I’m not much for the desert island scenario, but if I had to choose a wine to be marooned with, it would be Champagne.
Good Champagne offers so much of what I love in wine and what I would require if it were to be my sole companion. With crisp acidity, vivacious bubbles and bright, vibrant flavors, Champagne is refreshing, the No. 1 obligation of any wine. It is lively and versatile enough to go with whatever I may scrounge up to eat, and with its pale golden color and streaming bubbles, it’s about as pretty and entertaining a companion as I’ll ever find among bottles of wine.
Welcome back to Wine School, and what better greeting could there be than a lovely glass of Champagne? That’s Champagne’s most familiar role, of course, as a warm initiation of festivities, a signal to celebrate. No wine does it better.
But that is only the beginning. At Wine School each month we try to look beyond the conventional understanding of a particular sort of wine. We select a wine and over the next few weeks explore it in a natural, relaxed setting with food and family or friends. The idea is to drink attentively, to keep track of your reactions and to share those insights and impressions here for discussion.
Many pigeonholes constrain the way we think about wines, but few are as inhibiting as Champagne’s. Drink it at celebrations, we are told, at parties, as an aperitif. Champagne can be so much more. Right now, it is in the middle of a great reimagining, in which the industry and Champagne lovers are exploring its potential.
We have been forever taught by the trade to accept a narrative of Champagne that puts it at odds with almost all other wines. Perhaps you’ve heard? The province of Champagne is the cellar, not the vineyard, where a master blender combines wines from different sites, multiple vintages and, generally, three grapes: pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay.
For Champagne, a sense of place doesn’t matter. “Terroir,” we are told, is a dirty word, the antithesis of Champagne elegance. The aim is consistency, a house style, which remains the same regardless of rain, heat, drought or any other of the random occurrences that cause most wines to vary by vintage.
This narrative, not surprisingly, benefits the big Champagne houses, négociants that have long held sway. It obscures the practices of some big producers that smart consumers wouldn’t tolerate in other wines: industrial agriculture, harvesting prematurely to avoid risk, and factory winemaking, among other things.
A result is a system that has emphasized brand and marketing over agriculture and terroir. But the last 20 years have seen a welcome response in the rise of grower-producers, small Champagne vignerons who grow their grapes and make their own wines, which emphasize distinctiveness and a sense of place rather than year-to-year consistency. Though they account for only a small percentage of Champagne sales, they have helped revolutionize the way people think of Champagne: as a wine, rather than a luxury good.
Thanks in large part to these small producers, other Champagne shibboleths have fallen by the wayside. In the old narrative, good Champagne was said to come from three major regions: the Montagne de Reims, the Vallée de la Marne and the Côte des Blancs. A fourth, the Aube, was good only for supplying grapes to the big houses. Now, we understand that Aube itself can be a great source for wonderful wines.
Similarly, of the three main grapes, chardonnay and pinot noir were said to be the best, with pinot meunier an afterthought, good for adding light fruitiness and pleasant aromas but rustic on its own. Again, thanks to the grower-producers, we now know better.
As many wine lovers have embraced the small producers, predictably some have wholly rejected the big houses.
“While great wines are available from the Grand Marques, it’s good to be reminded that these are generic wines, sourced from every part of Champagne to create a consistent style,” wrote Steven Baker of Eugene, Oregon. “The real charm of Champagne today lies in the grower’s revolution.”
I believe you can find wonderful wines in both styles. While good grower Champagnes will generally be more distinctive, the best big houses have the resources to create blends that small growers cannot match. I recommended three entry-level nonvintage Champagnes from the big houses because I thought they would be easier to find and because I think each is excellent. Compared with one another, the three styles are quite distinctive.
The Charles Heidsieck Brut Réserve is fresh, robust and slightly toasty, with great finesse and deep waxy, chalky flavors that persist. It has great character and is one of my favorites, though sadly, Thierry Roset, the man behind the wines, died in October at the too-young age of 55.
By contrast, the Pol Roger Réserve Brut was more delicate, chiseled and precise, with a touch of spicy ginger. The Louis Roederer Brut Premier was somewhere in the middle, energetic and graceful, a little more substantial than the Pol Roger but not as voluminous as the Heidsieck, with an occasional whiff of fresh bread. House styles? Perhaps, and nothing wrong with it. Small producers also have personal styles, circumscribed by their methods and intentions, even if the wines vary more year to year. Though from big houses, these Champagnes are made with integrity, as the results demonstrate.
I suggested drinking these Champagnes with food, which some readers thought a novel idea. In the Champagne region, people naturally accept this practice, but throughout the rest of France? “Even my French friends ignore serving it with food,” said Joseph Scanlon, a reader who lives in Beynes, France, west of Paris.
Nonetheless, readers for whom this pleasure was familiar or newly discovered all found Champagne to be a remarkable culinary companion. Some found pizza a great match. Larry of Boston noted the saltiness of anchovies (and Parmesan) in Caesar salad goes beautifully with Champagne. Lobster, foie gras, chili dogs, duck: these were just some of the dishes readers tried and enjoyed. I might add risotto and fried chicken. The versatility, spanning the rustic and the luxurious, is clear.
Yet even as I argue for the ordinariness of Champagne as a wine, we have to acknowledge its extraordinary qualities. It’s not the bubbles; sparkling wines are made in every wine region. It’s the combination of grace, finesse, power, complexity and elegance that makes Champagne versatile by occasion as well as by food, and that makes it the epitome of what other sparkling wines hope to achieve, and occasionally do.
We have only scratched the surface here. So much more remains to explore: the various genres, blanc de blancs, blanc de noirs, rosés; the specific terroirs of different villages, oxidative versus reductive styles. The incentive, more Champagne, is rarely so pleasant.
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