Andrew Jefford – ‘The greatest wines often have a lovely unloveliness at their heart’
No wine is more sipped, but less tasted, than Champagne. For most of its drinkers, it’s a social marker. Clutching a flute of Champagne is a secular rite – to denote achievement, happiness, success, or to shine a light on any of the significant waymarks in life. What it actually tastes like is secondary, perhaps irrelevant. Indeed, given its high acidity levels and the ever-decreasing levels of dosage decreed by today’s zeitgeist, I suspect that many of those happy, starry-eyed celebrants must secretly suffer it rather than relish it.
Decanter readers – a breed apart, as usual – are indeed interested in tasting Champagne rather than merely enacting a ritual, and I wish you much pleasure with that as we mark the year’s hinge, the darkest day, and the return of the light over the coming month. All I’d say is this. Notice what a very strange sort of wine it is. As you hold it in your mouth, try to see the wine inside the bubbles, shocking though that experience may be.
The greatest wines often have a kind of lovely unloveliness at their heart – the fierce tannins of the Langhe, the austerity of classic Médocain beauty, a mocking stony-sour slenderness in red Burgundy. So with Champagne, and Champagne’s searing acidity. It is unreasonable, and in and of itself, almost impossible to like. Visitors who get a chance to taste the vins clairs (still base wines) before blending find them painful, challenging, inscrutable and tooth-jangling. You can experience something of this for yourself by sampling a still Coteaux Champenois white wine. Only the ripest wines from the most favoured villages will be used; even so, it’s hard to call them ‘balanced’, or to see how they could really justify their £30+ price points. (Yes, I know they are hard to find: QED.)This might lead us to conclude that the beauty in Champagne is a matter of acquired externalities: the sinew of malolactic fermentation, the nutty resonance which comes with a little controlled oxidation (via cask fermentation), the tongue-teasing texture of tiny bubbles, the bready scents and creamy palate fullness of autolysis, the chamfering brought by the addition of finely judged dosage, the gathering harmony which is the legacy of cellar years. Those elements must constitute the secret, no?
Not at all: these externalities can be mimicked by any skilled sparkling-wine craftswoman or craftsman anywhere. And they do; and they are. Other regions making Champagne-style sparkling wines nonetheless struggle to match Champagne (though both the UK and Tasmania glide impressively close). Either Champagne craftspeople are simply more skilled than everyone else – which seems improbable – or we are back to the raw materials themselves: Champagne grapes, must and still wine.
The more I taste Champagne, the more convinced I am that this is where its quality lies. An understanding of this strange wine consists in paring away the externalities to see, to smell, to taste and to weigh up the intrinsic nature of the lunging fruit beneath. Chalk is not the primary cause; the magic lies in the grey, fretful, hesitant Champagne season, and the phenolic maturity so painstakingly acquired over the length of that season winning out over the two-sided hazard of deficit sugars and unreasonable acidity.
That is where the resonance, the perfume, the nuance and the lift of truly great Champagne lies, although it is necessarily buried in raw young acidity at the vin clair stage. It’s when the balancing externalities are in place that we drinkers are finally able to unlock the resonance of Champagne’s slow-season fruit and (now chalk can play a role) its very finest vineyards.
That’s what I’d urge you to seek in bottles of Champagne you taste this Christmas. There should be nothing sweet, nothing bitter, nothing short, nothing hard, nothing too creamy, nothing too fizzy, nothing evident.
It’s by looking into the cold, singing fire of its acid profile that you’ll find the allusions we love most in this wine: orchards, fields, mists and their taut yet lambent fruits.
What I’ve been drinking this month
Some old friends and I chewed over (the verb is accurate) my last and much-travelled bottle of Baumard’s Clos du Papillon Savennières 2002 recently. It was reticent; it, too, had a sort of lovely unloveliness: that scent of dry straw, dry flowers and a sharp, almost rancid buttery quality, then sour green plums in the mouth, stony austerity and a little oxidative bite. We liked it all the more for the fact that it wasn’t trying to be liked.
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