A Champagne Adventure
Every
year thousands of tourists flock to Épernay, 25 kilometres south of
Reims in northern France, to visit the great champagne houses
gathered along the avenue de Champagne. We visited the Moët et
Chandon cellars on a cool autumn day, paid our $20 and waited in a
lavish hall decorated with posters proclaiming the Moët lifestyle.
A soft French accent ushered us through a rushed tour of cellar
tunnels set aside for tourists and an explanation of how champagne
was
made emphasising hand turning of bottles and long family traditions.
Not
mentioned were that
Moët et Chandon has been part of a conglomerate since the 1980s and
that champagne
is made like any other modern wine; fermented in huge stainless steel
vats then turned and purged by machines. Production is a million
bottles a year. We tasted our one glass of the wine before being
abandoned in the boutique then rushed out into the afternoon chill
without looking back.
Épernay
is the centre of a French marketing marvel that has sold wine with
bubbles as a lifestyle accessory for 90 years but it is not the whole
story of this great wine style. While 75% of the vineyards legally
able to provide grapes for true champagne lie in the Marne
département
around Reims and Épernay, the other 25% is situated more than 120
kilometres south in the département
of Aube. The Aube growing area is centred on about 20 villages from
Les Riceys in the south to Bar-sur-Aube 30 kilometres to the
north-east.
The
Aube wineries have a long history of champagne production but, when
the areas for inclusion in Champagne’s Appellation
d’Origine Contrôlée
(AOC) were established in 1909, the Aube département
vineyards were not included. Eighteen years of crippling conflict
followed. By the time Aube was included in the Champagne AOC, the
major producers of the north had established market dominance in a
new, image driven, wine market and the southern wineries had missed
their place in the champagne marketing juggernaut.
The next day, we
travelled south and found wine maker Champagne Marcel Vézien at
Celles-sur-Ource. There was no charge for tours or tasting, no
special areas in the buildings dedicated to tourists and the image of
the product or the company. This was a just wine-making business;
small, family, proud.
We tasted a chardonnay,
and a rosé, made a modest purchase and helped our host packed the
bottles. That night we enjoyed our champagne with a simple home
cooked meal in the warmth of a rented farm house sure that somewhere
between the marketing triumph of the Épernay houses and the small
family vineyards of the Aube was a complex and reassuring story. To
visit one was to find champagne as a lifestyle accessory prized for
its brand name and exclusivity. To visit the other was to get
involved with the wine for its own sake. We drank our wine and
wondered how sophisticated we could be drinking champagne from
kitchen tumblers.
