A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [76]
TINY BUBBLES
Artisanal Champagnes
If you come to my apartment during holiday season, chances are excellent that you will be served a glass of Egly-Ouriet, Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, or some other small-grower Champagne. It’s true that my 2005 balance sheet was anything but Cristal-worthy, but, more to the point, these and other small grower-producers are the most exciting trend going in Champagne. If you’re lucky enough to score a table at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York, you’ll discover that they’re pouring small-grower Champagnes such as Pierre Gimonnet by the glass.
Here at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a principle universally acknowledged among grape nuts that great wine is produced in the vineyard—the product of ripe grapes, low yields, and meticulous viticulture that lets the true personality of the vineyard shine through. Except, of course, in Champagne, where farmers who are paid by the ton grow as much as their poor vines will bear, pick the fruit before it’s ripe, and sell these wan grapes to vast industrial concerns that mix them all together. The Champenois sometimes cite their unique terroir as the reason they make the world’s greatest sparkling wine, and yet in practice they usually ignore the nuances of the concept.
After spending a day visiting the headquarters of the Grandes Marques Champagne houses in Épernay, it’s refreshing to knock on the door of Francis Egly’s little half-timbered house in the village of Ambonnay, where you literally trip over baby toys in the foyer. Egly’s mother offers cookies while his wife shouts for Francis out the back door. Egly finally turns up, apologizing for the dirt on his hands—he has been in the vineyards.
I had sought out Egly after an epiphany a few months earlier when the then sommelier at Daniel, Jean Luc Le Dû, handed me a glass of Champagne. “Whoa!” I said. “This is wine!” By which I meant it would be good even without bubbles. And what impressed me when I was tasting with Egly in his spanking-clean new chai was that, unlike many young Champagnes in their prebubbly stage, his tasted like good wine. Like most great artisanal growers elsewhere in the world—though like very few growers in Champagne—Egly regularly cuts off up to half the fruit from his vines in midsummer to promote the ripening of the rest.
“When I first started importing these small growers, the people I sold small-domaine Burgundies to had no interest in Champagne,” says David Hinkle of North Berkeley Imports. “If we were going to interest these people, it had to be wine first and Champagne second.” Terry Theise, the self-proclaimed Riesling wacko, who added small-grower Champagnes to his portfolio in 1997, puts it this way: “Champagne, like any other wine, is fascinating to the extent that it’s distinctive.” Sounds obvious to me. But the larger Champagne houses would argue that blending the wines of many different villages will create a sum that is greater than its parts.
Champagne is a world unto itself, but some of the best producers are those, like Burgundy-obsessed Egly, who look to other regions for inspiration. Pierre Larmandier, of Larmandier-Bernier, worked in Alsace and Burgundy, where he was surprised to learn that small growers were, if anything, more highly regarded than the large negotiants. With minimal intervention in the cellar, Larmandier-Bernier (not to be confused with Guy Larmandier, another excellent domaine) makes subtle, complex, Chardonnay-based Champagnes, including an all-Chardonnay Blanc de Blancs.
If artisanal Champagne is a movement, Anselme Selosse, also known as “the madman of Avize,” might be regarded as its leader—the Angelo Gaja of Champagne. Selosse farms biodynamically, keeps his yields low, and makes his wine with the goal of expressing the character of his vineyard. Avize