Franciacorta Andrea Arici

I’m on the road non-stop this week in Northern Italy, between Franciacorta and Trento. Today is changeover day; after visiting one of the big names in Bellavista this morning I’ll be driving the two hours or so up into the hills. Or at least it feels ‘up’, but the truth is that the city of Trento is about the same altitude as Lake Iseo, just under 200 metres, although the (vineyards do go much higher).

Franciacorta’s Lake Iseo is a bit less glitz-and-glam than the more famous Como and Garda. Yes, a stroll into the town might pass a fancy watch shop and a smart bar - but also pizza-by-the-slice for four euros and a campsite karaoke session. There are more sturdy, lycra-clad central European tourists off on hearty cycle rides and power walks than there are Porsches and tasting menus. Food is good, people are friendly, and it’s really quite beautiful.

Just South of the lake lies ‘the amphitheatre’. If you’re used to having to use your imagination to understand grandiose names given to geological features, here you don’t; much like pushing your fingertip into sand on a beach and looking at the imprint, this ring of hillsides was formed by a wall of ice coming down the valley, digging, scraping and eventually melting to deposit a crazily-complex combination of soils it managed to pick up on its travels. Beyond this, the zone extends Eastwards and Westwards, from the unusual ‘Monte Orfano’ through to the hills in the East that lie before the city of Brescia.

As Ca del Bosco’s Ambra Perdicchizi described, these stony, dry soils made traditional agriculture difficult during the middle ages, so it was decided to free the region of land taxes to encourage farmers to stay. ‘Francae Curtes’, a term first used in 1277, were tax-free estates.

Today, the name Franciacorta is famous for one thing, though; sparkling wine from Chardonnay, Pinot Nero (Pinot Noir) and Pinot Bianco (and, in theory, Erbamat - but not for a while, yet). Chardonnay is the boss, though, as Pinot Noir (around 15% of plantation) needs quite specific sites and, according to some of the wineries I’ve met, remains harder to keep clean with the high humidity that can affect the vineyards.

We are just into the part of Northern Italy that is comfortable, then, with the concept of non-native grape variety. ‘It’s traditional to go for a small glass of still wine [ a ‘bicchierino’] after work - it’s always Chardonnay, Pinot Bianco’, says the Franciacorta Consozio’s Luciano Colleoni.

At Berlucchi, the largest producer in the zone, Cristina Ziliani (of the family which now owns and runs the business) explains how the French connection was central to the founding of the first Franciacorta sparkling wine by her father Franco Ziliani and Guido Berlucchi in 1961. “They called it ‘Pinot di Franciacorta’, and what did everybody think? That it was French!”, she laughs, even remembering that the first wines cheekily had Champenoise d’Italia on the labels.

After visits (including some semi-covert ones) to Champagne, the grape varieties planted, and the methods were gradually refined. Cristina remembers her father returning back from Champagne with a car full of proper sparkling wine corks which were impossible to buy locally - “the car was full of bags, they were falling out when he opened the door”, she remembers. When her father was asked how he decided how to price the wines, it was easy; “I found the price of a bottle of Moët, and I cut it in two!”.

Today, though, accusations that Franciacorta is just a local clone of Champagne don’t hold water. Yes, some producers are a little more traditional than others, and there is a predominance of large and largeish companies making wines that range from adept and pleasant to deeply impressive. There are growers too, though, worth knowing; I visited small domaines Corte Fusia and the longer-established Andrea Arici, whose wines show a different side of the region.

Both had accumulated ten to twenty hectares of land (including via some abandoned vineyards) over the last twenty years, mostly outside the main amphitheatre and nestled in striking, sometimes hidden hillsides to the East and West of the region. I asked Corte Fusia’s Daniele Gentile how many young grower domaines there were in the region working in this way. “Around ten”, he said.

Technically, agronomically, spiritually, this is a place that has no other choice than doing things its own way. This year, harvest began on July 31st. Repeated hailstorms destroyed as much as 40% of the crop. At Ca del Bosco, an entire high-altitude vineyard lost its crop with hailstone that, whilst normally the size of blueberries, where “the size of golf balls” according to founder Maurizio Zanella. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Franciacorta is pretty much the Southern ‘front line’ for making fine sparkling wine from Chardonnay and Pinots at any scale.

As such, what it’s doing to adapt and maintain its quality is worth watching closely.

At Ca del Bosco

Coming in part two - wines and tastings

Dolly the sheep, who never lived to learn that clones were getting a bad name

It’s hard to read far into most descriptions of high-minded wines without bumping into ‘massale selection’. It’s one of those terms that, unless you’re deeply into viticulture, probably prompts one of those split-second moments of foggy annoyance. I get this is meant to be good, you think, and it signifies some kind of seriousness…a sort of ‘Heritage Breed’ of wine..but what the hell does it mean, and why does it matter?*

I spoke to Jean-Baptise Lécaillon of Louis Roederer last year about the house’s long-running project to preserve historic vine material. As with most conversations with Jean-Baptiste, I came away with a semi-blown mind….but the essence, echoed in other houses with younger programmes such as Moët et Chandon, is that Champagne’s vineyard is suffering from a lack of genetic diversity.

“Twenty five years ago, everyone was thinking about new varieties, new breedings, resistant varietals…it took some time for me at the CIVC, as President of the technical committee, to say, “we should not forget this massale idea”…

Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Chef de Cave of Louis Roederer

To understand what a massale selection is, we have to go back to the first period of replanting after phylloxera (documented here for Champagne):

And, because of Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, I thought we’d do the whole thing in sheep.

Phase one - ‘pre-clonal’. A group of diverse individuals, where genetic pools stay more localised.

Imagine this is a subregion of Champagne in 1950. This jolly band of colourful sheep stays within its local area, cared by nearby farmers and small breeders. When farmers need more of their favourite sheep, they’re not going to a central Champagne Sheep Supermarket and placing an order for the same variety as a grower on the other side of the region.

“Massale selection’ for vines means selecting wood from the vineyard to propagate. In pre-clonal Champagne, the end result was that the Pinot Noir vines of one village could end up subtly different from those in a neighbouring village, which had developed very slightly differently over time through its own propagation programmes. Even within a village, there could be significant variation.

Phase two - the ‘clonal’ period. Nurseries select the highest performing genetic specimens, codify them and sell them ready-grafted to growers.

The clonal landscape - large quantities of lower genetic diversity, with a little (just the bottom row) left of pre-clonal material

The logical next step here is to hunt amongst all this developing expertise for genetic specimens that growers really want. This means, for the champagne of the 1970s in its heady days of chemically-boosted viticulture, meant high yields, easy viticulture and early ripening.

Large nurseries that serve whole regions grew during the second half of the 20th Century, selling these selections (which were developed in conjunction with the regions they were from, hence ‘Burgundy clone’ Chardonnay, for example') to growers on the promise of better profitability and reliability.

‘Clones’, then, are codified, numbered centralised selections that are shown to have specific properties. It’s important to point out, too, that many of the world’s greatest wines (and some very grand champagnes indeed) are made with clonal selections, and it’s absolutely not the case that they are always inferior. Vineyard conditions, vine age and viticulture modify clone behaviour significantly.

Today, though, questions arise. Do we want the same thing - high yields and early ripening - as the growers of the 1970s? Not always. But, further than that, is there a risk to the health of the vineyard in having lost all that genetic diversity?

Phase three - the massale revival

Where pre-clonal vineyards survive, genetics which don’t exist in the clonal system also survive.

That material is usually lower-yielding than modern clonal selections. It’s not just that, though - they’re plants that growers have observed growing in balance, producing the right sort of grapes for the wines they make, toughing out difficult seasons where traditional clonal selections might struggle.

If your estate happens to have some of these specimens, you’ll get to know them, one-by-one, by working the vineyards (if you spend enough time in them). There might be a few vines in one corner of a vineyard that show especially compact bunches and small berries that suit red wine production for sparkling rosé, for example, so you’ll take some wood from them and get it grafted to replant for a block for red wine.

But if you find some vines that offer up beautifully balanced grapes for sparkling, don’t seem prone to disease and remain regular in yield and flavour, how do you know it’s down to its genetics and not just the particular place it’s in? Is its character translatable?

The future - formalising the massale process…and coming (at least partly) full circle?

Taking sheep 51 to 60, and spreading them out in smaller quantities…

This is where trialling comes in. Cue projects like Roederer’s In Vinifera Aeternitas, or the younger Moët ‘Essentia’ project. After a selection is checked for genetic stability and hygiene (being clear of virus), it needs to be grown, tested and understood in control conditions. They also need to be protected from virus and diseases themselves, which is why the CIVC’s ‘Quanopée’ project is hermetically sealed against insect ingress, and why Roederer’s nursery is in a geographically-isolated spot in the village of Bouleuse.

Here’s Lécaillon again:

“Then we start to understand what [these selections'] are, Budbreak, flowering, ripening, rot sensitivity…what we found is that from the earliest to the latest, there is fifteen days’ difference to reach 10.5% alcohol, planted in the same plot in the same nursery, in the same conditions, on the same rootstock”.

In other words, these original Pinot Noirs - the bottom row of sheep in my graphic - are so diverse that the latest-ripening are over two weeks later to mature than the earliest. That means later to flower, later to ripen, later to everything.

With everybody wanting to stretch the growing season thanks to climate change’s efforts to shrink it, surely you should just chuck in as much of the latest-ripening material as possible?

Not quite.

The name of the game, remember, is diversity. The problem with a landscape dominated by clones is that vast swathes of the vineyard are susceptible to the same things at the same time. If sheep number 57 keels over when it gets thirsty (it’s black, increasing evapotranspiration), a drought will wipe out the whole row. Mitigate risk by having enough sheep 56 nearby. If sheep number 54 is particularly adept at passing on viruses, surround it by numbers 53 and 57, which aren’t. And so on.

The solution it to mix and match, to plant small quantities (Roederer are going with 50 vines of each at a time) of different selections in mini-blocks.

The potential

Such is the power of reassessing Champagne’s genetic material that it has turned into the most important area of Lécaillon’s work. “Of course going for Organic and cover crops is one thing. But if I had to retain one area of my work, this is the most powerful - it pushes me back to middle age where the monks in burgundy selected vines. This is the essence of it”, he says,

The story starts to come almost full circle, as programmes promise to make these massale selections commercially available…a bit like clones! The main difference is that the volume of massale selections being collated is far, far greater than the fifteen or so Pinot Noir clones recommended officially for Champagne.

Dolly, the first cloned sheep, died in 2003 as Champagne first encountered the sort of crazy-fast vintage it has dealt with on multiple occasions since. Even she might concede, today, that the world looks a bit different.

The clones aren’t going anywhere fast, but they’re getting plenty of new neighbours.

*A friend of mine founded an Indian restaurant with a great wine list called Masala Selection, but I don’t think a single customer ever got the gag**

**this didn’t actually happen, I’m just on a roll with dad jokes this summer and I’m not quite ready to stop yet

Waiting for the Tour de France riders by Place de Clichy in Paris on July 26th. Champagne’s grapes were racing hard, too, with the first picked just ten days later.

The truth is, though, that whilst harvest is great fun, it’s not a particularly useful moment other than to check on the sanitary state of the grapes. Numbers fly around—ripeness levels, dates, acidities—as well as opinions which veer from rose-tinted to overly cautious. What we don’t know yet is how good the wines will be - tasting base wines in winter is the time for that.

Here is a summary of thoughts and observations on the harvest so far, gathered from chats and public posts:

It’s the earliest Champagne harvest ever, by some margin. Although the official start date was the 12th of August, producers with especially precocious vineyards are able to ask for a ‘derogation’ to pick earlier than the date selected, village by village, by the CIVC following the centralised ‘Réseau-Matu’ maturity checks. I wrote, about a month ago, that I could scarcely believe rumours that one producer thought they might start on the 3rd of August. In the end, it seems the first grapes were picked on the 6th.

Not only is it the earliest start by a full week (from early pickers in 2020), but it’s a date on which, in years like 2008 or 2013, the grapes were not even through ‘véraison’, or the colour change that sees Pinots turn purple. It’s mind-boggling, in other words.

• It will be one of the smallest Champagne harvests of modern times (if not the smallest). Up to 8,800 kg may be vinified into champagne this year, but it is increasingly clear that both the weight and the juice yield in the vineyard will be below this and likely end up at around 7,000 kg on average, undershooting the 250 million bottles predicted, according to a video posted by the CIVC’s Sébastien Dubuisson. The small grapes are a headache; Thibaud Brocard of Pierre Brocard told me there’s “no liquid inside compared to a normal vintage. Usually we have juice coming down in the trailer. This year, not a single drop…”.

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One of the reasons it’s tricky to learn about Champagne is that it’s expensive to compare wines. How often do meals and gatherings just feature one champagne, before moving onto still wines?

If you can find an occasion to compare champagnes, though, you can start to pick up what differences in vinification, vintage and vineyard location really taste like. These three champagnes are from the same producer, with the same vinification, in the same sub-region and with the same grape variety - which means you’re really tasting the village. In this case, the cool and tricky 2021 season means the difference between the warmth and generosity of the South face of the Montagne de Reims, and the stricter, tighter character of the North face, is super clear! Even Bouzy and neighbouring Ambonnay are quite different, though. Which is my favourite in 2021….?

As a reminder, in Champagne you can think of the structure of the land like this:

The Larmat maps, made famous by their inclusion in Peter Liem’s ‘Champagne’ hardback, are the most famous example of mapping down to lieu-dit level in Champagne. They’re incomplete and a little out of date today, though (cue Charles Curtis and Steve DeLong’s project to map Champagne, which currently has accurate and attractive mapping complete for the Côte des Blancs).

What about digital, phone-friendly information, though?

Enter Swiss computer scientist Roman Blum.

“It started with the Larmat maps and Peter Liem’s book”, Blum says. “But I couldn’t take them with me into the vineyards. I got obsessed with single vineyard cuvées, but they were invisible and nobody was giving them a stage. There is Burgundy, with all their maps down to the level of who owns which vine row…why isn’t there something for Champagne?”

Going down to who owns what, row by row, is a gargantuan task that Parcelles doesn’t yet tackle. What Blum did do, though, was to take the vast amount of public data available and produce an app which integrates lieu-dit names with terrain and weather data, google earth views and emerging wine data to make a compelling ensemble for bubbleheads:

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There are conflicting signs here. On the one hand, the old-timey charm of the label, printed vintage and evidence of cellaring (rust marks perhaps indicating a metal storage rack) raised hopes of some sort of rustic gem. Seen in context of the wonky label application, the ensemble becomes less convincing, though.

I have a glass before me as I type. I’ll get to how it tastes in a minute, but first, the crucial question; how, as a wine bore, does one deal with such a wine?

Firstly, there is the option to not drink it. This seems perfectly acceptable, until you realise that you do want to drink other wines during that week. You must go to shops, and buy these (nicer) wines, consume them, and then - the sticking point - place the bottles in the recycling. This is where, as an Englishman with highly-attuned worries about offending people, things get complicated.

Imagine the reaction if this kindly host discovered that The English had actually gone out to purchase wines instead of drinking the FREE WINE they had given you? Who do they think they are?

OK, so the next option is to open it, suffer a glass (or cook with it), and pour the rest down the sink.

The price to pay in this respect is that you artificially inflate your own recycling output. Worse, though, is the malaise which comes with pouring wine - any wine - down a sink in a non-professional setting. It’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re spending some kind of celestial currency - that you’ll reach purgatory to find one half of the balance holding“mostly kind, sound personal hygiene, law-abiding”, and the other groaning under “wasted perfectly good Picpoul”.

The next option is to drink whatever you want, but then take the time to visit a nearby bottle bank. This is probably the most complete solution, although if you’re English you won’t have time because you’ll have spent too long cleaning up for the cleaner. For the second year in a row, an AirBnB host has asked us to look after its animals*, which we’re actually delighted to do…but I’m envisaging a last-morning refresh of the chicken coop is going to come before a jolly to the recycling centre.

Option four. Things are getting a little convoluted. Open the bottle, remove (either into your being or into the drainage system) an amount which looks like it may have been enjoyed, and leave the rest stoppered. In the presence of other empty bottles in the recycling, this could say I saved your lovely bottle till last but we just couldn’t quite get through it - but I’ve left some here in case you or the cleaner wants it. This hits many high notes. Modesty. Generosity. Politeness.

Or, interpreted the other way around, it says we opened your bottle first and it was rank, so we bought some other stuff. But if you really like it you can have the rest.

Do you see, now? There’s just no good option.

Except one. Drink it.

Drink it down, come what may.

So here we are. I tend to drink pretty ordinary wine on holiday. The heat is preventing me from self-analysing this trait with enough rigour, but a decent interrogation might arrive at the following question; are you afraid that if you bought good wine, you’d have to think about it?

Either this, or it’s because my wife sees me shopping on holiday so it’s my chance to prove to her that I can be a frugal wine purchaser. Just a normal guy, buying 9 Euro Rosé. That’s me, honest (although all the money I didn’t spend will be spaffed on very fine cheeses, breads, vegetables and charcuterie, all of which can be readily matched for quality in London, but for three times the price).

Back to the flavour of this wonky Fronsac. It’s a lot better than I was fearing. A bit cooked and a touch too old, very figgy, going treacly and a bit naive in baking-spice sweetness (reminds me a of panforte)….maybe the wine rack assessment was accurate, but I’m less convinced this has sojourned in a model cellar. It has lived fast, and is in the process of dying young.

There’s quite a nice muskiness about it, though, and a waft of cherry and blackcurrant fruit that is more confit, to be generous, than baked. Then some heat, liqueur-like, and the unceremonious landing of a hot, juicy dollop of slightly wonky Merlot that weirdly still manages, in its slightly charcoaly-vegetal-angularity, to taste like Bordeaux. No, cheap Bordeaux doesn’t taste like International Red Wine Blend. It tastes like cheap Bordeaux.

Its fate? It has already been open for two days, and although it’s fine today it tasted better yesterday. I bought some pretty OK Muscadet and rosé during the big family shop, which unlike the wonky Fronscac will get consumed in their entirety - but they won’t have the honour of being immortalised on Substack.

Which reminds me; I’m on holiday. Next week, I will be looking after chickens, and recycling. I’ll see you after that, when I hope to be catching some harvesting (but not, this year, in Champagne).

*We had to look after a tortoise last time in Bordeaux. This time (not in Bordeaux, thankfully), it’s chickens and a cat. We still have to pay extra for towels, though - do domestic holidayers travel with your own towels? I guess you do! This household feels, though, that looking after chickens should earn you free towels.

England remains a fascinating test bed for sparkling wine, and even for those readers outside England I’d encourage reading on. Some of the questions we face here are the same as Champagne first tried to solve almost a hundred years ago, whilst others are completely new.

First, a graph. To inevitable groans from some quarters, it’s about how much English Sparkling Wine is being made, with projections up to 2036. Using a combination of Food Standards and WineGB data, it shows:

• How much sparkling wine is being bottled. This forecasts 10 million bottles in frost-affected 2026, and then follows average production levels for the productive planted area (if it remains frozen at 5,000 hectares) reaching full production in 2026/7. It assumes a split of 73% sparkling production continuing as per the long-term average.

• Sparkling wine ready for sale - 4 years from harvest on average (some will be less, some more, most business models will be built on this sort of timeframe though)

• Sparkling wine sales, assuming a 2% year-on-year growth for 2025 onwards

• A running surplus of sparkling wine - how much has remained unsold to that date

On paper, the enormous 2023 harvest looks set to kick off a growth in surplus that is very hard to slow down.

The issue with predictions about English oversupply, though, is that they don’t tell the story producer-by-producer - and there’s plenty of optimism in some quarters. “We had exactly this situation with the 2018 vintage” says consultant and ex-Hattingley Valley winemaker Emma Rice. “Everyone at the time was very negative, saying ‘you’re never going to sell it’ - but the 2018s have mostly sold through”. Against a backdrop of rapidly-declining Champagne sales, England has so far held steady, maintaining 2023’s sales figures into 2024 (in effect a growth in market share - 2025 figures are not released yet).

There’s still plenty of expansion either by vineyard plantation or fruit purchase going on amongst successful smaller and mid-sized producers too, with Nyetimber and Chapel Down still holding significant vineyard hectarage yet to produce. Optimism, in other words, is very much still in the room.

A good time to buy grapes?

As with the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc boom and bust, though, the first sign of an imbalance is softening fruit prices. “I’m being offered a lot of fruit”, says Rice, who points out that Essex still wine fruit is dropping from highs of £4000 per tonne to closer to £3000, and that last year sparkling wine producers were “hoovering up” grapes for under £1000 per tonne (around one eighth the price of Champagne grapes) on the spot market - “barely enough to cover the picking”.

Fruit prices dropped in 2023 thanks to the abundance and lack of tank space, but this year’s frost-affected harvest won’t be anything like that size. This is a full-on buyer’s market.

Speak to successful producers, then, and all is hunky-dory. Those buying fruit are happy with lower prices (at least for the spot market), and sales amongst the well-established names remain largely solid. Even when you look at the financial troubles of producers such as Gusbourne, Chapel Down, Ridgeview, Hambledon and Rathfinny, they’re tales of ballooning costs, debt interest and cash shortages more than they are poor sales performances.

The question mark in terms of market is larger for the newer names, the heavily-invested farmers with higher growing costs, mid-size producers and those without the resources available to put into selling. The parts of the industry that don’t always grab (or try to make) the headlines, in other words.

“It’s the guys in the middle who are producing too much to sell locally but don’t have the resources to pay 100k a year plus for sales guys”, says Rice, who also believes that both larger producers able to export and sell to larger multiples, and small producers selling “10 to 20,000 bottles” locally, are relatively well-set.

With so many privately-funded companies not publishing accounts, it’s hard to get a picture of where this unsold wine is hiding; a significant portion is still on its way from the expansion of Nyetimber, Chapel Down and MDCV, all of whom theoretically have the machinery needed to raise their sales to match it.

How much, though, is the product of what Rice calls the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality? Somewhere in these figures lurks a lot of wine without a plan.

Smoothing out the bumps

Let’s knock one idea on the head; England is never going to have a centralised mechanism for controlling how much wine is made. “There would be uproar, resignations, questions in the House, revolution even!” says industry veteran Stephen Skelton MW.

What about reserve wines, though? Even putting aside quality advantages, wouldn’t more of a reserve wine buffer avoid gluts of particular vintages hitting the market at the same time or aging for too long on (or off) lees? Isn’t it more cost-efficient, prudent and beneficial for quality to keep good reserve wine in bulk than to over-bottle?

English sparkling wine producers don’t keep a lot of reserve wine by Champagne standards, with Nyetimber possessing the most comprehensive reserve wine system in the country. Skelton is sceptical, though, that producers will move in this direction, preferring simply to bottle what they have. “The only real way to dispose of excess stock is to cut and run, slash the price and take the hit”, he says. “Not many people are prepared to do that - it’s easier to build another warehouse and store it in bottle”, adding that the “expertise” in managing proper reserve wine systems is not really there.

Bottling is expensive though, and part of the reason that companies ran into cash problems dealing with large vintages. “Honestly it would have bankrupted Hattingley to bottle all of 2018 and 2019” explains Rice, who used the generous yields to build a 100,000 litre reserve wine system. “It’s the cost of bottles, cages, storage space… Hattingley had to build a warehouse just to house 2019!”

Rice is keen to point out just how difficult it is for young producers to hold back wine, even if it does make long-term sense. “We do learn a lot from champagne, but we haven’t taken all the lessons on board”, she says. “When you first start, you want to get as much into bottle as soon as possible. By default the first few wines are vintage, then it becomes ‘this is what we do’. It would take a very brave person to start off in the reserve wine track”.

Brave, and wealthy. The extra tanks, space, maintenance and delayed recoupment on investment involved in creating a system that, as in Champagne, stores an entire harvest in reserve, is considerable. Reserves need to be stored in large volumes to protect them, and there has to be an experienced winemaker to know which wines are best suited.

Some, such as Black Chalk and Gusbourne, have the sites and expertise to make vintage-only work beautifully. For smaller producers ( and especially those working with contract winemaking), a long-term reserve strategy is almost impossible, and they’ll be faced with bottling single vintages that vary wildly in quality and quantity.

How does balance return?

In short, planting for sparkling not expanding, a globally trend-bucking increase in sales and exports (the graph below showing 5% year on year), and a rebalancing towards an even split with still wine production (dropping 2% per year) will start to shrink the gap between wine ready for sale and sales by the early 2030s.

Just as likely, though, is a very rapid switch in still wine production; it wouldn’t surprise me if sparkling turns out to be sub-65% in 2026, or even lower.

Once again, though, a broad industry-wide pattern like this doesn’t really tell the story on the ground, producer-by-producer. Many will have no surplus at all. Some will successfully sell off wines, whilst others will move to selling more grapes at attractive prices, undercutting those on longer-term contracts and fueling the profitability of producers who have the engines and manpower to raise sales (something we’re already seeing happen).

Larger, more efficient vineyards will hold advantages if grape prices slide, too. When I spoke to Henry Sugden of Defined Wines about how it was possible for a group of producers to turn out their ‘Mighty Wren’ English still wines at a £4 to £5 trade price, his answer was clear - they only work with farmers who have enough vineyard scale to keep the fruit prices competitive.

It’s tempting to pivot to still wine, although even if you do have suitable grapes (far from guaranteed), the risk is in the pressure to sell it young, as Rice points out in reference to the popular choice of re-purposing Pinot Noir originally destined for sparkling to still rosé. “There’s a time limit on rosé - it’s a risk if you don’t sell it, but with sparkling there’s not the same sense of urgency”, she says, as the wines can rest protected on lees for longer, potentially improving.

The overproduction of English sparkling isn’t some kind of cloud hanging over the whole industry. It’s patchy weather, localised, unpredictable, disruptive to some, barely noticeable to others, terminal to a few. Eventually, it will resolve itself.

If I had crystal ball, at the moment I’d expect it to say something like this; if producers can avoid growing too fast, cut through to trade and press with strong identities and great wines, make the most of commercial opportunities and listen to what sells (and not what they want to make), they can thrive. If anyone finds a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, I’d just as soon advise them spend it trying to make great English Sparkling as I would send them anywhere else; the potential is that high.

30% of that pot, though, ought to be going straight into reserve wine…

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My report on England’s wines for the Wine Advocate in the US is due out this summer, in which I’ve selected around 50-60 wines out of hundreds tasted. Keep posted.

The weird and confusing aspect of reserve wine in Champagne is that it has a split personality; on the one hand it’s an aesthetic tool, yes. But the other side - and what we’re looking at today - is that it’s a highly regulated economic tool. And it’s pretty interesting.

This is a very clever system, designed so that:

• Growers have an insurance policy for bad harvests

• Houses get an assurance that their supply will not fluctuate wildy

• The region overall avoids wild swings in production

The main takeaways:

• You can think of an R.I. a bit like an account of spare base wine held by every grower (physically kept in the cellars of the house they are supplying). It’s only allowed to be bottled when the authorities unblock it.

• Growers get paid when the R.I. is unblocked and used in a champagne, not when it is harvested and delivered.

• Effectively there is little difference between an R.I. and the grapes of a harvest - as a grower you use both to fulfil your contract, and your R.I. will be used to reach the appellation yield if your vineyard doesn’t produce enough. As a grower you don’t have a choice as to whether your R.I. is used.

• Because you can swap out R.I. from lesser harvests for better quality R.I., in theory the R.I. should only improve in quality over time.

• With the new credit system, if a grower falls below the appellation yield even with R.I., their account will go negative. Any surplus production in the next three years will go straight into appellation wine of the house they supply to replace that deficit. Only after your deficit is paid will excess go into topping up your R.I. (This has benefits for growers in that they can recoup losses straight after tough harvests, such as with 2021, but it can also reduce the amount of R.I. a producer can build up, reducing their insurance)

• R.I. becomes part of the negotiation for each year’s permitted yield (appellation) - when this is low and growers don’t receive much income immediately, being allowed to put wine into R.I. can be used to offset this (so long as there’s space within the permitted maximum level).

• You can still keep reserve wine outside of the R.I. system as a producer, by choosing not to bottle all your appellation wine.

Confused? Watch the 4 minute video below (maybe get a cup of tea first). I put some soothing guitar music on it, if that helps.

It only took me about four years to understand (most of) this system, so if you’re even getting half of it after 4 minutes you’re doing well!

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The non-negotiables of derangement, avarice, insularity and tone-deafness are covered, after all. He’d benefit, too, from the fact that, unlike the US presidency, not a single person actually knows what the FIFA president is supposed to be doing. The only snag might come up when the interview turns to corruption credentials; at least when the Qataris bribed FIFA their prize was a World Cup, not regional war and economic strangulation. Oops.

Most attractive to the flaccid tangerine, though, would be the ability to continue his favourite pursuit - pissing off Europe. Many of us, I suspect, fantasised last night about proud continentals taking a stand against the comical corruption of USA striker Folarin Balogun’s ‘suspended’ red card. Steadfast Belgians! Hold the line for decency and integrity! Brussels Sprouts: Corruption Out!

But no, they played. And, boringly, they won. They let the football do the talking, as the pundits would say. In the end, FIFA president Gianni Infantino was even criticised by former President Sepp Blatter, who asked “Quo Vadis, FIFA?”. If you look up and see Sepp Blatter taking the high ground, then it’s probably best not to look down.

Why am I writing about football, though? I’m not sure. Wine is close at hand, but this summer is turning into a strange brew. Am I alone in feeling like I’m not quite sure where I am any more?

I attended the Louis Roederer 250th anniversary in Reims two weeks ago, and the feeling was already starting then. Granted, summer often feels a bit dream-like when you work with Europeans, who view the period from mid-July until the end-of August as a de-facto slacking time whether or not they are technically on holiday or not. Here in the UK we tend to make a fine point of working hard during August, as if to prove our protestant industriousness to you spritz-sipping, zoom-sales-call-by-the-pool continentals….whilst knowing, deep-down, that you have it all worked out.

Forty degrees, in houses designed to squirrel away every joule of heat offered by coal fires and cruel summers, may yet break us.

It was so hot in Reims that Roederer had to move a whole live music and theatre show (with its four-hundred person audience) from the Opera House to the (air-conditioned) regional assembly. Poignancy, much? The one Champagne house that has arguably done more to improve and future-proof Champagne vineyards against climate change than any other, being forced to move a celebration years in the planning from a place of art and culture to an actual seat of political power - because the climate has gone rogue?

Daytime temperatures in Reims next week are maxing out at between 34C and 37C. Everyone I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks is expressing a mixture of bewilderment, exhaustion and anxiety. I saw Alice Paillard of Champagne Bruno Paillard in London last week, and she told me that the vineyard team are “basically finished” since all the work tied to the vegetative cycle of the vine is pretty much done. Not normal.

In Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, teams at both Paul Girard-Bonnet and Guy Charlemagne were getting up at 4am to work the vineyards in order to stop by 11/12pm, when temperatures made it unsafe. Paul, looking fresher than many after the Champagne & Hip Hop event that everyone and their dog attended, showed me some sunburnt grapes he had found at the end of June. Not normal, either.

This has now been going on for weeks on end. Vines in Le Mesnil, although recovering in places from hard Spring frosts, were not yet showing hydric stress, where heat and water depletions shuts down ripening and vines switch into pure survival mode, but with few signs of rain on the horizon it seems inevitable. I heard multiple rumours of one Champagne producer planning to start harvest on August 3rd (which, if true, must be for a very small/unusual/low yielding/exceptionally advanced plot), although I’ll believe it when I see it. The actual date, though, looks likely to be earlier than ever before.

What will 2026’s grapes taste like? Anybody’s guess. After a good fruit set for unfrosted vines, two growers on the Montagne de Reims told me that the extreme heat and dryness is slowing down the expected growth of the bunches, and that they really need some rain to unlock the next phase of ripening.

Really, really small grapes pushing into August are not really what’s wanted for sparkling wine. Hot, dry years mean the juice:solids ratio inside the grapes is too low, and extracting the allowed amount of juice from a marc (4000kg) of grapes pressed too much bitterness and stalkiness from the grapes. “In 2015 the ratio was really bad, and people squeezed too hard”, explained Quentin Paillard at Pierre Paillard in Bouzy.

2015’s allowed yield was higher, at 10,000kg, than 2026’s will be, so there will be less incentive to press hard if this year’s harvest also features low juice volumes. Even so, it looks likely to be yet another harvest where the dynamic is defined by contradictions between flavour and technical ripeness. Growers don’t want to be picking on dropping acidity or high alcohol, but there is a limit to how far both can be pushed.

We’ve had our share of heatwaves summers recently, from 2018 to 2020 and 2022. 2026 just feels different, though. More than just the weather, it’s the dissonance between the pure inertia of relentless heat and the turbulence of everything we know is really happening beyond the garden fence, the treeline, the vineyard. It feels like a fever dream.

When it breaks, finally, maybe some of us will take stock and find more that we can do. I think I will.

And to my American readers: don’t feel bad. The universe may be throwing us a lot of ‘curveballs’ in 2026, but the potential fallout of the U.S.A. beating Belgium thanks to a Big Don and Gianni stitch-up is one we’re all better off for having dodged. We love you over here, really. Just don’t break soccer, please.

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A bonus video taken during the last heatwave (June 24th) from the Chétillon lieu-dit in Le Mesnil-sur Oger:

It’s easier to follow lines. So, I’ve come up with a neat and easy ‘skeleton’ of the whole of Champagne which, at least for my brain, helps place everything.

It starts with the rivers:

First step - VAMPAS

Starting North to South, you can remember VAMPAS - Vesle, Ardre, Marne, Petit Morin, Aube and Seine. On the graphic, I’ve also included the Laigne, the Ource and the Arce, the tributaries of the Seine that form the valleys of the Bar Séquannais in the Côte des Bar (also, confusingly, all bundled up as ‘The Aube’ even for the vineyards on the Seine, because that’s the name of the administrative department.)

Let’s head South and fill in the vineyard regions (these are somewhat simplified for ease of understanding)

Try out the (beta) Directory App!

If you want the heads up on over 350 Champagne producers, my Directory app is in testing mode and any Six Atmospheres Subscriber can try it out. It’s web-based for now, meaning you don’t have to install anything - just bookmark the page. Register above, and have a go!

Second step - the Northern Group

(This map is a little simplified, as the Ardre and Vesle vineyards are rather spread-out and discontinuous in truth)

If you’re going to divide up Champagne, I would argue that the Massif de Saint Thierry, Vesle, Ardre and Petite Montagne could be grouped together. We’re almost exclusively out of the chalk here, on often newer, sandier soils dominated by Meunier.

The growers on the Petite Montagne often term themselves ‘Montagne de Reims’ - and many of the villages are traditionally ‘Premier Cru’ rated. It’s a great area for indie champagnes, although for me they’re quite distinct from the ‘Grande Montagne’, coming up next…

Third Step - the celebrities

A bit like a ‘P’ shape straddling the Marne, the Montagne de Reims, Grande Vallée and Côte des Blancs contain all of Champagne’s ‘Grand Cru’ rated villages, with plenty of the classic Cretaceous chalk soils. The Côte des Blancs and Eastern edge of the Montagne de Reims are Chardonnay territory. Elsewhere, Pinot Noir rules (with a little Meunier in the North of the Montagne.

Fourth Step - Meunier and more

The Val du Petit Morin and Coteaux Sud d’Épernay, although geographically near the Côte des Blancs and sometimes featuring some chalky soils and a fair amount of Chardonnay, also feature plenty of Meunier, which heads Westwards in Champagne along the Vallée de la Marne on both sides of the river. Planting in the Marne Valley is more diverse than people realise, though - there’s increasing amounts of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir here, too.

Then there are the two other major Chardonnay subzones - the Sézanne and the Vitryat. The Sézanne is arguably closer to the Côte des Blancs in style, topography and soil. The Vitryat is on the same, older chalk soils as Montgueux. There are few growers in either, although that’s slowly changing.

Fifth Step - the Aube, and the whole picture.

The Côte des Bar vineyards surround the Seine and Aube rivers and their tributaries. Montgueux sneaks into this department, too, with its old chalk soils that also pop up in the Vitryat with equivalent Chardonnay dominance.

And there we have it - North to South, river-by-river.

Now you know what’s where, if you’re interested in Champagne’s Geology - why, for example, I might have grouped the Petite Montagne with the Ardre and Vesle and not the Montagne de Reims - here’s a video:

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Or, for me, English wine month!

I have been tasting, and visiting, a lot, in preparation for another report coming out in the US for The Wine Advocate. I have been rating English wines for a while - most notably for the large-scale Tim Atkin reports on England in 2022 and 2023 - but I still find it harder job than Champagne. Why is that?

Hi-drinkability; dosage trials and current wines as Balfour Winery last week

Let’s take a real-world scenario. I have a very solid, diverse wine-drinking circle. Many of them are regular English sparkling wine buyers (and even tourists), and between us we even have a decent stock of older English sparkling that does get wheeled out from time to time. Every year the quality ceiling rises, and amongst this European circle, devoid of any naturally-enthusiastic Brits, the opinion of the wines has consistently grown.

The other week we cracked a few good bottles. Eventually, I poured a particular English sparkling wine which notable voices have highly praised as one of England’s best. Would my drinking buddies be impressed?

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The trouble is that the Substack format isn’t really suited to this kind of information. So, I’ve put it into a no-frills, accessible web-based directory app. Currently, it is for Champagne only, with just over 350 producers listed. As a Six Atmospheres subscriber, you can now have a go!

Before you jump in, here’s what it does, and how to use it:

You can see my favourites, producers I’m watching, and producers on fire.

This isn’t a platform for formal tasting notes, points or individual wine reviews (yet…) - it’s for those moments you need a quick steer.

• A heart is for producers I just really like - ones I’m always happy to recommend, or that I’ll say ‘go for it’ on a restaurant wine list.

• A ‘watch’ means producers I’m interested in following, either because I’ve had some really good wines but not a complete, consistent picture yet, or because promising changes are playing out under the hood.

• And fire…well those are producers on top form throughout their portfolios.

Every producer is geotagged, so you can explore my personal world of champagne on the map.

I wanted this to be a useful resource if you find yourself visiting the region. I’ve even listed if producers are open to visitors, and website links to arrange visits. If you’re in the region, you can see where you are on the map, and see nearby producers. You can browse around the map, and see the entry of any producer tagged.

How to access it

This app is web-based - it’s not in the app store/android store, but will open in your browser on a mobile, tablet or computer. On a mobile or tablet, you can “add to home screen”, which will place an icon on your home screen to access it quickly.

During this testing stage, all subscribers can access the app, although eventually the full app will be for paid subscribers.

Register using the same email address as you use for your account on this Substack, and choose a password (this doesn’t have to be the same). Email address is the only data collected, although the app will ask permission for location data to use the map functionality. This data is not stored.

What’s next

This is still a beta, just for subscribers here - let me know what’s working, and what’s not, for you! I’m updating producers on a rolling basis, but do let me know if you spot any errors. Please don’t share the app, or post about it, yet.

I will be adding new regions, too - starting with the major European sparkling wine regions that I’m the most up-to-date on.

When bugs are ironed out and everything is working smoothly, I’ll launch the app fully. I have bigger plans, too, of course….but one step at a time!

Try out the Directory App!

A reminder: Register with the email address you use here, and set a new password. You’ll be logged straight in.

“We have to keep in mind the objective of selling 300 million bottles - it’s an essential level to preserve balance in Champagne”

Maxime Toubart, president of the association of Champagne’s growers (the SGV), writing in their magazine ‘La Champagne Viticole’

La Champagne Viticole is a magazine for growers who sell grapes for a living. It’s not for consumers, or marketers, or press (although they do let me subscribe, which not all the trade bodies do!). What it offers, though, is insight into what grape growers are thinking about. Business, in other words. And business means yields.

Champagne sales remain sluggish, with April’s sales figures showing a levelling-off from the modest recovery shown in the preceding two months (with a particular slowdown in ‘grower’ champagne and in the French market).

Despite this, the grower’s association and its president are concerned that the vineyard is degrading, and an upturn in demand could see production caught short.

Is this just a standard case of Champagne high-yield greed, or is there a real problem?

The facts, as presented by the SGV and CIVC:

• Over the last 15 years, the vineyard has lost one quarter of its production.

  • This is not because of vines being pulled up - this is because of changes to viticulture (more working of the soils and less fertilisation), disease and virus pressure, and ageing vines - the latter reportedly responsible for one third of the drop.

• The average age of vines in Champagne has grown from 21 years in 1998 to 36 years today.

  • The culture of pulling up older vineyards when yields started to drop has fallen away to some degree as the understanding of how to plant and prune better has started to enable growers to keep healthier vines for longer. Still, according to the CIVC, a vine of more than 30 years age produces 8 to 10 bunches per m2, compared to 13 to 14 for a vine of 15-25 years - a difference of 3 to 5 tonnes per hectare! Sébastien Debuisson, technical director of the CIVC, thinks the region should work towards a realistic average age or 40-50 years.

• A “young and healthy” vineyard could have a maximum potential yield of an enormous 22,500kg, or nearly 19,000 bottles, per hectare (a number I have certainly seen in Champagne, especially in Chardonnay, although it is far above the authorised appellation maximum), but the current average potential is around 16,000kg with an actual agronomic (what is on the vines) average of 11,900 kg, or about 10,000 bottles per hectare, over the last 10 years. In the 1950s, this was around 5,000 kg, or only 4,000 bottles. For comparison, the average yields in Premier Cru Chablis are the equivalent of 5-7000 bottles per hectare, with Grand Cru red Burgundy much lower again.

On the surface, the story looks like this; greedy Champenois value their huge yields over the heritage of their old vineyards, and are overly-optimistic that sales will recover enough to absorb them.

Is the truth a little more complex?

The case for the defence - yes, Champagne needs to replant more

The arguments:

“Old vines” doesn’t always mean “good vines”

Vines from quantity-driven clonal selections that have been poorly pruned, or were poorly planted, or established in poorly-worked vineyards where compacted and dead soils give rise to poor root structures, aren’t assets just because they’re old. Not only yields, but drought resistance and climate-change resilience would often be improved by new, high-quality plantings (including the possibility to aid genetic diversity of the vineyard by planting more massale selections or varied rootstocks).

The rates of decline shown by the SGV eventually drop Champagne’s vineyard below what is needed to maintain even current (low) sales:

To maintain 2025’s sales of 170 million litres of Champagne over a vineyard area of 34,300 hectares requires approximately 5000 litres of must to be produced per hectare. This requires approximately 7.8 tonnes per hectare of grapes. This is very, very low for Champagne.

Still: starting from the 10-year average of agronomic yield, if the vineyard continues age 2 years for every 1 and yields continue to drop by 200kg per hectare per year (an extrapolation of the 15-year yield drop reported), then by 2045 the region’s agronomic yield would drop below 7.8 tonnes per hectare. If sales recovered to 300 million bottles, the current rate of decline would see the average production dip below the required level by 2034.

Is that sort of decline really realistic though?

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I can’t describe how little I wanted to play Bach when I was younger. Listen, sometimes. Play? Much less so. Learning Bach as a teenager is a bit like learning to cook via the Larousse Gastronomique. It’s got everything in it you could really need, but the format doesn’t make any concessions to the impatient, or disorganised of thought.

Rachmaninoff! Chopin! Debussy! Jazz! A few blurry lines, a little pedal, a little colourism - that’s what I wanted. And, living in the middle of the countryside with no means of escape until the procurement of a driving license at seventeen, that’s what I got.

Even as a professional jazz pianist years later, friends would be astonished when I told them that I was probably a better pianist, at least as a technician, upon leaving school then I ever was appearing on stages, recordings and radio stations. Like any job, you adapt your skills to what’s needed, and I didn’t need to play double-handed trills, or thunderous double-octave passages - or pretty much anything fast at all in the left hand - in the world of contemporary jazz. Whilst my musicality improved, my technique didn’t.

Covid, then, was a rupture. Gigs, teaching and income disappeared. We had a toddler, and a half-renovated house. Both placed large demands on resources. I felt the urge to write music, yes, but when it came to practising and playing contemporary jazz, Covid was a period of skin-shedding. I continued to teach piano, and to gig and record, especially with one quite successful group founded just before the pandemic and called, somewhat inadvertently, The Antidote. Musically, though, all I really wanted to do in my own time was write.

As the idea of wine writing and reviewing as a complementary career stated moving from impossible to merely inadvisable (a status in which it still resides), the urge to actually sit down purposefully at the piano started to surface once again. To this day, though, I wonder why I didn’t go back to the thing that actually brought me success - improvising, advanced contemporary harmonies, small groups. By any measure, this was what I was actually good at.

No, the first thing I picked up was my old grey hardback Bach Preludes and Fugues, bought when my piano teacher at Oxford, an immaculate gent called Raymond Fischer, insisted I put some daemons to rest. I’ll never be a great Bach player. Few are, really. Later, I picked up my collection of Beethoven Sonatas, which are perhaps little more forgiving:

Explaining what I’m practising in a Beethoven Piano Sonata

…but even those are played in the knowledge that I’ll never quite be the classical player I could have been. I was good - good enough to take Grade 8 at thirteen and do the rounds of local piano competitions - but never driven enough to drill out the four hours a day of practise it took to get into Conservatoire on the classical track. When I finished with my Chopin aged fourteen, I’d go up to my bedroom, sling my electric guitar around my neck and try and play along to Steve Vai records.

So why, now. am I suddenly looking forward to my tube trips thanks to Bach, Schubert and Beethoven? Why do I relish those fifteen minutes a day after the kids are out of the door when the piano is unoccupied (so long as my wife, a very good amateur pianist, doesn’t get there first?) Is the rekindling of love for the classics just a drift to old-farthood, or a case of unfinished business?

Perhaps, after a break and a new career, playing jazz just reminds me too much of the pressure, entirely placed on one person’s abilities and mentality, of making music into the thing that pays the bills. I’m wading back, maybe, into a sense of safety that was always there in classical music, borne of the knowledge that I was never quite good enough to have to confront the idea of it as a career.

Or maybe it’s as simple as knowing that, in a life now full to the brim with self-employment and parenting, neither of which come without instruction manuals or bosses, there’s comfort in a page full of dots, written by someone three hundred years ago who only asks you to bring them to life correctly, in the right order, and according to what you imagine was the spirit of their conception.

You start at the top and, although it’s difficult, you can see the end. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t disappear, the game doesn’t change. Today, somehow, that feels pretty reassuring.

However, the Aube (which contains the viticultural area known as the ‘Côte des Bar’) is actually a major part of Champagne today. Some stats (note that some stats do not include Montgueux in the Aube, but I have included it here, in statistics from the Union des Maisons de Champagne)

• 8,106 hectares of vines, or 24% of the vineyard area of Champagne

• Approximately 83% Pinot Noir, 13% Chardonnay, 3% Meunier, 1% other varieties (mostly Pinot Blanc)

• 65 winemaking villages, approximately 2,600 growers. This means the average size of a domaine is around 3 hectares, much larger than, for example, the 1.35 hectares in the Côte des Blancs

Map from the Union des Maisons de Champagne

With fewer visitors and no ‘Grand Cru’ labels to slap on bottles, producers here have to stick together to promote their wines. When I contacted the ‘Empreinte Côte des Bar’ group hosted by Delphine Brulez at Champagne Louise Brison last year, the growers all turned up together, bringing bottles, food, lighting a fire, tasting together (and I have a feeling that the afternoon continued for a while after I left). I’m not saying that never happens for a wine reviewer in the Marne. But it hasn’t happened yet.

The Empreinte Côte des Bar group

Sticking together is always hard-wired into the Aubois pysche. As the Marnois riotied over the concurrence of a cost of living crisis and ‘foreign’ wines being brought in to the region, the Aubois were fighting their designation, in 1908, as those very foreign wines - despite the fact they (mostly) considered themselves true Champenois!

This week’s post is a digestible timeline into the events that took place.

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Tom

I was going to follow on from last week’s piece on the Champagne riots in 1911:

…with the next chapter of the story featuring the vignerons of the Aube. That will now wait until next week, though, because I have BIG NEWS!

I may have solved a mystery. Or at least partially solved it. A mystery that has its genesis on the mean streets of East London, where foxes roam, and curries foam.

I have kept a bag of fresh curry leaves - from the ‘Bergera Koenigii’ bush - in the freezer ever since we went to Sri Lanka. On the way home, I bought an old-fashioned Sri Lankan cookery book that offers such advice as “if the following simple rules are followed, the housewife need never spend more than 1.5 hours in the preparation of a rice and curry meal for 6-8 persons and the tidying up of the kitchen afterwards”. Well, this housewife isn’t that efficient. But I cook quite a lot from it.

Apart from humans, my quartier of London is frequented by large numbers of foxes. When we moved into our current house, we had a family living under the dilapidated outbuilding that became the music studio. The babies still come and peer in through the glazing.

The foxes mark their territory with pungent urine rich in volatile sulphur compounds. A well-trained Londoner can sense the presence of foxes as clearly as they can sense the presence of anyone born north of Hertfordshire (we just know, you don’t have to say anything). It’s a really distinctive smell - burnt rubbery, feral, smoky. Curry leafy.

Few, I imagine, have troubled themselves with exploring the conviction that fox piss and curry leaves smell very, very similar. Well, this was my moment to shine. And this, completely unhinged and unedited, is my forum.

The plot thickens

Things started to get a little weirder when I began clocking the exact same smell in wines. It was coming across to me very much as what’s known as a reductive aroma, although more accurately one should say it is sulphidic, or belonging to a group of volatile sulphur compounds that are associated primarily with winemaking techniques that limit oxygen contact during fermentation and ageing. But let’s use reductive, because that’s what everyone says.

When very prominent, this one wasn’t a nice reductive character either (although I still clock it subtly in some wines that I really love). It’s not that classic gunflint/matchstick, Chardonnay and Burgundy thing - it’s a bit savoury, a bit burnt. A bit foxy. Less attractive.

To be clear this is not really a ‘reduction’ fault, either, which is quite a specific set of things to me (from egginess to fartiness to overt rubberiness). It’s rather a tint, an off-kilter take on deliberate reductiveness. I saw others taste it and say ‘ah, it’s reductive’. To me, it’s a bit of a misfire, especially when it’s very prominent.

Now, with three points of reference, I reckoned I could narrow things down. The single compound which fits foxes, reductive winemaking and what research has shown as the main aromatic signature of curry leaves (as well as fenugreek) may be:

1-phenylethanethiol (and specifically the ‘S’ mirror)

The issue - it has never been formally identified in wine! It operates as such a low detection threshold that it is very hard to measure with machinery. So its actual presence is only theoretical, really. But it, or something like it, is quite possibly there.

It’s not you, it’s me

First, though, a preface - our thresholds for detecting volatile sulphur compounds have been shown to vary by as much 3,400 times in this recent study looking at related compounds caused by smoke taint!

Perhaps I just pick this one up relatively strongly?

It seems likely. It’s a reminder not to be triggered into claiming that judgements based on this sort of thing are universal. All I can say is that, 9 times out of 10, when I find this aroma strongly, the wine wouldn’t strike me as a great one even if it wasn’t there. I’m proceeding on the basis that if it’s slightly unpleasant for me, it’s likely negative for others too, even if on a lesser scale.

Out in the wild

I attended a large tasting of Champagne’s still wines, ‘Coteaux Champenois’ (above) this week. The standard has definitely improved, and there are lots of good wines in both red and white (I’ll be writing about these soon, for Decanter at least). I still generally find the reds are better aligned than the whites, which is perhaps not surprising given Champagne is historically a still Pinot region!

Still Chardonnay winemaking here does seem prone to leaning into some off-kilter reductive characters, though. I’m not saying all Coteaux Blanc smells of curry leaves (or fox piss), but I was picking up more of this character than the sort of positive reductiveness you find in Burgundy, or in high quality global Chardonnay.

What I suspected - and now have a little more evidence for - is that some winemakers may be attempting to pull off nice reductive aromas, but are slightly missing the mark. How so?

The common starting ground: slightly stressed yeast.

Keeping yeast slightly underfed with nitrogen is a classic way to ferment Chardonnay. Stressed yeast produce hydrogen sulphide, or H2S, that is the first ingredient - but very much NOT, in its eggy fartiness, the final desired end product - in positive reductive profiles. We need it, though, to join up with other compounds to form nice reductiveness.

If your must is really low in nutrition though (yeast-assimilable nitrogen, or YAN), then the yeasts can misbehave and start producing undesirable reductive aromas. Is low nutrient status more of a problem in Champagne than in Burgundy, perhaps?

As the vine heads into winter, it actually starts sucking back nutrition from unpicked fruit into its permanent stores. So, in places such as Champagne (and indeed England) where still winemaking involves much later picking than say in Burgundy, some studies show the risk of low nutrition may be higher (likely to be exacerbated when combined with soil profiles or viticultural regimes that also reduce nutrition in the musts).

It’s not really about ripeness, it’s more about the stage of the vine’s cycle when picking takes place. Winemakers making any decent amounts of still wine will get musts checked by a lab. If you’re only making a few barrels, though, as many Coteaux makers are, perhaps you don’t bother?

Getting the turbidity of the juice wrong

These kind of reductive characters are not all good or all bad. A bit like spices themselves, winemakers are often dancing on knife edges to get subtle complexity into their wines. Taste a curry with ten times too much fenugreek in, though, and it’s pretty awful.

A tried-and-tested still Chardonnay ferment technique is to keep some of the ‘solids’ - bits and bobs from the solid parts of the grape - in the ferment, rather than settling out the juice from the press beforehand as you would do for champagne production. You get a bit of texture from the solids, and at the right levels you can court some interesting savoury flavours.

It’s a balancing act. If the turbidity is too high, hydrogen sulphide produced by those stressed yeast will bind abundantly to heavy particles from the press (essentially bits of skin and pulp), which can lead down the road to high production of undesirable reductive compounds. What could be nice touch of savoury complexity turns into something a bit feral. With some winemakers saying they’re going straight from press to barrel, might they have pushed the solids a bit high for the fruit?

If the turbidity is too low, though, there’s another risk; the yeast is starved of lipids and produces tonnes of hydrogen sulphide, which is bouncing around looking for trouble. Heavily clarified musts for champagne production often need some nutrient additions to ferment cleanly.

The oak effect

A new Damy barrel at Roger Coulon in Vrigny

In Champagne (and, for example England outside the ripest growing areas), Chardonnay aromatics are relatively low-intensity next to Burgundy. You just don’t tend to get the sort of ultra-intense, perfumed citrus that sits very well with new, or new-ish, oak unless your fruit is really, really aromatically ripe.

New-ish oak, though, is actually a key ingredient in the production of some of the positive reductive aromas that still Chardonnay makers are often after!

Furfural, a compound present from recent barrel toasting, binds with hydrogen sulphide from stressed yeast to form 2-Furanmethanethiol (2-FMT), part of that matchstick-gunflint key to ‘nice’ reductiveness.

Using older barrels, depleted of furfural, makes sense for Champagne as they mark the wine less with oakiness. You might miss the nice reductiveness, though.

If you have nice reductiveness, you’re less likely to notice the less-nice (part of a phenomenon known as ‘masking’). Increasingly we’re understanding that it’s the way molecules interact, even more than the presence of individual molecules, that affects aroma.

Finally - lees, oxygen, low pHs, and long times

The last piece of the puzzle comes from a realisation I had, tasting a Coteaux at Printemps that had ages for two years in barrel and was extremely foxy. ‘IS THE FOX THING A LEES AGING THING?!?’ :

I’m not talking about lees aging after bottle fermentation here - producers, helped out by consultants, are usually very careful to get this stage technically correct - but rather the time that initial still wines spend on the dead yeast from their first fermentation.

A lot of producers said they don’t do lees-stirring (bâtonnage) in their still Chardonnay barrels. Lees-stirring is seen by some as an artificial way to build texture, or even a dreaded ‘intervention’ in the winemaking process.

It does, however, introduce a bit of oxygen and break up what can become a bit of a danger zone down in that sludge at the bottom of the barrel. If you have any ‘heavy’ lees, or parts of the solid part of the grape, the decaying yeast, trapped in a compressed and oxygen-free layer, can produce H2S that once again marries up to produce less desirable reductive flavours. Leaving it untouched is a bit risky unless you’re sure there’s no grape material there.

Beyond this, cool-climate and Champenois pHs can be lower than warmer-climate Chardonnays, which means more H2S remains active, and the precursors on those particles from the grape solids are even more reactive!

The upshot

In essence, it doesn’t really make sense to try and cultivate sexy-reductive still Chardonnay unless you have fruit with enough aromatic intensity to sit with at least some new, or newish oak. A lot of Chardonnay in Champagne develops a kind of power and intensity at the levels it is harvested at - often around 12.5% to 13% for still wine - but it’s different from the aromatic lushness that comes with the right selections of Chardonnay at true still wine ripeness levels, in still wine-specific vineyards.

You’ve really got to push the viticulture, and there are success stories in this more Burgundian direction - see still Chardonnays from Louis Roederer, Paul Girard Bonnet, Guillaume Doyard (and promise from the aromatic ripeness of some 2025, perhaps, judging by Coteaux barrel samples from Mathieu Godmé-Guillaume I tasted). I do think we will see more.

Otherwise, it’s probably a mistake to get too reductive, either on purpose or accidentally, for producers with ripe - but not necessarily hugely aromatic - Chardonnays.

So…. there we are. I hadn’t planned to be incorporating Sri Lankan cookery, fox piss and reductive Chardonnay oenology into one stream of thought, but sometimes things have a life of their own. Next week’s post will be a little more straightforward!

“A lot of people got caught because the guy from the local cinema thought it would be good to go out and film the riots for a news piece!…When you look at who got arrested it wasn’t just vine growers, it was butchers, bakers, blacksmiths. When nobody’s got any money you can’t buy a loaf of bread or get your horse shoed, can you?”

Rebecca Gibb MW, author of ‘Vintage Crime - a Short History of Wine Fraud’

Contrary to popular opinion, everyone in Champagne isn’t flashing the cash. Apart from the superstars, head honchos at international groups and large vineyard-owning families, score a lift off most Champenois - even Chef de Caves at a decent house - and you’ll be in a nice new electric Kia, not a V8 Range Rover or the sort of flashy sports cars you might see trundling up poplar-lined driveways in Tuscany or the U.S.A.

If you make your grape supplier park up next to your Maserati when they come to negociate their contract, they might push a bit harder, after all. Champagne is high-in, high-out, high risk and - sometimes - high reward. Those rewards, when they eventually arrive (often after generations of hard work), tend not to be flashed ostentatiously, though. The history of tension, inequality and resentment on the part of Champagne’s growing families for the large commercial machines that market the wines is never too far from the surface.

When the system broke - 1911

To understand how Champagne has broadly managed to keep the balance over the last century, though, we have to look at the flashpoint that changed everything: the 1911 riots.

(For some background, brush up Champagne’s wrangling with phylloxera and the recovery of the vineyards in the late 19th Century here):

…and here:

Having delved into both Gibb’s Master of Wine dissertation on the causes of the riots and her excellent book ‘Vintage Crime’ (which also covers such vinous scandals as Rudy Kurniawan’s epic wine frauds and the Austrian antifreeze episode), I asked her what life was really like for ordinary Champagne growers in the first decades of the 20th Century.

“Between 1880 and 1920, the prices that people were getting for their grapes and base wine dropped, but the champagne prices and demand had gone up. It just doesn’t correlate”, she says. Through an unenviable research that involved taking a four-month old baby - and her parents - to the Marne department archives in Châlons-en-Champagne in a ‘dire’ December, delving into old newspapers between feeds, Gibb was able to quantify just how close to abject poverty Champagne’s growers really were.

The following Épernay market prices illustrate the sudden increase in the cost of everyday foodstuffs:

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It’s on, then, to things that weren’t surprising. Such as:

People are having to put effort into selling again.

As I wrote in 2025, the scattered, volatile nature of the grower champagne market isn’t always suited to building long-term reputations. Some of those that benefitted from the rush of post-Covid price rises and champagne shortages are very much out there, plying their wares.

Maintaining the sort of prices set - NV for 70 Euros retail in your second or third vintage - means finding new markets in order to keep supply stretched enough in existing ones. Isn’t it better, though, to work in fewer markets, keep prices competitive and build longer-term relationships with the people actually buying and consuming the wines?

Then again, we’re not the ones actually faced with the enormous costs, investments and yes, debt, involved in a grower champagne startup. How realistic is it today to become the next Selosse, Laval, Egly, Brochet or Larmandier….? Tough. As it was for them. Despite the promises of instant stardom in the hype machine, it’s a long game.

So, to Selosse, Laval, Egly, Brochet, Larmandier….

The group Trait d’Union comprises Jacques Selosse, Egly-Ouriet, Larmandier-Bernier and Roger Coulon. Few surprises here; as I discussed with a fellow bubblehead well versed in Selosse, the new release of ‘Initial’, based on fabulous 2019, was a highly expressive, dense and complex one, almost seeming a little more like the higher-up bottlings. V.O. is a deeper, more dramatic affair - the current release is 2018 based.

We tasted La Côte Faron from Aÿ too, although for me it’s still the Blanc de Blancs that is the most ‘Selosse’ Selosse. Yes, they’ll still split an un-Initialised room sometimes. But if you’re trying to understand grower champagne, ultimately you do need to find some and sit down with it for an evening.

Larmandier-Bernier showed a beautiful 2016 Terre de Vertus magnum that was one of the most impressive editions of this cuvée I’ve tasted in the last few years. It’s usually a little more of a softer-focus, Vertus-juicy wine than the other single village offerings. This one was supercharged.

2021 does sort the best producers from the rest, even in the Côte des Blancs where Chardonnay did quite well, and this base of Longitude was an absolute delight. Vielles Vignes du Levant, from Cramant, is often more evolved and hedonistic than I remember it, and a 2006 was certainly that. Chemins d’Avize is a little more nimble, crispy, airy, Avizoise.

Egly-Ouriet is immovably consistent, with Vignes de Bisseuil Chardonnay based on 2020 and the 2018-based V.P. both offering full Egly experience without the cost of the top Blanc de Noirs or Vintage. Rosé Grand Cru based on 2021 is a delight, although the vintage is a little punchier, narrower, less generous for rosé. Nevertheless, Brut Grand Cru is the first Egly-Ouriet you should try to understand what this producer is all about.

Oh, we tasted the Trait d’Union 2014 vintage as well - made with grapes from all four members plus Jérôme Prévost and Jacquesson. I imagine, for FOMO purposes, that you’d like me to tell you that this unicorn wine wasn’t actually that great. Unfortunately it was actually highly delicious.

Terres et Vins

Emmanuel Brochet, Olivier Horiot, Vincent Laval

Then it was the turn of Olivier Horiot, Emmanual Brochet and Vincent Laval (of Georges Laval) to hold court at the Terres et Vins masterclass. The theme? Climate change.

“We used to get pHs like 2.98, 3.02…now it’s numbers like 3.14 in cuvée. You have less freshness, more oxidation….with some testing we found we had no SO2 left in the wine” explained Brochet, referencing the fact that the higher pHs found in hot vintages render sulphite additions less effective.

Having tried Brochet’s excellent 2020 Mont Benoit at various stages of life, I did like it best at around one to two years post-disgorgement, when it showed tonnes of density, vigour and complexity. People do sometimes hang on to these sort of wines a bit long.

It was refreshing, in any case, to see a respected grower talk honestly about the need for considered sulphite levels in an age where Natural Wine dogma has almost cancelled the conversation. As is often the case in life, followers are often more dogmatic than leaders.

Horiot spoke relatedly on the fact that climate-change era August harvests take place when bacterial populations are more active than fungal (yeast) populations. “Think of mushrooms - we don’t find them in August”, he said, explaining that it was harder to run wild yeast fermentations at this time of year, and that heat and high pHs risked bacterial populations getting the upper hand. Keeping wines clean, in other words, is arguably getting harder.

Laval is a gregarious, jovial and quite magnetic character, who brought along two vintages of ‘Les Longues Violes’. a parcel of mixed plantation in Cumières. The 2013 was fabulous, not only more energetic in vintage style but, as is often the case with 2013, showing more controlled evolution.

Laval noted that the potential alcohol for 2013 was 10.6 at harvest - about the same as 2015, and a reminder that a ‘cool’ or ‘late’ vintage doesn’t mean an underripe one. Half of champagne’s ripeness questions have come in vintages with serious amounts of heat, after all. The 2015 was more developed, punchier, wilder. Later, a 2014 was closer to the 2013 in quality.

Les Artisans,

This is a Premier League group of established growers. I didn’t taste everything here as I’d either recently visited, or am going to, the likes of the Pierre Paillard, Huré Frères, Pierre Peters, Vilmart, Nicolas Maillart, A Margaine and Doyard. Wines from the like of Pierre Gerbais, J.M. Sélèque, A Bergère and Lancelot-Pienne are more dynamic and largely on the up, and some were noted in my last piece.

Something that did strike me at Les Artisans was just how good some of these guys are at dealing with the trade. I saw big slaps on the back, long chats, selfies, commercial relationships that clearly went way, way back. It turns out you don’t just have to grow the stuff for ten years, and vinifiy it for ten more…you have to sell it, too.

Les Artisans? Masterclasses in all three.

Now the important, and slightly annoying bit; I’m going to go through new names, young projects worth talking about and growers really hitting their stride, but I’m going to make you pay for it (if you don’t already). An annual subscription is cheaper than any one of these bottles, so go ahead (punks) and make my day…

This installation is all about movement; things that surprised, or interested me. Part three will feature Things That Didn’t Surprise Me, i.e. great producers still doing their thing….

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