Nurse the Hate: French Wine Blitzkrieg Part 3, Champagne

Champagne is delicious.  If you don't drink it, at least on occasion, you're missing out on one of life's affordable pleasures.  “My only regret is not drinking more champagne.” is a great quote that may or may not have been uttered by John Maynard Keynes on his death bed.  It doesn't matter if he said it or not.  He should have and that's all that matters.  I have been drinking an unhealthy amount of the stuff for months during and now after studying the region for that WSET Diploma test.  I just got hooked.  I got a champagne monkey on my back.  Don’t pour me a prosecco or even Cremant de Bourgogne and try to pretend it’s the same thing.  It isn’t.  Champagne is from champagne and is a step above all the rest.  The rest of that other stuff is just “sparkling wine”.  The folks in the Champagne region have it down and these wines are the last word in quality.

The Champagne trade has done an absolutely amazing job selling the wines as the epitome of luxury and class.  The last thing that the Champagne trade wants you to know is how industrialized the making of these wines are, as if small teams of artisans were hand turning the 300 million bottles of champagne made annually.  This is big business with huge corporations running the best known brands like Moet, Veuve, Dom Perignon, Cristal and Taittinger.  There are 5 million bottles of Dom alone made each year.  The whole enterprise is presented as part magic and part artisan craft but it’s really industrialized farming and food processing.

There has been a trend towards “grower champagnes”.  What this means is that small family run wineries stopped selling their crops to the big brands and instead decided to make their own champagne.  These are like the indie bands of Champagne.  They are made in very small quantities.  They tend to be quirky wines and reflect their vineyard sources.  Douchy waxed mustache hipster wine professionals might say something like “I don’t drink anything but grower champagne” which is the wine version of saying “I only listen to Minus the Bear’s early stuff”.  Just like not all indie rock bands are good, the same holds true with grower champagnes.  Waxed mustache guy and his buddy Roger would never admit that the too acidic grower champagne they are pretending to like is about a third as good as Pol Roger or Louis Roederer’s NV bottlings.  However, mustache guy and I would likely agree on the wines of AR Lenoble.  Roger would still disagree, but that's because he's kind of a shit.

A very small operation in the tiny village of Damery, AR Lenoble is run by a brother/sister team.  Christian is the sales/marketing head and poured everything in the house during the two plus hours he graciously spent.  They came one after another.  “OK, here’s our version of a non vintage which we call Intense.  Here’s a zero dosage.  Still pretty rich, right?  You don’t want to try the Demi Sec, do you?  Here…  I’ll pour you some.  OK, now try the 100% meunier next to the grand cru Blanc de Blancs.  Now try it next to the 2008.  That still has a ways to go.”  It was awesome.  Great quality and distinct wines.  While not every one of them played to my style, it’s cool that they made them.  For my enthusiasm for the Blanc de Blancs, I know there’s someone else jacked up about the Blanc de Noirs.  These are wines with personality.  AR Lenoble has my full support.  Good wines and good people.

Driving through the villages of the region was illuminating.   As I had memorized maps of the region certain landmarks took on great import.  The Montagne de Reims (Reims Mountain) looks massive on the map, but it really just a good sized hill.  People in Pittsburgh would be pissed off if they knew the French had called that a "mountain".  I was expecting much greater distances between the villages of the Vallee de la Marne and the Cotes de Blanc.  Instead they are very close, which makes the idea that the valley grows the meunier grape because of frost resistance and chardonnay is grown in the Cotes de Blanc because of different climate conditions all the more remarkable.  American translation.  "Well, we grow corn over here in Covington but all the way over there in Cincinnati we grow wheat as'in the weather being so different and all across da river..."

Things that are smaller than you expect, but still manage to be impressive include the villages around the Montagne de Reims, the Statue of Liberty, Graceland, and the Alamo.  (I debated including "my penis" in that list, but felt it was a cheap joke.  By mentioning it in brackets like this I was still able to make the joke but can now provide distance saying that the whole point of this side bar was to note how I didn't make the remark.)  Things that are larger than you expect and still impressive include Easter Island statues, the Gates of Babylon, Golden Gate Bridge, and the champagne aging cellars in Reims/Epernay.  (See, if I had been thinking in advance I could have said "my penis" here instead, but I think the joke is funnier if you say "smaller" instead of "larger" as it is more self effacing.  Really, the joke isn't that funny at all and I have spent too much time trying to work it in.  Hmm.  There might have been another cheap joke right there too...)

One of the things to prepare for in visiting Epernay where the big Champagne houses headquarter is the expressionless Asian tourists.  Asian tourists love to take pictures of themselves in front of prestige brand landmarks.  They have absolutely zero interest in "very good" champagnes and are only focused on what they perceive to be "the best".  You could make an afternoon of it sitting near the Dom Perignon statue at Moet and Chandon watching blank faced Asians photograph each other in front of it.  I have this vision where you go to their houses and after dinner they roll out an old fashioned slide projector and screen slide after slide of themselves looking miserable in front of recognizable landmarks.  "Here's Lin Chu unhappy in front of the place where they make Cristal.  Oh!  And here he is slightly frowning with a bottle of La Grande Dame.  This is my favorite!  Here he is looking uncomfortable at the Eiffel Tower!".

When I took blind tasting classes in Bordeaux, the table of Chinese would be completely uninterested in a wine.  Let's say the wine was "good" but not "great".  They would be disengaged as we would go through the analysis in a group.  Then, if the bag was pulled away to reveal a prestigious grand cru Burgundy, they would immediately light up, fight each other to take pictures of the bottle, and kill for the last of the bottle to be poured in their glass.  It has to be an entire nation walking around in fake Gucci and Prada with the people of Levi's wondering why they can't make any headway.  In Epernay, the sale of Dom and Cristal must be brisk to these tourists.  Me?  I'd rather have three bottles of AR Lenoble Blanc de Blancs.

On the last morning in Epernay, I grabbed an early morning coffee in the middle of a busy workingman’s café.  A locals place, the patrons teased the bartender who was stoically making coffees and dolling out croissants to his friends.  When he turned his back, they would toss their sugar cubes, purposely missing the basket and filling his back counter.  I hid in plain sight standing in the middle of the bar, all of them ignoring the quiet American as they carried on.  I like the sound of different languages, always imagining the conversations aren’t as inane.  It is easy to imagine that the translated French would somehow be charming.  I stood at the counter slowly sipping my espresso.  At a small round table near the sidewalk a woman sat with a small glass of champagne, cigarette held straight up in the air.  It was eight o’clock in the morning, a perfect time for a glass of champagne