Adventures in the Chalk

In the second of his columns on champagne, ned goodwin mw takes a tour of the region to sample some of its choicest wines

TRAVELLING THROUGH CHAMPAGNE recently, I visited small growers as well as large champagne houses. While grower champagnes, or those of the récoltant manipulant – produced by estates that grow their grapes in single plots or groups of plots, from which their wine is made – are the darlings of sommeliers the world over, larger firms often have more muscle to flex when it comes to sourcing grapes, as well as older stock to nourish reserve wines and keep overall quality high. During my tour, four of the region’s most prominent houses opened their doors – and popped their corks – for me.

MOËT & CHANDON
No house is larger, or commands the ire of so many, as Moët & Chandon. It is indeed easy to criticise the largesse of this company. However, as the export director for another firm told me, “If it weren’t for Moët, we wouldn’t be what we are today in Champagne. They have opened up Asian markets for us and led the way in many respects, even if some of their products are misguided.” As for the last point, he who remains unnamed was referring to a champagne that Moët recently devised to be served over ice.

While risqué frivolities are bound to pop up from time to time when a single company produces up to 12 percent of Champagne’s total production, Moët’s Chef de Cave Benoît Gouez is crafting an increasingly streamlined and impressive range of wines, especially the Grand Vintage champagnes. The 2003 Grand Vintage, for example, is a bumptious expression of flamboyant stone-fruit flavours and relatively low acidity due to a vintage that was among the warmest in history. Nevertheless, its weight is balanced by some taut phenolics and the wine drinks well. It is mouth-filling and hedonistic.

Gouez wisely, if not daringly, opted for up to 43 percent Pinot Meunier in the blend. Pinot Meunier is a grape variety that offers texture and forward fruit, if not the tensile raciness of Chardonnay or the grip of Pinot Noir, the two other major grape varieties of the region. The grapes were sourced from the water-retaining heavier soils of the Vallée de la Marne, helping to mitigate the dry conditions of the growing season and allowing for both healthier grapes and a fresher wine than otherwise possible.

While I tasted a slew of wines at Moët, the 2003 stood out as a celebration of a vintage that many producers chose not to make. While its production was most likely driven by shareholder pressure, the wine is good indeed. Grapevine rating: 91 points.

POL ROGER
On my second day in Champagne I was met in Pol Roger’s atmospheric sitting room – adorned with pictures of Winston Churchill – by the affable Hubert de Billy. Hubert led me through the deepest cellars in Champagne, which are said to give Pol Roger’s wines a persistence and fine mousse like no other.

We tasted a generous platter of wines. I was particularly moved that de Billy had agreed to meet me on a Saturday morning, when Pol is usually closed. I felt that I was in somebody’s home. On many levels, the reliable and almost avuncular nature of these wines, always Pinot Noir-dominated, is reminiscent of a well-lived-in residence. Tom Stevenson, the world’s pre-eminent writer on champagne, opined that if he had to choose a single producer’s champagne to lay down, it would be Pol Roger.

The Pol Roger 1998 Vintage boasts plenty of autolytic detail, or the toasty aromatic complexity that comes with a solid seven
years of lees-ageing. Fresh and reverberant, it was one of the outstanding wines of my trip. Next to it, Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill 1999, the house’s current-release luxury cuvée, is broad-shouldered and rumbles across the palate. Less precise, perhaps, than the 1998 Vintage, the 1999 Winston Churchill stains rather than caresses, searing itself into the memory with force. Grapevine rating: 96 points for Pol Roger 1998 Vintage, and 93 for Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill 1999.

KRUG
At Krug, I met Olivier Krug, the anointed scion of the family and an unashamed hedonist. He also understands that not everybody wants to hear winemaking talk. While champagne’s complex blending process and Krug’s religious barrel regime interest some (geeks like me), Olivier and I agree that champagne’s story must be humanised and attuned to the drinker.

After all, champagne, at its carnal soul, is a wine like no other; a wine that stimulates, titillates, and elevates the weary. Champagne celebrates the optimist, as much as it allows us to rise above the insidious grasp of pessimism. When we raise a glass of bubbles like Krug, it’s time to swoon rather than contemplate; after all, champagne is a wine to enjoy despite the airs that we all, consciously or not, imbue it with.

I was blessed indeed to taste Krug’s very top wines. These are great champagnes. While Olivier insists that there is no hierarchy at Krug, it’s hard to believe in this vinicultural equivalence when the two single-vineyard wines, Clos de Mesnil Blanc de Blancs and Clos d’Ambonnay Blanc de Noirs, cost considerably more than the flagship Grande Cuvée. Nevertheless, I frequently find myself rating the Grande Cuvée on a par with the former and, usually, higher than the latter. In this respect one is not necessarily acquiring a superior wine by paying more, but rather wine from a single plot or group of plots, and thus a wine of scarcity.

Krug Grande Cuvée ages as well as it drinks in its youth. Its signature nose is one of acacia with notes of mace, brioche, orange rind and the tang of nectarine propelling it across the mouth and down the throat. This is a wine that is not afraid to bridle oomph and finesse, nor the fruitiness of Pinot Meunier, with a good dollop in the blend.

While I also tasted Krug Vintage 2000 and 1998, as well as Clos d’Ambonnay 2000 and Clos de Mesnil 1998, a prodigious wine of ethereal grace, Krug 1998 is a wine that sings of the vintage’s warmth and piercing concentration as much as it does of its clinical precision and freshness.

Indeed, 1998 is only the second Krug vintage to be Chardonnay-dominant, suggesting a fidelity to both a house style and a vintage, as well as flexibility of the winemaking. This is a wine as bold and lusty as any Krug, with ginger, turmeric, cumin and exotic tangy spice filling the nose. There are abundant yellow-fruit flavours in the mouth. The wine is mouth-filling and powerful. While the oak lies low, this Krug is incredibly vinous. Another glass please! Krug’s integrity is further manifest in the code on each of its bottles that enables the consumer to know when it was released from the cellar. Grapevine rating: 94 points for Grande Cuvée, and 96 points for the 1998 Vintage.

TAITTINGER
Taittinger is a house boasting one of the most spectacular of all cellars. Mined for chalk during the middle ages, les crayères, as these cellars are known, are often etched with eerie graffiti from World War I, when Taittinger’s served as a hospital for soldiers returning from the front. I couldn’t help but think that champagne is now a wine of celebration in many ways – a wine born from blood.

Taittinger is known for a finessed line-up of champagnes that are Chardonnay-centric. The non-vintage Brut is a lacy aperitif-style champagne, while Les Folies de la Marquetterie represents a quirky and highly innovative approach to a single, warm plot of vines behind Taittinger’s property, the Château de la Marquetterie in Pierry, not far from Épernay.

While it’s labelled as a non-vintage, Les Folies de la Marquetterie is from 2003, an iconoclastic year if ever there was one. After all, while this wine was being fermented and aged in-cask for 10 months, winemakers across France were panicking about the condition of fruit that had come in far riper than ever before; 2003 will go down as one of the hottest vintages on record.

The make-up of this idiosyncratic wine is typically Taittinger, with 55 percent Chardonnay and the remainder of the blend Pinot Noir. Les Folies de la Marquetterie is viscously textured. It’s a wine that exhibits mouth-coating tannins from thick grape skins – typical in such a hot year. The aromas are far from the citric norm, but lavish and summery, with peach, apricot and even mango at the fore. The breadth and tannin from oak handling reins in the exuberant flavours to keep them corseted, fresh and compelling rather than tiring.

Meanwhile, the Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2002 is a tour de force that will be released in the coming months. Quite Burgundian with notes of curd and brioche, this is a profound champagne, while Les Folies is the house’s peacock. Grapevine rating: 93 points for Les Folies de la Marquetterie non-vintage, and 97 for Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs.