, 2007

Champagne is one of the world's oldest and greatest luxury brands. As a result of this fact, it is often the stuff of myth and legend.

First and foremost, Champagne is a place. It is located in northern France and is renowned for producing the greatest sparkling wines in the world. These wines, like those of Bordeaux and Burgundy, are named for the place in which they are made.

But for a long time that brand had been used erroneously to describe other sparkling wines made pretty much anywhere. These wines, despite their bubbles, are not Champagne, even if the labels claim they are. The region of Champagne has fought long and hard to protect its name, and today very few sparkling wines are now labeled as Champagne that aren't from that region. In fact, it is illegal to label these wines Champagne and the French producers have been quite diligent in forcing such producers as Korbel and Andre to honor international copyright laws.

To really understand Champagne, we are well served by a basic understanding of the complicated process of how it is made. Basically, wine is produced when sugar in grapes is turned to alcohol during fermentation. When this happens carbon dioxide is produced, which is allowed to dissipate in most wines. But with sparkling wines, the CO2 is trapped in the wine during a second round of wine fermentation in the bottle, hence the bubbles. This creates pressure in the bottle and is the reason why care must be taken when the cork is popped to open it.

Some like to claim that Champagne and maybe even Dom Perignon himself first created sparkling wine back in the 1600s, but with more investigation that seems highly unlikely. Naturally, as with all such great discoveries, it was most likely an accident. Perhaps some still wine was shipped somewhere, fermented a second time in transit, and arrived with bubbles (many, I am sure, exploded in a flume of red sparkling wine). History has shone that this "flaw" began to be appreciated and requested by consumers, and most likely our famous blind monk, Dom Perignon, discovered that sparkling white wine could be made from black Pinot Noir grapes. He also very likely had a hand in perfecting the process of making wines sparkle, but so did many others.

The region of Champagne has a wine history dating as far back as the poet and scholar Pliny (AD 79). The name Champagne is a derivative of campus or campania, meaning field. There are two other places that share the name, and both produce wine. One is in Switzerland and is being challenged in its use of the name. The other is Charantes, but the wine they make there is used to produce Cognac, so the "original" Champagne doesn't have an issue with them.

Sparkling wine can be produced from any wine, but in Champagne it is only produced from wine made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Some Champagnes are a blend of all three, while some use only Chardonnay, in which case the wine is called Blanc de Blancs.

Producing a wine that is under pressure creates many winemaking, shipping, storage and marketing obstacles. Consider what happens when you open a bottle of warm soda that may have been shaken a bit. Throughout the history of Champagne these obstacles have created some very interesting advancements in the technology of wine production. Examples include the discovery of producing glass from very hot fires (part of the Industrial Revolution). Prior to this coal-fired glass production, glass was too delicate to handle the pressure of a sparkling wine and shipping wines in bottle was hazardous, to say the least. Another was the re-introduction of cork as a wine bottle "stopper." (Cork was used before but then somehow forgotten while muslin was used in conjunction with oil.) When cork was re-introduced, the "musli," the name for the caged fat cork used for stoppering a sparkling wine today, was invented.

Ageing is quite important in making elegant sparkling wines with small bubbles, and in Champagne (and Champagne look-alikes), that is done in bottle with a type of sediment called "lees" (e-mail me for more detail on this). Two interesting things here are that no commercial Champagne or sparkling wine is cloudy or has sediment, so how are those lees (sediments) removed? That brings us to Madame Cliquot (a widow, therefore the Veuve), who was involved in developing what is called the riddling and disgorgement process of removing the sediment through freezing it and firing it out, an exciting and dangerous process. The only problem with this method is that it produced a bottle of Champagne with a short fill. This was solved in two manners, both of which affect the current Champagne product. At first, the solution was to put a long foil sleeve over the top of the bottle so the customer wouldn't notice the short fill, but later they decided to top off the wine with more still wine. It is this "dosage" that determines the sweetness of the Champagne, depending on the level of sugar in the dosage. This step determines the dryness levels of Brut, Extra Brut, Extra Dry, etc.

All of these obstacles and processes create a wonderful, but expensive, wine, hence the lofty prices of Champagne. Of course, there are shortcuts that can be taken, many of which produce sparkling wines of much lesser quality. Often these wines find their way onto banquet tables for toasting, only to be quickly abandoned for a cocktail or beer.

Oh yeah, one last thing. It seems that the royals and wealthy patrons from the sixteenth century on were the ones that originally made Champagne an "in drink." The bubbles (which get the alcohol into your blood steam more quickly than still wine) surely had a positive affect on their mood. Champagne may even get credit for being the original "feel good" drink!