Looking ahead: the Champagne revolution

Champagne is one of the most fascinating wine regions of France, and it is also one of the most dynamic, as this is where tradition and change go hand in hand. It is technically just one large appellation, but multiple identities and stylistic expressions co-exist, adding to its dynamic force.

Still today, for many fun-oriented consumers Champagne remains synonymous with partying. They continue to adhere, if you will, to the ‘party line’ of most Champagne marketing campaigns from the 1980-2000 period.

For others, however, it is first and foremost a fine wine, and only secondly one with bubbles.

Momentum has bee growing for a now deep-seated trend towards the production of more terroir-focused Champagnes with clear identity markers of precise provenance. These are what some are calling in French Champagnes de lieux.

Two pioneers provided the driving force for the move to the production of wines from parcel selections: Francis Egly (Champagne Egly-Ouriet) and Anselme Selosse (Champagne Jacques Selosse).

Selosse drew inspiration from the Burgundian sense of place, which he observed during his studies in Beaune in the early 1970s.

This formed the foundation of his own approach to Champagne production. His deep understanding and painstaking cultivation of individual vineyard parcels owed much to the practices of the Cistercian monks in 12th century Burgundy.

Accordingly, after his return to the family estate, Selosse turned his back on the classic Champagne tradition of blending grapes sourced from all over the Champagne region. Indeed, he sought to capture the spirit of place in a bottle and enhance precise terroir expression. He felt sugar additions would not only mask terroir character, but also diminish the savoury salinity that he wanted in his wines, so he started using lower and lower levels of dosage.

Thanks to his thoughtful approach to wine production and outspokenness, Selosse proved to be a persuasive and visionary force for change that attracted a new generation of young growers who felt more attuned to his terroir focus than to the established codes of the big houses, which dominated Champagne production at the time.

Playing catch-up

For almost a decade around the 1980s, the well-established Champagne houses looked askance at this emerging school professing a philosophy of place, thinking that it would run out of bubbly steam as fast as it had seemed to burst onto the scene.

Their initial attitude could be explained by the simple fact that their large-scale operations did not easily lend themselves to such pinpointed production.

The big houses own hundreds of hectares of land and/or buy grapes or finished wine from a large number of grape growers. On such a scale, the Champagne production process is unsurprisingly more industrial than artisanal, and so it seemed to be next to impossible for them to make terroir-based cuvées released in limited quantities.

However, the success of the terroir-focused Champagne growers, or récoltants-manipulants – whereby the same pair of hands that grows the grapes also handcrafts and sells the Champagne directly – did not wane.

On the contrary, the winds of change that these producers incarnated brought greater freshness in their wake, both in the Champagnes themselves and in attitudes and viticultural practices.

Among a circle of informed consumers there is still a cultish devotion to the highly sought-after Champagnes of both Francis Egly and Anselme Selosse, and to the wave of innovators that followed, including Cédric Bouchard, Jérôme Prévost, Olivier Collin, Frédéric Savart and many others.

The high prices these bottles fetched on the international market created a stir among the big houses. Revolution was in the air, even if grower Champagne represented only a fraction of total Champagne production.

The traditional houses could not ignore this unexpected, even astonishing, competition from within the region itself, and to their credit, they mobilised their forces to raise their own game. They began by analysing the strengths of the new players on the scene and seeking areas where they could improve the quality of their products even further.

This created a healthy dynamic of lucidity and emulation in the region, and the vineyards were the major beneficiary of such change. Enhancement of terroir expression begins with high level, precise viticulture.

Credit: www.selosse-lesavises.com

Champagne’s new age

The major houses joined ranks with the growers when it came to being more attentive to the quality and care of the vines.

This was a significant turnaround from the infamous period between the 1970s and 1990s which saw widespread dumping of urban waste – the so-called ‘boues de ville’ or city mud – onto vineyard soils to fertilise them. Traces of plastic residue can still be seen here and there, although the regional wine council, the Comité Champagne, banned this practice in 1998.

In time, most of the actors involved in Champagne production came to understand how important it was to harvest quality grapes if the goal was to produce quality wine. But it was the most forward-looking and reactive houses that began to convert their vineyards to organic, and sometimes biodynamic, farming.

Another innovation spearheaded by grower-producers was providing dosage information and disgorgement dates on the labels. The traditional houses soon adopted this practice too.

They followed suit again when it came to releasing site-specific bottlings, which that growers developed to reveal terroir nuances within a single village and which a number of houses have also emulated.

This could be seen as a fleeting, even deplorable, trend, but it is beneficial for Champagne production as a whole. The revolution underway in the region has brought in its wake a vital momentum for improvement and innovation that has stimulated the Champagne market – which needed it.

This includes encouraging producers to rethink their approaches to dosage and disgorgement dates while also providing more information to the consumer about grape sources and terroir origins.

This latter aspect is clearly inspired by the Burgundian benchmark for respecting vineyard specificity and identity. More and more Champagne cuvées highlight a singular style or perhaps a grape variety, including those neglected ones that do not belong to the hallowed trio formed by the two Pinots and Chardonnay.

A bright future

Consumers and collectors all over the world have shown how receptive they are to this brave new world of Champagne production, and they are snapping up the most prestigious cuvées from the likes of Selosse and Egly, with speculation adding its own outrageous dynamic to the market.

Other growers aspire to achieve the same degree of desire and renown enjoyed by these two role models. Meanwhile, the traditional houses are starting to release more exclusive cuvées produced in minute quantities for the happy few able to afford the very high prices. I call this the ‘Burgundy effect’. The more intimate and select the cuvées, the higher the prices tend to be, and this leads to them becoming objects of speculation.

The quality of Champagne has undoubtably risen over this time, and winegrowers and houses are increasingly attuned to their vineyards and seek to put the spotlight on terroir character in their Champagnes.

Both camps are also taking advantage of global warming to propose a different approach to dosage and introduce new styles, but also reveal the powerful potential of terroirs (such as the Aube) that were once overshadowed by the big guns such as the Côte des Blanc and the Montagne de Reims.

All this is very positive and will enable Champagne to be what it should always have been: a wine and not a party drink.

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