Champagne

Phylloxera reached Europe in 1863, imported to England with American vines, and spent the 1870s destroying French vineyards while Champagne stayed untouched. The insect appeared at Chassins, a hamlet of Tréloup in the Aisne, and was first detected inside the Marne on 6 August 1892 at Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. The spread was then recorded hectare by hectare: 24 hectares affected in 1898, 61 in 1899, 560 in 1900. On 29 October 1901 the whole Marne département was declared contaminated, and by 1911 roughly 6,500 hectares had been hit.

The response split the region. Growers formed the Syndicat antiphylloxérique on 17 July 1891 for a renewable five-year term; infested vines were burnt on site and the ground drenched with carbon sulphate, and Moët & Chandon bought the Tréloup vines expressly to have them destroyed. Many growers suspected the merchants of inventing the crisis — René Lamarre had published a pamphlet called La Révolution Champenoise in 1880, urging them to make their own champagne. Grafting was fought over for two decades before American vines were allowed to circulate freely in the Marne on 11 December 1901, across 63 communes.

Delimiting Champagne took a quarter of a century, from 1905 to 1930. Between 1927 and 1930 committees identified every eligible plot complete with its cadastral plan reference — parcels, not just communes and lieux-dits. The production rules arrived in stages: usages locaux, loyaux et constants first referenced in 1919, the permitted grape varieties in 1927, then in 1935 a maximum yield per hectare, a maximum press yield, a minimum potential alcohol and a minimum bottle-ageing period. Pruning followed in 1938, vintage labelling in 1952, planting density in 1978.

The appellation fixes the arithmetic of pressing. Clusters must reach the press whole and intact, which is what rules out machine harvesting, and press yields are set at 102 litres of must per 160 kg of pressed grapes. From the traditional 4,000 kg marc that gives 25.5 hectolitres: 20.5 hl of clearer first-run juice, the cuvée, then 5 hl of taille drawn at the end and kept separate. Presses run from 2,000 kg to 12,000 kg of whole grapes, the cake is broken up by hand between pressings in an operation called the retrousse, and pressing centres work under a Quality Charter introduced in 1987.

The sparkle is made inside the sealed bottle, and it costs alcohol and glass. Yeast converting the added sugar raises the wine by about 1.2 to 1.3 degrees of alcohol. A modern Champagne bottle weighs 860 grams and is designed to withstand 12 atmospheres, roughly double the pressure it will carry. That margin is historical: before strong glass, repeated explosions destroyed as many as 80% of the bottles in a cellar and cellar workers wore face masks. Vine density is at least 8,000 plants per hectare, and one bottle takes the fruit of a whole vine.

Sweetness in Champagne is a legal scale rather than a house preference. The Union des Maisons de Champagne sets Brut Nature under 3 g/l, Extra-Brut 0–6, Brut under 12, Extra-Dry 12–17, Sec 17–32, Demi-Sec 32–50 and Doux above 50 — which is why Extra-Dry is legally sweeter than Brut. The liqueur d'expédition added at disgorgement is cane sugar dissolved in old Champagne, prepared months ahead from reserve wines at least two years old and filtered so it cannot restart fermentation. Wines given none may be labelled Brut Nature, Brut Intégral or Brut Sauvage.

The échelle des crus, the scale that once set an official grape price for every village, survives only as a reference document: the sale price is now a freely negotiated agreement between each house and its grape suppliers. The annual authorised harvest yield is fixed jointly by the Comité Champagne and INAO inside a ceiling set at EU level, which is why the figure moves every summer. Ageing is regulated too — 15 months minimum before shipment, 12 of them on the lees, and 36 months for a vintage, against an EU floor of 90 days.

Champagne once dosed itself to national taste, and the gaps were extreme. In 1882, according to Vizetelly, the British goût anglais took 2 to 6% liqueur — 22 to 66 grams of sugar per bottle; the American goût américain 10 to 15%, or 110 to 165 grams; the French and German goût français 15 to 18%, or 165 to 200 grams; and the Russian style 25 to 30%, or 275 to 330 grams, which the Union des Maisons de Champagne calls virtually a syrup, a third of the bottle's volume being sugar solution.