Champagne
One day, with good fortune, you will find yourself in Paris, with
leisure and the money to enjoy some of the famous French wines. If the
hour is 11 o'clock on a sparkling Spring morning and your mood is for a
glass of champagne, the whole thing will be spoilt if you ask the waiter
to bring you a fine champagne, for he will come back with an excellent
brandy, of the very best quality, which is not what you wanted. Your
money and your mood were, of course, meant to be satisfied by one of the
white sparkling wines from the vineyards near the cathedral city of
Rheims, about 80 miles to the north-east of where you are sitting in
your boulevards cafe. But if you have asked the waiter for a bottle of
Bollinger, Veuve Cliquot, Heidsieck, Mumm or Pol-Roger, you will have
selected one of the classic champagnes of France. But do not, on any
account, allow the joy of being in Paris on a fine Spring morning to
distract your attention from the wine, which will be the very best of
its type, having travelled a mere 80 miles from the cellars where it was
born and grew up, to your glass.
In the more probable event that you are at home in Australia, when the
mood and occasion are for champagne, and you have been wise enough to
provide yourself with a bottle or two of Seppelt's Great Western Brut,
the wine will warrant the same careful attention, for it will be capable
of giving the same sort of pleasure, having been made in the same way,
and with the same care, as the notable champagnes of France.
It is not difficult to make a sparkling wine. Large quantities of
sparkling wines are made, by one or other of three methods, the quality
of the finished product depending on the method of making and the
materials used.
The best champagne is made by the bottle fermentation method from grapes
of the pivot noir, or pivot blanc varieties, or, as with most of the top
French vintages, a mixture of each. Many of the best French champagnes
are made from as much as three parts of the black pivot grape to one
part of the white, and because champagne is, except in very rare
instances, a white wine, great care must be exercised from the
beginning. If the black grapes are allowed to become too ripe, it is
impossible to avoid some color in the wine, hence they must be picked at
exactly the right time, and must be carefully handled to prevent
bruising or bursting before they reach the crushers.
The pressing of champagne grapes also requires close attention, for only
the first run of juice from the press will make the best champagne. The
second and third pressings are used for inferior quality wine. The wine
is fermented, often in glass-lined tanks and when fermentation is
complete, is taken quickly from its lees to storage casks where
sometimes a little alcohol, tartaric acid and tannin are added.
 After several months in the cask, the dry white wine is carefully fined.
This is a delicate operation and an anxious time for the winemaker, for
sometimes the wine refuses to clear, and there arises a need for
chemical assistance. The next stage of making, by the bottle fermentation method, is to put
the new white wine into bottles and to induce a supplementary
fermentation in the bottle. Because the wine is dry When put into the
bottle (that is, it is fully fermented with all its natural sugar
already converted into alcohol) the wine maker must add a little syrup
and a specially cultured yeast in order to start up a new fermentation.
As one of the products of fermentation is carbon dioxide, fermentation
in the corked bottle will build up gas pressure. This is why champagne
bottles are always heavier and stronger than those used for still wines
and why the corks are wired down.
But the process does not end here. Another product of fermentation, as
well as alcohol and carbon dioxide, is multiplication of the yeast
cells, which die when their work is completed, but which must be
removed, for they float as sediment in the wine and spoil its
appearance. The trick of removing the sediment, known as disgorging, is
traditionally a hand operation. The problem is to induce all the
sediment to collect on the cork, hence the bottles are stored neck
downwards, shaken each day for several l weeks with a twist to left and
to right, leaving each bottle an eighth of a turn further round. The
effect of this remueage is to move the slowly settling sediment, in a
cork-screw motion, towards the cork and not adhering to the side of the
bottle.
When all the sediment has reached the cork, the traditional degorgeur
deftly removes the cork, allowing the sediment, under gas pressure, to
fly out. The art (requiring years of training) is to get rid of the
sediment with only negligible loss of gas or wine. The operation calls
for split second timing. At the precise instant, the degorgeur puts his
thumb over the neck, and then inserts a new cork.
It was, of course, inevitable that science would find a way to assist,
if not to replace the traditional processes. Champagne made today by the
old-fashioned hand methods is helped in the last stage of disgorging its
sediment by refrigeration. The neck of the bottle is frozen, turning
perhaps an inch of wine and the sediment into ice. When the cork is
removed, gas pressure ejects the ice pellet. The modern machinery used
for disgorging also replaces the small amount of wine lost and adds the
amount of sweetening needed to bring the finished wine to a degree of
sweetness that different tastes demand.
Without its final dosage of syrup, the champagne would be very dry;
indeed too dry for almost all tastes. That to which no syrup, or a very
small quantity, as little as one percent has been added, is called Brut.
Depending on the additional quantities of sweetening, so is the wine
described as sec (dry), demi-sec (semi-sweet), or doux (sweet).
 Pink champagne, once very popular, waned in popularity until recent
years when the market demand for it increased. French law does not
permit the addition of artificial coloring, but as most good quality
French champagne is made from a large proportion of black skinned
grapes, it is a very simple matter to allow natural color into the wine
without offending the law. The winemaker simply needs to leave the skins
of his black pivot grapes a little longer on the wine, and, voila, pink
champagne! Do not scorn such a wine from the Aube or the Marne, or
dismiss it as "ladies"' wine. It may be of excellent quality, and
probably is. It is just that it looks all wrong!
After degorgement, champagne is stored to mature, some of it for many
years, the best for at least six, but as all wine changes in the bottle,
and champagne is certainly the liveliest, it is wise to look at one's
stock from time to time. And if a bottle of champagne happens to be
"flat" when opened, do not instantly pour it down the sink as
undrinkable. You may be very surprised to find it of remarkable quality.
If it has been made from high quality original material, the chances are
by no means remote that it will be an excellent still wine.
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