CHAPTER TEN
The Night (and Day)
They Invented
Champagne
 (and Sparkling Wine)

Taking Champagne Back to Its Roots

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Robert Caplin.

With rough, workthickened hands, unruly hair and a steady gaze, Anselme Selosse looks the image of the French vigneron, a man more comfortable tending vines and working in his cellar than he is in a New York restaurant talking to sommeliers and wine writers.

But there he was last week, at Eleven Madison Park, leading a tasting of his wines, speaking smoothly in French, gesturing with long arms that seemed as if they would be a lot more comfortable sprung from the confines of his rumpled blazer.

Mr. Selosse, 54, is not the usual emissary from Champagne, a smooth guy in a suit, talking about product positioning, luxury brands and lifestyles. To hear them tell it, Champagne pops into this world like a genie from a lamp, ready to make magic.

But to Mr. Selosse, the magic occurs long before there is a wine. It takes place deep underneath Champagne’s chalky soil, where the roots of the vines take hold of what Mr. Selosse calls the essence of the earth.

Jacques Selosse Champagne, named for Anselme’s father, is not something found at the corner wine shop. In fact, for five years, from 2002 to 2007, it wasn’t sent to the United States at all, not after Mr. Selosse severed ties with a previous American importer. But last year another importer, the Rare Wine Company, made a deal with Mr. Selosse and began to bring it in again—though in minute quantities at high prices.

Suffice it to say that most of us probably can’t afford Selosse Champagne and may never drink it. Well, then, why should anybody care about it, especially now when $20 for a bottle of wine seems like a lot of money, much less the $250 you might pay for Selosse’s top-of-the-line Substance cuvée?

Because, as superb, striking and idiosyncratic as the Selosse Champagnes can be, what Mr. Selosse represents is equally important, if not more so. Yes, he and his wife, Corinne, had taken this rare trip to New York to reintroduce their Champagnes to the wine trade, but what he had to say about Champagne was possibly more meaningful than the wines themselves.

The key word is wines. In almost every possible way, the corporate line from Champagne is the antithesis of what consumers are taught about every other important wine region in the world. Great wines, almost everyone can agree, are distinctive. They ideally reflect their terroirs and the conditions of their vintages. In short, as the rest of the wine world preaches with varying degrees of honesty, great wines are made in the vineyard.

But the dominant Champagne houses have divorced what’s in the bottle from what comes from the earth. Their story of Champagne, told through decades of marketing, associates bubbles with elegance, luxury and festivity, achieved through master blenders in the cellar. Champagne does not celebrate the land and the vigneron, but the house and the event. Too often, Champagne is a commodity, not a wine.

Mr. Selosse, by his example and his Champagnes, is intent on restoring the ideas of vineyard, terroir and wine to the perception of Champagne. He is not alone by any means. He is one of a growing number of Champagne vignerons—grape growers who also make the wine and bottle it themselves—who are intent on changing the nature of Champagne. Some of the big houses make great Champagne, and not all of the small growers are successful. But their influence has increased, and the big houses are paying attention.

Any restaurant in New York with a decent wine list will have at least one of these small Champagne houses among the big names. Grower-producers like Larmandier-Bernier, Egly-Ouriet, Pierre Gimonnet, Pierre Moncuit and Pierre Peters are making Champagnes that are distinctive if not profound, reflecting the terroir in which the grapes are born, and forcing people to rethink their ideas about Champagne. In this company, no Champagne producer has been more influential or more original than Mr. Selosse.

Not that Mr. Selosse heads any organized group. He leads more by inspiration. He won’t criticize his colleagues big or small, though he was more impolitic as a younger man after he took over from his father in 1980. His Champagnes are not adored unanimously, although you can count me among the adorers. He has been criticized for making Champagnes that are too oaky—perhaps a fault once but no longer. That said, his Champagnes—his wines—are distinctive, and distinctive wines will always be at least somewhat divisive.

Mr. Selosse was trained in Burgundy, and his ideas about grape growing are indeed Burgundian. He has likened himself to the Cistercian monks who planted many of Burgundy’s great vineyards in an effort to make the most of their terroir. “They were motivated by religion,” Mr. Selosse told me once. “My religion is the vineyard.”

Mr. Selosse does not adhere to biodynamic viticulture, but he thinks of the vineyard in biodynamic terms, seeing it as a harmonious eco-system of plants, animals and micro-organisms. “The greatest danger is man, who can upset the balance,” he said. His job, he said, is to observe and guide with a gentle hand, but to stay out of the way.

“Essentially, we’re of the countryside, and our goal is to give expression to the countryside,” he said. It’s not an unusual thing to hear from a vigneron, but revolutionary in Champagne, which strives for a decidedly urban image.

Mr. Selosse is determined to emphasize what is singular in his wines, rather than the Champagne norm of seeking house consistency year after year. Yet he is not so Burgundian that he believes only in vintage wines. Of the eight cuvées he poured at the New York tasting and at a dinner later that evening, only one was a vintage wine, a 1999 blanc de blancs extra brut. The others, including a floral, chalky rosé, a rich yet energetic blanc de noirs and a beautifully subtle and textured extra brut blanc de blancs called Version Originale, are all made from multiple vintages.

Perhaps the most unusual of his Champagnes is Substance, made from a single chardonnay vineyard in Avize. It uses a solera system, similar to what is used to make sherry, in which successive vintages, back to 1987, are blended. The result is an almost ethereal Champagne, with aromas of flowers and seashells.

Rather than obscuring the terroir, Mr. Selosse asserts, the blending of his solera Champagne emphasizes the qualities of the vineyard by eliminating variables like weather.

“It takes all the different years—the good, the bad, the wet, the dry, the sunny—and neutralizes the elements to bring out the terroir,” he said.

I asked him whether he would ever suggest this method to his friends in Burgundy, where it would be looked on as heretical.

“No,” he said. “In Burgundy they already understand the terroir—it rises above the vintage.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Maybe in Bordeaux,” he said.

November 2008

In Small Houses, Champagne Finds Its Soul

By ERIC ASIMOV

Like any bottle of Champagne, Larmandier-Bernier’s Terre de Vertus, with its tapered, graceful curves, can ignite the imagination. Simply glancing at it transports you to a world of tuxedos and gowns, where the music is soft, the dancing close, and elegance as near as a pop and a pour and a sigh. A more careful examination of the bottle, though, reveals a label completely at odds with the bubbly, urbane notion of Champagne. Its central image?

Dirt.

More precisely, it’s a photograph of the gravelly, gloriously chalky soil of a vineyard here in the heart of the Côte des Blancs in the southern part of the Champagne region. For Larmandier-Bernier and other small producers that, unlike the famous houses, make their Champagne almost entirely from grapes they have grown themselves, this image of dirt conveys a truth that is often overlooked amid the elegant imagery: Champagne, above all, is a wine, made from grapes that grow in the ground. It should be thought of, like other great wines, as having a provenance—a terroir, as the French say—and a home on the dinner table.

“We make wine before bubbles,” said Laurent Champs, the young head of Vilmart & Cie in Rilly.

These grower-producers account for no more than a trickle of foam in the river of sparkling wine that flows out of Champagne. But their significance far outweighs their numbers. Tiny Champagne houses like René Geoffroy in Cumières, Chartogne-Taillet in Merfy, Jean Milan in Oger, Pierre Gimonnet et Fils in Cuis and Godmé Père et Fils in Verzenay produce excellent wines that demonstrate more than just another side of Champagne. Rather than the smoothly consistent blends that dominate the production of the biggest Champagne makers like Moët & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot, these winemakers produce Champagnes with clear, pronounced personalities that bubble up through the wine, expressing the quirky nuances of each particular combination of soil, climate and producer.

In the hands of the best of these winemakers, the Champagnes are utterly distinct. The intense, almost austere minerality of the Terre de Vertus, or the equally lean and stony Champagne from José Dhondt in neighboring Oger, offers a marked contrast to the creamy fruit of a bottle of Michel Genet from Chouilly. Each of these wines is a blanc de blancs, made entirely of chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs, which is known as chardonnay territory. They are completely different from, say, the rich, round power of an Egly-Ouriet from Ambonnay, a pinot noir-based Champagne, which in turn bears little resemblance to another pinot noir-based Champagne, like one from Godmé, with its clear, precise raspberry flavors.

“Each village has a different style of wine, and within each village different locations have different styles,” said Paul Couvreur, who, with his wife, Françoise, has joined forces with Becky Wasserman, a wine broker in Burgundy, to market grower-produced Champagnes. “These Champagnes are much more on the wine side. We sell to people who think that Champagne is not only bubbles and fizz, but chardonnay and pinot noir. It’s wine you can think about.”

Champagne is wine? This is news? Indeed, if you travel the narrow, back roads winding through towns like Rilly and Ambonnay south across the Marne River to Oger and Vertus, Champagne looks pretty much like any other wine region. Vineyards dominate the hillsides and flatlands, where the underlying chalk pushes up through the soil here and there in crumbly patches of white. In a chilly early November drizzle, the vines hang with resignation, seemingly counting the days until the arrival of the pruner’s shears, a last few bunches of unpicked grapes waiting to be plucked by the birds.

In the small towns of this northernmost fine wine region of the world, where buildings seem to cluster for warmth, signs point in almost every direction to Champagne producers. Most are tiny. Aside from the several dozen big houses that account for more than 70 percent of the Champagne produced, only 5,000 or so of the 20,000 grape growers in Champagne also sell wine. Around 3,000 simply take their grapes to a cooperative, where it is made into basic Champagne for them, bottled and returned to the grower with a label slapped on. The remaining 2,000 make their own Champagne, often achieving something special.

Most of the growers sell to weekenders from Paris who back their Peugeots to the door and load up with bottles. A mere handful of these grower-producers make enough of their own wine to export bottles to the United States, though their number is growing. Last year, grower-producer Champagnes accounted for 1.9 percent of all Champagne imported into the United States, said Terry Theise, the leading importer of such Champagnes, more than triple the 0.62 percent of 1997, when Mr. Theise put together his portfolio.

To most of the world, wine is wine, and then there’s Champagne. No other wine has been so brilliantly defined by its marketing, which places Champagne at the center of weddings, ship launchings and other cultivated, congratulatory affairs, but never at the center of a meal, where you would put any other wine.

“These are food wines, intended to go with food,” Mr. Couvreur said. The combinations practically suggest themselves. The more mineral-laden Champagnes would be exceptional matches for oysters, or for scallops in a sauce flavored with citrus and herbs. A more robust bottle would go exceptionally well with roast chicken, veal or rabbit. Almost any dry Champagne will go well with sushi, not to mention fried chicken.

Champagne and wine are perceived differently in other ways, too. Almost everywhere else, wine lovers want to know where the grapes were grown. In Burgundy, connoisseurs fancy they can taste the difference between wines from the Meursault-Perrières vineyard and its neighbor, Meursault-Charmes. Barolo fans know that wines from La Morra are distinguished by their elegant perfume, and wines from Serralunga d’Alba by their power. In Germany, Mosels are known for delicacy, Rheingaus for their voluptuous richness.

What’s more, in almost every other winegrowing region, the best wine producers grow their own grapes, or wish they could. It’s become a sometimes disingenuous cliché for winemakers to proclaim their desire simply to allow the grapes to express their terroir in the glass.

But not in Champagne. Few of the big houses own more than 30 percent of their vineyards. Even connoisseurs would have trouble naming the three key zones in the region, Montagne de Reims, Côte des Blancs to the south, and Vallée de la Marne in between, much less a fourth region, Côte des Bar to the southeast. And while the communes of the Côte d’Or might roll easily off the tongue of any Burgundy hound, few Champagne lovers could name any of the 17 villages ranked as grands crus, the highest classification. In fact, it’s fair to assume that most people have no idea that Champagne vineyards even have a ranking system. What the public does know are brand names, especially prestigious ones like Cristal and Dom Pérignon. Although the big houses reserve their best vineyards for their high-end bottles, it will strike few people as odd that they see no need to even mention the provenance of the grapes.

“It’s only at the grower level that a person can luck into a nonvintage Champagne that’s 100 percent grand cru,” Mr. Theise said.

To a far greater extent than any other wine, Champagne has celebrated the art of blending. Most Champagnes are a mixture of wine from three grapes—pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier—and a blend of different vintages. Nonvintage Champagne (or multivintage, as the big producers like to say), accounts for around 90 percent of all Champagne sold.

There are sound reasons for the development of this system. The grapes, grown in these northern vineyards, have historically battled each year simply to ripen. The annual struggle of the grapes gives Champagne the blend of fruit, intensity and acidity that distinguishes it from all other sparkling wines, but it also makes the Champagne business a risky proposition.

Some years the grapes didn’t ripen enough, or at all, so for producers to depend only on the annual crop would have been highly dicey. Some years the pinot meunier, which provides perfume and fruitiness but little structure, does best. Some years it’s chardonnay, and some years it’s pinot noir. It might be a different combination each year, so by necessity in Champagne the winemakers blend what they have.

Over time the big Champagne makers turned this necessity into a virtue, so much so that the exalted image of the blender’s art long ago overtook any notion of terroir in Champagne. “The names of the wine villages, for example, need hardly concern the wine drinker, for the essence of Champagne is that it is a blended wine, known in all but a handful of cases by the name of the maker, not the vineyard,” wrote Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, in the 2001 edition of the World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley).

In fact, blending really can be as high an art as the Champagne producers assert. One need only taste a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée, a blend of up to 50 different wines from six to 10 different years, to appreciate the level of complexity a blend can achieve. In the neat, laboratory-clean tasting room at Krug headquarters in Reims, Rémi Krug, who runs Krug, possibly the most prestigious Champagne producer, demonstrated the art of the blend.

With seven still wines in carafes in front of him, he poured into a tall beaker first a little 2003 chardonnay from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, newly made yet already intense. He added some supple ’03 pinot noir from Ay, rich with a light raspberry edge; a leaner ’03 pinot from Verzenay; and some seductively perfumed ’03 pinot meunier from Ste. Gemme. Then he reached for some older wines. First a 2000 pinot noir from Ay, with aromas of wet earth; then some crisp, beautifully fruity pinot noir from Verzenay, from the great vintage of ’96; and finally, some ’90 chardonnay from Mesnil, already aging like a good white Burgundy, crisp and acidic yet with aromas of hazelnut and honeysuckle.

After sniffing and tasting, he added a few dashes of this and a dollop of that, and voilà. His blend was indisputably more complex and remarkable than any of the individual wines.

“Blending is not destroying individuality, it’s creating a cuvée,” Mr. Krug said. “We’re not blending to correct, we’re blending to enhance. If you would transform Champagne into Burgundy you would destroy it.”

Of course, few big producers and no small producers can hope to match the elegance of Mr. Krug’s blend. Krug Champagnes begin at more than $100 a bottle and surely fit into the artisanal category. Most growers might produce 3,000 to 10,000 cases of Champagne a year, as against Krug’s 40,000, which in itself is a drop in the ocean compared with Moët’s two million cases a year. While the growers, too, blend their nonvintage wines, it is a far more limited composition, with wines taken from different parcels in the same general area, and covering far fewer vintages.

“We want to express the style of the village,” said Pierre Larmandier, who, with his wife, Sophie, runs Larmandier-Bernier. “We can’t make the sophisticated blends of the big houses. This is what we can do.”

Slowly but clearly, consumers are gaining awareness of these small Champagne houses. As with heirloom vegetables and microbrews, their success depends on developing a small but select public for whom connoisseurship is as important as the wallet.

“What the big houses are seeing is that connoisseurs are looking for specificity and individuality, notwithstanding that we’ve spent the last 40 years saying great Champagne can only be blended,” Mr. Theise said. “You definitely see the impact of this kind of thinking in that no less than Moët & Chandon is releasing single-vineyard Champagnes.”

Moët first offered limited quantities of its three single-vineyard Champagnes, each demonstrating one of the three grapes of the region, in 2001, with the intention of promoting its own vineyards. These are intense, powerful wines, thoroughly unlike other Moëts, which are typically more balanced. “The way we present this trilogy has a bit to do with the world of still wines, rather than what is typical of Moët & Chandon,” said Georges Blanck, Moët’s head winemaker. “It’s something completely new.”

In fact, some of the greatest and most expensive Champagnes of all are terroir wines, produced in tiny quantities, like Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises, an all-pinot-noir Champagne from ancient vines in Ay and Bouzy; Salon’s Le Mesnil from the Côte des Blancs; and Krug’s Clos du Mesnil, which comes from a single walled vineyard in the town of Mesnil. For Krug, the apostle of blending, this single-vineyard Champagne, which it started producing in the 1970s, was a complete departure. Mr. Krug calls it a “contradiction wine.”

“So what,” he said. “We’re not selling concepts. We’re selling pleasure.”

These days, many of the grower-producers are selling all the Champagne they can make. Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, who has about 32 acres in the Vallée de la Marne, is the fifth generation in his family to grow grapes in the region. While his family always made a little wine, they began to emphasize Champagne production in the bad years after World War II, when they were unable to sell their grapes to the big houses. In the 1970s, Mr. Geoffroy’s father decided to keep all the grapes and turn them into Champagne.

As you walk through a hillside vineyard in Cumières overlooking the Marne, Mr. Geoffroy’s parcels are easy to distinguish from the others. The lush green grass growing between his rows of bare vines is evidence of his distaste for chemical pesticides and herbicides.

“If you don’t have the passion, you won’t make a very good Champagne,” he said as he strolled the vineyard, waving at local hunters who also walked the rows, shotguns in hand, searching for rabbits and pheasants.

Passion can be expensive to maintain. Mr. Geoffroy said good vineyard land was going for 800,000 to 1 million euros per hectare, around $400,000 an acre, enough to set up the Geoffroy family for several generations.

But that would mean sacrificing the graceful, lightly smoky Cuvée Sélectionée that Mr. Geoffroy says expresses the personality of Cumières, and the wine-making facility underneath his grandmother’s house. And that would mean more of what Mr. Geoffroy calls “normal Champagne.”

“To me,” he said, “that’s not to my taste.”

November 2003

Champagne’s Servants Join the Masters

By ERIC ASIMOV

Cédric Bouchard (top left), Bertrand Gautherot (top right), Davy Dosnon and Nicolas Laugerotte (bottom, left to right) and Dominique Moreau (bottom right).
Photos by Nigel Dickinson.

Unlike Reims and Épernay, the Marne cities to the north that are rivaled only by caviar in their close association with Champagne, this pleasant medieval city in the Aube, with its cobblestone streets and timbered architecture, is rarely considered the hub of a thriving Champagne region.

Perhaps that’s because for years the Aube has served anonymously as the workaday supplier of grapes to the production areas to the north, a sort of scullery in the elegant house of bubbly, essential to the smooth operation of Champagne, but best ignored.

Yet today, the spotlight is unexpectedly shining on the Aube, and its primary growing area, the Côte des Bar. Now, the region is coming to be known for its independent vignerons, whose distinctive, highly sought wines have caught the attention of Champagne lovers the world over.

The grandes marques of the Marne made Champagne one of the world’s leading luxury brands by marketing it as an urbane beverage for special occasions. They emphasized the art of blending, in which the distinctions of terroir, grape and vintage are absorbed into a house style.

By contrast, many Aube producers are taking their cues instead from Burgundy, with its emphasis on farming and on being able to trace terroir through the wines. Rather than the hushed pop of the cork and the silken rush of bubbles, these Champagnes suggest soil on the boots and dirt under the fingernails.

Even so, Champagnes from producers like Cédric Bouchard and Vouette & Sorbée, Marie-Courtin and Dosnon & Lepage, Jacques Lassaigne and Drappier, the closest thing to a grande marque in the Aube, can be as ethereal as their siblings to the north, if a trifle idiosyncratic.

“The identity of Champagne has been as a beverage for celebrations, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Davy Dosnon, who, with his business partner, Simon-Charles Lepage, issued his first wines in 2007. “But it’s also a wine of terroir, of place, and should be thought of that way as well. And why not in the Côte des Bar?”

The focus on terroir in the Aube reflects a larger discussion throughout the entire region, in which small producers making distinctive, terroir-specific Champagnes from grapes they farm themselves have seized initiative from the big houses. These small grower-producers account for barely an eyedropper’s worth of the Champagne that flows from the region, but they now lay claim to an outsize portion of the fascination among Champagne lovers.

“Before, it was Champagne, singular,” said Michel Drappier of Drappier, the largest and best-known producer in the Aube, which was founded in 1808 but didn’t begin to bottle its own wines until the early 20th century. “Now it is Champagnes, plural, as sophisticated and complex as Burgundy, with as many villages, winemakers and styles as any place.”

Mr. Dosnon studied viticulture and enology in Beaune, the heart of Burgundy, and he brings a Burgundian passion for the land to his work. Strolling through a hillside vineyard in the hamlet of Avirey-Lingey, about 25 miles southeast of Troyes, one parcel among 17 acres or so that they farm, I noticed another similarity to Burgundy, tiny fossilized seashells in the earth, like those often seen in the vineyards of Chablis.

Indeed, the Côte des Bar is closer to Chablis than to Épernay, and its limestone and clay soils are more like those of Chablis than the chalky soils to the north. Yet, despite the geological resemblance to Chablis, which makes the most distinctive chardonnay wines in the world, the vast majority of the grapes in the Côte des Bar are pinot noir.

“The soil is also interesting for pinot noir,” Mr. Dosnon said. “There’s a lot of volume and complexity.”

The Dosnon & Lepage Champagnes are superb, especially the 100 percent pinot noir Récolte Noire, powerful yet graceful, wonderfully fresh and aromatic, and a blanc de blancs, Récolte Blanche, a wine of finesse and nuance, with savory, focused floral and mineral flavors.

If the evolution of the Aube seems a bit of a Cinderella story, it’s with good reason. A century ago, in 1911, riots tore through Champagne as, among other issues, the big houses in the Marne tried to exclude the Aube from the Champagne appellation. Eventually, a compromise was reached in which the Aube was granted second-class Champagne status. Even after the Marne finally, if gingerly, embraced the Aube as a full part of Champagne in 1927, none of its vineyards were designated grand cru or even premier cru, marks of quality reserved only for the Marne.

And so the Aube served primarily as a faceless source of grapes. While a small amount of Champagne has always been made here, the grapes mostly traveled 80 miles or so north, through the flat farmland that separates the Côte des Bar from the production areas of the Marne.

In Épernay, I met with an executive at one of the grand marques and told him I was heading to the Côte des Bar the next day. “Oh?” he asked. “They make Champagne there?” Well-worn mockery, perhaps, but an indication that grudging appreciation from the Champagne establishment is not so easy to come by.

Many producers in the south still feel the sting of northern scorn, and it is a driving force.

“Always, we were second class,” said Emmanuel Lassaigne, whose Champagne house, Jacques Lassaigne, is in Montgueux, a small village west of Troyes. “People in the Marne will still say, ‘The Aube is no good.’”

The vineyards of Montgueux, largely on an imposing south-facing hillside, are distinct from the Côte des Bar, and are one of the few places in the Aube that emphasize chardonnay. In Montgueux, achieving sufficient ripeness is rarely a problem. Indeed, the exotic, tropical-fruit flavors of Montgueux chardonnay are highly unusual for Champagne. Mr. Lassaigne’s aim is to capture the aromas and flavors of this singular terroir.

“My job is to say, ‘Montgueux is good,’” he said. “It’s not better, but it’s absolutely not worse.”

His nonvintage blanc de blancs Les Vignes de Montgueux is very much its own Champagne, with light aromas of tropical fruit and flowers. It feels broad yet is dry and refreshing. His vintage blanc de blancs are a step up in elegance, with more mineral flavors yet still with the distinctive Montgueux fruit.

Foremost, perhaps, among the region’s new stars is Cédric Bouchard, whose single-vineyard Champagnes are exquisitely delicate and subtle, gently expressive of their terroir. His dark, tussled hair and piercing olive green eyes give him the brooding look of a young philosopher. Indeed, his uncompromising winemaking might be called highly philosophical.

“I’m only interested in the wine, the grape, the parcel and the terroir,” he said. “It’s got to have emotion to it; otherwise, it’s going to the négociants.”

Mr. Bouchard’s father grew grapes and made a small amount of his own Champagne, but as a young man Mr. Bouchard left for Paris, where he worked in a wine shop. There, he said, he discovered the wines of vignerons he described as working naturally, and decided that he, too, wanted to make wine. He returned to the Aube only because his father offered him land.

Right away, he proved himself independent. “Whatever my father did, I did the opposite,” he said. “Spiritually, I’m the first generation because it’s my own style and philosophy. I think my father is proud of the wines, but he would never admit it directly.”

Mr. Bouchard tries to be as natural in his approach as possible, even rejecting the use of horses in his vineyards, which he now plows by hand. In that sense, he said, he is lucky to have only small parcels.

Another rising star in the Côte des Bar, Bertrand Gautherot, named his label Vouette & Sorbée, after the two vineyards he farms biodynamically. His family grew grains and grapes and raised animals around the town of Buxièressur-Arce. As a young man he left, to design lipsticks, but the call of agriculture was great, and he soon returned.

“We were not in the business of Champagne,” he said. “We were more farmers than winemakers.”

Mr. Gautherot, too, focused on farming, selling off all his grapes to cooperatives or the big houses. Among his good friends were superb grower-producers from the north, like Anselme Selosse and Jérôme Prévost, who he said urged him to begin making his own wines.

“But I understood I had to learn the terroir of my village,” he said. “A big problem in Champagne is that wines are easy to make by recipe. It’s much harder to learn the taste of your vineyards. That’s why it’s called Vouette & Sorbée rather than Bertrand Gautherot.”

His first vintage was 2001—only 2,000 bottles, he said, in case he had to drink it all himself. He’s now up to around 30,000 bottles, which all seem as if they are fine wines that just happen to be effervescent rather than simply celebratory bubbly. Perhaps his most unusual Champagne is the Saignée de Sorbée, a rosé that emphasizes the lovely spicy fruit of the pinot noir grape and its exuberant aromas. It’s a beautifully fragrant, exuberant Champagne, with spicy, smoky flavors.

The Côte des Bar seems rife with small producers waiting for discovery. Some, frankly, are rustic, not yet ready for prime time. Others, like Dominique Moreau, whose label, Marie-Courtin, is named for her grandmother, make breathtakingly gorgeous, elegant Champagnes in such minute quantities that they can be frustrating to try to find.

While the bubbling up of talent in the Aube is clear, Mr. Drappier prefers a historical perspective. With an annual production of 1.6 million bottles, Drappier is the size of a small grande marque, like Pol Roger or Billecart-Salmon. Its facility in Urville sits over an original cellar that traces back to 1152.

“The Aube was the wealthiest of the Champagne regions in the Middle Ages, and Troyes was the capital,” said Mr. Drappier, who is the seventh-generation Drappier to lead the house.

“Before phylloxera,” he said, referring to the pest that destroyed European grapevines in the late 19th century, “there were many more vineyards in the Aube than in the Marne.”

Today, Drappier’s Champagnes are discernibly more mainstream than those of the smaller producers, dry and refreshing with full-bodied, sometimes smoky flavors.

Mr. Drappier suggests that the rise of the Aube is due partly to the new prosperity in the entire Champagne region, which allowed growers to start making their own wine; to better education, which contributed to the arrival of dynamic young winemakers in the region; and to the changing tastes of consumers, who now understand that Champagne is more than simply a luxury good.

“Terroir used to be considered rude in Champagne,” he said. “It was all about blending and dosage. Now we say we are from the Côte des Bar, and we are proud of it.”

July 2011

Buried Treasure in Baltic Has Vintage Taste

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

François Hautekeur and Baltic Shipwreck
Photos by Alex Daws. Credit: Augusto Mendes/Government of the Aland Islands.

When Christian Ekstrom, a local diver, finally got to explore a sunken two-masted schooner he had known about for years, he found bottles, lots of bottles, so he brought one to the surface.

“I said, ‘Let’s taste some sea water,’” he said with a laugh, over coffee recently. “So I tasted it straight from the bottle. It was then that I noticed, ‘This is not sea water.’”

Mr. Ekstrom, 31, a compact man with a shock of blond hair, brought the bottle to experts in this town of 11,000 on Aland Island, which lies midway between Finland and Sweden, then to others in Sweden and finally in France.

Though the bottle had no label, burned into the cork were markings that made clear it was a bottle of Juglar, a premium French Champagne that ceased to be sold under that name after 1830, when it was renamed Jacquesson, for another of the winery’s owners. It remains one of the smaller but finer producers of French Champagnes.

“You could still see the bubbles, and see how clear it was,” Mr. Ekstrom said.

The 75-foot wreck, in 160 feet of water, contained other cargo as well: crates filled with grapes, long withered; carpets; coffee beans; spices including white and black pepper and coriander; and four bottles of beer.

Not including the bottle Mr. Ekstrom swigged from, the divers soon discovered a cargo that numbered 172 bottles of Champagne.

Four were broken, but 168 others were intact, and in early August they were hoisted to dry land and stored in Mariehamn. The Baltic Sea floor proved an ideal wine cellar, with 40 degree temperatures, total darkness and enough pressure to keep the corks in.

Getting help in recognizing the find was not easy. “It was quite tricky to get someone to listen,” Mr. Ekstrom said. When he contacted Veuve Clicquot, one of the largest French Champagne houses, in search of expertise, a voice on the phone said, “It’s a fantastic story, but I have to ask you, ‘Where is Aland?’”

Gradually, word got out to the Champagne world, and this November experts from abroad, including from Jacquesson and Veuve Clicquot, were invited to Aland (pronounced AH-lahnd) to replace the crumbling corks in 10 bottles and for a tasting. In the meantime, the Champagne had become the property of the local government, which lays legal claim to anything found in undersea wrecks that is more than 100 years old.

The first three bottles recorked were Juglar, but on the bottom of the fourth cork were the star and anchor of Veuve Clicquot. The star represents a comet that crossed the skies of Champagne in 1811 and supposedly caused fabulous vintages. “I thought, ‘Madame Clicquot is watching us,’” Mr. Ekstrom said.

At another recorking, further bottles of Veuve Clicquot appeared. François Hautekeur, a Veuve Clicquot winemaker who attended, pointed to the name Werle branded into the bottom of the cork, referring to Édouard Werle, the man who in 1830 assumed much of the business from the Widow Clicquot, actually Barbe Nicole Clicquot, née Ponsardin, who inherited the company from her husband in 1805 and ran it until her death. “So it is later than 1831,” Mr. Hautekeur said.

Jean-Hervé Chiquet, whose family now owns and operates Jacquesson, the winery that absorbed Juglar, said that the shape of the bottles and the use of the name Juglar indicated the Champagne was from the late 1820s, and may have been stored for some time before it was shipped.

He was “overcome with emotion,” he said, when he first tasted the Champagne at the recorking in November.

“There was a powerful but agreeable aroma, notes of dried fruit and tobacco, and a striking acidity,” Mr. Chiquet said by telephone. The oldest Champagne in Jacquesson’s inventory is from 1915, he said.

The Champagne was probably en route to the court of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg when the wooden cargo vessel sank. Though the exact age of the Champagne is not yet known, it goes up against tough competition in the oldest Champagne category.

The Champagne house Perrier-Jouët claims that its vintage of 1825 is the oldest recorded Champagne in existence. Mr. Hautekeur said Veuve Clicquot’s oldest drinkable bottle was from 1904.

Richard Juhlin, a Swedish author of numerous books about Champagne, said he noted “great variations” in the first 10 bottles tasted, “from seawater to great stuff.” After overseeing the recorking, he said both Juglar and Veuve Clicquot “had in common a mature aroma, almost of cow cheese, Brie or Vacherin, almost too strong,” combined with a “liqueur-like sweetness.” Of the two Champagnes, he found the Juglar, “a little more intense, bigger, the French would say, ‘rustique,’” but said they both compared favorably to some of the best Champagnes today.

Not much goes on in this collection of islands that belongs to Finland but whose inhabitants speak Swedish, so the residents are understandably hoping the Champagne will put Mariehamn on the map. The government wants to auction the bottles over time; there are also, somewhat inexplicably, plans to blend some of it with modern Champagne and sell it in local restaurants and liquor stores.

“We see events and different possibilities with Champagne for small companies and restaurants,” said Britt Lundberg, responsible for culture, and hence for Champagne, in the local government. Asked whether Veuve Clicquot and Jacquesson would get some of the antique bubbly, Ms. Lundberg replied, “Not get, but they’ll have the possibility to buy.”

Some experts, like Mr. Juhlin, have suggested that the bottles could fetch as much as $70,000 each at auction. The previous record price was $21,200 paid for a 1928 Krug auctioned last year in Hong Kong.

“There is obviously a market and collectors,” said Bjorn Haggblom, the government spokesman. “You have London, New York, Hong Kong—why not Mariehamn.”

Some islanders, like Mr. Ekstrom, wish less were auctioned and more kept on the island. “There’s too much business in it, you’re losing the history,” he said. “You could create a food event, serve it with a meal and tell the story of the Baltic Sea. Even if you got 3 million euros,” about $4 million, from an auction, “that’s nothing.” As part-owner of the island’s only beer brewery, he would like to brew a special beer if the yeast in the beer bottles proves to be alive, as experts expect.

Others approve of an auction. “I think it’s a waste to keep it on the island, people drink it maybe at New Year’s,” said Patrik Helander, 34, a salesman in a hunting and fishing store. Beer, he added, was “more my cup.”

Some said the auction proceeds should go to clean up the notoriously polluted Baltic. “The Baltic Sea preserved the Champagne,” said Henri Pettersson, 18, a high school student. “That would say thank you.”

December 2010

A Greener Champagne Bottle

By LIZ ALDERMAN

Deep below a lush landscape of ripening Champagne grapes, Thierry Gasco, the master vintner for Pommery, ran his finger over the shoulders of a dark green bottle that looked just like the thousands of others reposing in his chilly subterranean cellars.

But to the practiced hand and eye, there is a subtle, if potentially significant, difference.

“This is how we’re remaking the future of Champagne,” he said, pointing to the area just below the neck. “We’re slimming the shoulders to make the bottle lighter, so our carbon footprint will be reduced to help keep Champagne here for future generations.”

The Champagne industry has embarked on a drive to cut the 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide it emits every year transporting billions of tiny bubbles around the world. Producing and shipping accounts for nearly a third of Champagne’s carbon emissions, with the hefty bottle the biggest offender.

Yet while many other industries might plaster their marketing with ecofriendly claims, changes to Champagne, as with so much else in France, are being made discreetly. Producers in this secretive business are tight-lipped about the costs and occasionally enigmatic about how much their carbon emissions will really be cut.

“Champagne is sometimes more humble than it should be,” said Philippe Wibrotte of the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne, the region’s trade organization. “Much is done for the promotion of the environment, but it’s kept quiet because we want to make sure each step is perfect.”

The industry speaks in hushed tones, too, in deference to the luxurious image and ritualistic traditions of Champagne, as symbolized for centuries by the bottle. It was Dom Pérignon, a Benedictine monk, who first thickened the glass in the mid-1600s to contain what was often referred to as “the devil’s wine” because its vessels exploded so often. Over time, the bottle was gradually recalibrated until 900 grams, or about two pounds, became the standard weight in the early 1970s.

The current retooling, which uses 65 fewer grams (2.3 ounces) of glass, is in response to a 2003 study of Champagne’s carbon footprint, which the industry wants to cut 25 percent by 2020, and 75 percent by 2050.

The move comes as efforts to reduce carbon output and improve vineyard ecology are accelerating worldwide, as wine houses reduce packaging, pesticides, water use and transportation. In California, for example, winegrowers are promoting what their trade group, the Wine Institute, says are nearly 230 “green practices,” including methods to cut carbon emissions.

Champagne accounts for only 10 percent of the three billion bottles of sparkling wine produced globally each year. But the bottle stands out for its heft. Italian prosecco, for instance, uses a 750-gram bottle. But it and its various fizzy cousins have only about half the pressure of Champagne—which generates three times the air pressure of a typical car tire.

Although some of Pommery’s restyled bottles are already on the market, the C.I.V.C. expects all Champagne houses to start using the new 835-gram vessel next April for bottling this month’s grape harvest; the new wave of bottles will hit stores after three years of fermentation. The effort, the group says, will trim carbon emissions by 8,000 metric tons annually—the equivalent of taking 4,000 small cars off the road.

“For Champagne producers to reduce the weight of their packaging is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Tyler Colman, an author of environmental studies on the wine industry, “because there’s less mass to transport around the world.”

Vranken-Pommery Monopole, which in addition to Pommery owns Heidsieck & Company Monopole and other labels, got a head start by adopting the lighter bottle in 2003. Consumers around the world may have already uncorked some specimens without noticing the new bottle. Moët & Chandon, Veuve Cliquot and a few others quietly switched this year, with those bottles still under fermentation.

The rest of the Champagne producers are deciding whether to embrace the C.I.V.C.’s mandate, which is voluntary but carries special force in this clannish community.

Designing a new bottle was no small feat. The container still had to withstand Champagne’s extreme pressure. It would also need to survive the four-year obstacle course from the factory floor to the cellars to the dining table, and fit in existing machinery at all Champagne houses. And it had to be molded so that consumers would barely detect the difference in the bottle’s classic shape.

“The bottle is part of Champagne’s image, and we don’t want to affect it,” said Daniel Lorson, a spokesman for the trade group.

Mr. Gasco said Vranken-Pommery, one of the largest houses, has spent 500,000 to one million euros ($635,000 to about $1.3 million) each year since 1994 on environmental initiatives, including research and testing of the lighter bottle.

But the bottle, he said, is not about money, which has become tighter since the financial crisis. Industrywide sales for Champagne last year were 3.7 billion euros ($4.7 billion), down from nearly 5 billion euros in 2007.

“Reducing their carbon footprint and energy use is also a great way to make their operations more financially viable, especially with the economy the way it is,” said Euan Murray, an official at the Carbon Trust, a nonprofit group that advises businesses and government on global warming issues.

Sipping a glass of Pommery during an interview, Mr. Gasco eventually disclosed that the new bottles cost around 32 euro cents (41 United States cents) each, not much cheaper than the classic. But Mr. Gasco, who sits on the C.I.V.C.’s bottling panel, said “if everyone starts to use it, the price will come down.” Any savings, however, would be too slight to pass on to consumers, he said.

Most of the new Champagne bottles are made at the St. Gobain plant near here, where molten red glass is dropped from a 20-foot-high chute into molds at a rate of 160 a minute. The glass is cooled from more than 1,000 degrees Celsius for over an hour, scanned for imperfections and stacked on pallets for shipping.

A worker on Pommery’s assembly line, who declined to be named, said he noticed that a few more of the new bottles were exploding, and that they made a higher-pitched sound when they clinked together. Mr. Gasco denied there were more explosions, and said any damage more likely came from using heat to inject the cork.

Bruno Delhorbe, the director at the St. Gobain factory, said that using less glass lowered the carbon emissions necessary to make each bottle by 7 percent, and allowed about 2,400 more to be placed inside delivery trucks, reducing the number of trucks on the road.

Slimming the shoulders while thinning the glass, he noted, also allowed his clients to avoid giving their customers more Champagne for the same price.

Of course, there are even lighter alternatives: Many of the world’s producers of still wines are employing plastic bottles and box containers to reduce their carbon footprint.

But it may be a long time before Champagne goes that route. Most houses take pains to cultivate an image of luxury through packaging and pricing—and intimations that other sparkling wines are inferior because they simply are not Champagne.

Still, many producers insist that while tradition has its place, the environmentally motivated changes are about the future. Patrick LeBrun, an independent producer, said he started going green “for personal reasons.” He has not used herbicides for five years, and this year, he is putting all of his product into the lighter bottle.

“There’s about a 2-cent price difference but that’s not what decided me,” he said. Trying to improve the environment “is my contribution to the next generation.”

August 2010

Spring Comes for a Prince of Champagne

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Winemakers come in most shapes, sizes, sexes and political persuasions, and I thought I’d pretty much come across all of them. Until someone mentioned that the chief enologist for Pommery Champagne was a prince.

An authentic prince?

I was skeptical. As a result of mergers upon mergers, most of the old-line Champagne houses are run by bean counters these days. But some of them are clever enough to keep a title or two around to convey the image of privileged elegance that Champagne has always tried for.

Would Alain de Polignac turn out to be just another titled front man, tanned from the Côte d’Azur and eager to gossip about polo and the price of a new Aston-Martin? I called from Paris, and Prince Alain, as everyone at Pommery calls him, from the forklift drivers up, agreed to spend time talking about Champagne and, I hoped, the Polignacs.

“Good morning, good morning,” he called, striding across the parking area. “Thank you so much for coming to see us.” Sixtyish, trim and with a striking resemblance to Noël Coward, Alain de Polignac was a model of a successful businessman, down to what had to be Savile Row tailoring. Around his neck and tossed insouciantly over his left shoulder was a vivid yellow cashmere scarf. I later learned that it is his trademark.

“Isn’t it lovely here?” he asked as we headed toward his office. It was in fact a beautiful morning. In the distance was Rheims, dominated by its immense cathedral where so many kings of France had been crowned, and all around us were the buildings of Pommery Champagne, looking much as they must have when Mme. Louise Pommery had them built more than a century ago. Prince Alain laughed when I voiced my egalitarian suspicions about him. “I am a chemical engineer,” he said. “I am also an enologist and have been the chief enologist at Pommery for 10 years. I also happen to be a prince.”

Pommery was founded in 1836 by Alexandre-Louis Pommery, a Rheims textile merchant, and Narcisse Greno, a wine merchant who eventually left the business. When Pommery died in 1858, his widow, then 39, took charge. Over 30 years, she built a modest little business specializing in red wines into one of the largest and most prosperous of all Champagne houses. Today, it produces seven million bottles a year.

The Polignacs, who trace their history back to 809, came to Pommery in 1879, when Louise Pommery married Count Guy de Polignac, later a marquis. A son of that marriage, Melchior, also a marquis, ran the company from 1907 to 1947. In 1952, one of his nephews, another Guy de Polignac, took over and ran Pommery until 1979, when it was sold to the Gardinier family, owners of Lanson Champagne. Since 1991, Pommery has been owned by LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, which owns Moët & Chandon, Dom Ruinart, Veuve Clicquot, Krug and other Champagne producers. The second Guy de Polignac ran Pommery with his two brothers, Louis and Edmond, all of them princes. Alain de Polignac is Edmond’s son.

“My title was awarded to us by the King of Bavaria,” Prince Alain said. As if that would clear things up.

In 1972, when Patrick Forbes wrote about Pommery and the Polignacs in Champagne (Victor Gollancz), he noted that the family seat was the Château de Polignac, in the Loire Valley, but that there were “no less than 15 Polignac ancestral homes scattered about France.” Prince Alain is proud of his family background but proud, too, of his winemaking heritage at Pommery. “In almost two centuries, there have been only eight winemakers,” he said. “Each of us has held the job for 20 to 30 years. Each of us has spent his last 10 years training his successor.” He has been working for five years with Thierry Gasco, now the Pommery cellar master.

“There is no father-to-son line,” Prince Alain said. “The only link is taste. It takes years to understand the house style, what is Pommery and, more important, what is not. Actually, there are two lines at Pommery, the family line and the taste line. In me, for the first time, the two are joined.” And what is Pommery?

“Ah, a light Champagne, yes, but full-bodied. And fresh, always fresh and lively on the palate.” Over lunch we sampled “Louise,” Pommery’s tête de cuvée, or top-of-the-line bottling, and the vintage brut. Mme. Pommery was the first to introduce the brut, or very dry-style Champagne, in the 1870s. It became the basic style of almost all the Champagne houses.

Architecture is also an interest of Prince Alain. “I would have loved to be an architect,” he said, adding quickly, “Of course, I am an architect: each year I build my wines.”

The buildings that interest him most are those of the Pommery winery on the outskirts of Rheims. Built over 10 years, mostly in the 1870s, the domaine, with its warehouses and parks, covers 200 acres on what was a city dump. Below ground are spectacular chalk caves from the Gallo-Roman era, 2,000 years ago. Some 20 million bottles of Champagne are stored in them now.

The main buildings, often derided by modern critics, are in a neo-Elizabethan style, popular in England in the late 19th century, and were partly meant to symbolize Pommery’s strong ties to the English Champagne market. “The buildings give a face to Pommery,” Prince Alain said. “The style is in the Champagne. Architecture connects the look of Pommery and the style.”

Alain de Polignac may look like a businessman, but the yellow scarf says he is a sensualist. As we walked out of the winery, he paused. “Listen,” he said, dropping his voice dramatically. “Hear that? Dring, dring, dring—the bottles bumping along the bottling line? For me, each year, it means the beginning of spring.

“Then, in fall, it’s the smell of the new wine. Sight, sound, smell—all come together right here. Ah, I adore it.”

March 2001

They Make the Champagne of Champagnes

By FRANK J. PRIAL

“I would like to see people drinking Krug at picnics,” said Rémi Krug, the man who makes Krug Champagne. “The wine is too revered, overworshipped. How often have I heard someone say: ‘I’ve had a bottle of Krug for years. I’m saving it for something special’?”

We were sitting in an austere reception room at the Krug winery here one January day, Rémi, 62, and his less voluble brother, Henri, 65, and before us on the table, like some precious icon, a bottle of Krug’s 1990 vintage, which is just now being released.

As a chill winter rain rattled the windows, Rémi Krug described a cricket match he attended in England not long ago when the players refreshed themselves between wickets with Krug 1961. “I loved it,” he said, “and I’d love to see more of it. People enjoying Krug, not just praising it.”

Yes, yes, of course. But Mr. Krug is a romantic. His least expensive Champagne, at something like $100 a bottle, is more costly than the top of the line at other houses. Krug at a picnic? Why not caviar at a Knicks game or pheasant for breakfast? Occasional reverence is a small price to pay for Krug’s extraordinary reputation, one the Krugs themselves have nurtured carefully for five generations.

I had long wondered about the Krug reputation. Was it justified? The wines are magnificent, but there are other great Champagnes: Bollinger, Salon, Moët’s Dom Pérignon, Roederer’s Cristal. Even so, critics with far more experience than I invariably place Krug ahead of all of them.

So I came out from Paris to learn the secret, and finally, in that studiously dull tasting room, listening to Rémi Krug talk about commitment and passion, I began to understand. For one thing, there before us and in our glasses was the 1990 vintage, a Champagne made 13 years earlier, in the days of the elder George Bush, just now being released. There has to be something special about a business that makes a product, then waits 13 years before selling it. In fact, all Krug Champagnes are aged at least six years before they are released.

And then there is the 1988 vintage, held back until well after the 1989 was released. “We just didn’t feel it was ready,” Henri said, “and the 1989 was.” What’s more, “ready,” in Krug parlance, means ready to sell.

A Krug Champagne can be drunk as soon as it is released, but Krug fanatics insist the wines should be held a decade or more before opening. Actually, part of Krug’s vintage production is always held back for long aging in the cellars here in the Rue Coquebert. The wines are eventually sold to the most loyal of all Krug fans, known as Krugistes, who eagerly pay $350 or more a bottle for 30-year-old wines. Krug Champagnes seem to last forever. The family’s own favorites include 1928 and 1959, both, they maintain, still lively and fresh. I can vouch for the 1959, a wonderful wine 10 years ago, but not yet for the 1928.

Despite all the talk of vintages, the star of the Krug cellars is the Grande Cuvée, a nonvintage blend, which may include wines from 20 crus and 10 vintages. It is a dry Champagne of great depth and power with immensely complex flavors. To one commentator the Grande Cuvée is as detailed and textured as a Gobelin tapestry. There is a nonvintage Rosé Brut and, for true Champagne connoisseurs, the legendary Clos du Mesnil, a vintage Champagne that first appeared in 1979. All Krug Champagne is fermented in oak barrels, a practice begun when the company was new. “But we don’t do it because our grandfather did,” Rémi Krug said. “We do it because wood brings out the Krug taste.”

Wine purists complain that Champagne, being invariably a blend of wines from all over the Champagne region, cannot possibly express the native soil from which it springs, as in Burgundy and, more and more, in California, too. There are exceptions in Champagne, and the Clos du Mesnil is one of them.

Its 4.5-acre walled vineyard in the center of the town of Mesnil-sur-Oger was once part of a Benedictine monastery. It is entirely planted in chardonnay, making it one of the most exclusive of all blanc-de-blancs Champagnes. Only a few thousand cases are made in years when a vintage is declared. Most of it is reserved for restaurants and special customers, and what is left usually sells for $250 to $300 a bottle.

Krug was founded in 1843 by Joseph Krug, who came from Mainz in what is now Germany and worked for other Champagne houses before setting up his own business. He was said to have exceptional skills as a blender and for many years made Champagne cuvées for other houses. Evidently, he passed his blending skills on to his descendants.

Neither Rémi nor Henri is an enologist, but they alone are responsible for the Krug style. Remarkably, Krug has maintained its individuality even though it has been owned by others for almost 30 years. In the mid-1970s, the house was sold to Rémy-Martin, later Rémy-Cointreau, the Cognac producers. In 1999, Rémy-Cointreau sold its interest in Krug to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which also owns Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart, Mercier, Pommery and Canard-Duchêne.

The outside owners, whatever their influence on Krug’s business practices, appear to have had no impact at all on the Krug style. The Krugs themselves rarely refer to their corporate masters, preferring to concentrate on their shareholders. The only visible sign of outside corporate policy may be Henri’s mandatory retirement this year. He will continue to be a consultant while his son Olivier, who has joined the company, hones his own blending and tasting skills.

Henri’s career marks a change from the days when his grandfather Joseph Krug II was running the company. He took over in 1910, but in 1915, as an artillery captain in World War I, he was severely wounded in the Ardennes and taken prisoner. After the war, his health was so poor that a nephew took over the business. He recovered, however, and remained head of the firm until 1959, when he was 90. Even then, he remained as a technical adviser until 1965, when he was 96. Paul Krug, the father of Henri and Rémi, continued to join final-blend tastings until his death at 85 in 1997.

Nor was Joseph II the only strong-willed Krug to head the firm. When he was taken prisoner, his wife took over. She made several vintages of Krug in her own style, which apparently leaned toward more red grapes than her husband liked. In fact, according to Patrick Forbes’s Champagne: The Wine, the Land and the People (Gollancz, 1977), she used mostly red grapes because it was difficult to get white grapes from outlying vineyards in the middle of the war. She ran a dispensary for wounded soldiers in the Krug cellars and was gassed twice. In World War II, she hid downed British airmen here until the Gestapo caught on and jailed her.

Krug is a small Champagne house, producing less than 50,000 cases of wine a year. The Krugs would like to grow, “particularly in America, which was the biggest Krug market before Prohibition—but not at the expense of quality,” Rémi Krug said.

“We could double our American sales,” he added, “but not at the expense of quality.”

“Often people say to us, ‘I remember the first time I had Krug.’ I never want to hear anyone say, ‘Krug was not what I expected.’ Our clients expect so much of us. We feel we have a commitment. This is very personal with us.”

January 2004

A Drink With Drama

By FRANK J. PRIAL

At this time of year, the question most often asked of anyone in the wine world is: “What kind of Champagne do I buy for (a) my daughter’s wedding, (b) my son’s graduation, (c) the launching of my new aircraft carrier?”

The aircraft carrier presents no problem. Almost any Champagne bottle will smash nicely on the prow of your average warship. If the vessel is American, of course, it might be politic to use an American wine. The wedding and the graduation are something else. Champagne was never more reasonably priced than it is right now, thanks to the strong dollar and a string of good years in the Champagne vineyards. Even so, Champagne is not cheap, and when one is buying for a crowd it can become very expensive indeed.

If money is truly no object, then by all means serve genuine French Champagne. Even routine parties take on unexpected elegance—or seem to—when Champagne is served. But for most special events, when a sparkling wine is appropriate, there are dozens of excellent substitutes for Champagne that will keep the guests happy and the host out of bankruptcy.

The remarkable Spanish sparkling wines, such as Codorníu and Freixenet, are made in the classic Champagne method and still manage to sell for under $6 a bottle. If it must be French, there are dozens of excellent vins mousseux at a third less than the cheapest genuine Champagne.

I guess what I’m saying here is this: Be serious about Champagne for a moment. We think of it in terms of lawn parties, summer weddings, diplomatic receptions and such memorable cultural events as the locker-room fete that ends the World Series.

But that’s not really what Champagne is about. Champagne is not supposed to be incidental music for someone else’s drama. It is, or should be, a superb sensual experience to be enjoyed for its own sake. It has color and drama in the glass, it has a bouquet like no other wine in the world, and—if it is a true Champagne—it has a taste like no other wine in the world.

But these are qualities to be experienced in quiet moments, alone or with a friend or two; not after the ambassador’s speech nor just as the band swings into “From this moment on. . . .”

The people who make Champagne, and their publicists, will tell anyone who pauses long enough to listen that in fact Champagne goes with almost anything. To prove their point, they promote dinners among gourmet societies and at certain restaurants at which Champagne is the only wine served.

Accordingly, there are big, robust Champagnes such as Krug to accompany the heavy dishes, and lighter, more delicate Champagnes such as Piper-Heidsieck with the fish and the desserts.

Do such dinners work? Whether anyone goes home from them inspired to create his own all-Champagne dinners is unlikely. But in fact there is a tradition of all-Champagne dinners in France.

The food and wine writer Robert J. Courtine, who uses the nom de cuisine La Reynière in the newspaper Le Monde, recently unearthed a menu for the 1899 Christmas Eve dinner at Maxim’s. It included Marenne oysters from Ostend, consommé, fillet of sole Maxim’s, white and red blood sausage (boudin), potato purée, chaud-froid of chicken, glazed oranges and the traditional Christmas cake Bûche de Noël. What Champagnes were served was not recorded. But the prices were. The dinner cost 25 francs a person; the Champagne, 18 francs a bottle. Courtine goes on to list menus for all-Champagne dinners prepared by Raymond Oliver, late of Le Grand Vefour, Claude Terrail of La Tour d’Argent and René Lasserre of Lasserre. And he offers his own menu: fresh foie gras, écrevisses, wild duck and floating island. In each case he leaves the Champagne choices up to the reader.

Courtine believes that there are some dishes that almost demand Champagne. We all know that connoisseurs love Champagne with oysters. Ah, says Courtine, but what Champagne with what oysters? He does not hesitate: nature, or totally dry, with the Marennes; crémant, which is less fizzy and usually lighter in taste, with the Belons. Now that is refinement.

A famous restaurateur once maintained to him that Champagne was the only possible wine to serve with pot-au-feu. Courtine said he tried it and liked it. Champagne with a red-meat stew? Well, why not, so long as it is a good hearty Champagne, a Bollinger, perhaps.

He is equally enthusiastic about Champagne with game birds, suggesting an older vintage blanc de noirs, “just on the edge of maderization.” When wine, Champagne or any other, maderizes, or oxidizes, it takes on a nutty flavor and a darker, slightly brownish tinge. It acquires a more pronounced taste, one capable of standing up to the strong taste of a pheasant or quail.

Courtine suggests Champagne with goat cheese and pink Champagne with some of the cheeses of the Champagne region, such as Riceys, which I’ve never seen in this country. Certainly it will go well with the new goat cheeses being made here.

Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that the cheeses go with Champagne. If Champagne is being served alone, as an aperitif, some thought should be given to what goes with it, and appetizers made with light, preferably white, cheeses will fill the bill.

In the last three or four years, there has been a growing awareness of the fact that so-called Champagne glasses are not the best way to serve such an elegant wine. The flat Champagne glass, which also serves for shrimp cocktail and fruit cup, lets all the bubbles escape and allows the wine to become warm quickly.

Most Champagne enthusiasts prefer the flute-style glass, which is tall and narrow. It’s harder to clean, but it highlights the color of the wine and the flow of the bubbles from bottom to top. Courtine, ever the iconoclast, criticizes both the classic coupe de Champagne and the flute; the coupe for the reasons cited above, the flute because it traps the bouquet. He opts for a regular red or white wine glass. He’s probably right, but there is supposed to be something celebratory about Champagne, and special glasses always add a bit to the occasion—even if you’re commissioning a dinghy and not an aircraft carrier.

May 1985

Royal Wedding Wine
May Be Bubbly and English

By ERIC ASIMOV

In January, Michel Roux Jr., a London chef who is on the tasting committee that recommends wines to be served by the royal family, made a suggestion that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Wouldn’t it be nice, Mr. Roux asked a reporter for The Telegraph, if at the wedding reception for Prince William and Kate Middleton the glasses were filled not with Champagne but with English sparkling wine?

“It might be a bit controversial, but I think it would be great to see, and it would say a lot about Britishness,” he said.

Nobody is saying whether English sparkling wine will be poured at any of the events related to the royal wedding on April 29. Yet those who follow these issues note that when Queen Elizabeth II turned 80 in 2006 the wine poured at her reception was an elegant blanc de blancs produced by Ridgeview Estate outside this little village in East Sussex. Indeed, last year the 2006 vintage of the same wine was voted the best sparkling wine over more than 700 other wines from around the world, including Champagne, in a competition put on by Decanter, a British wine publication.

The notion of fine English wine may seem as absurd as the thought of fine English food once did. Yet, just as London has become a dining destination, southern England has become a source of excellent sparkling wines, made in the illustrious mode of Champagne. From Kent, where the white cliffs of Dover face across the English Channel toward France, stretching westward along the southern coast through East and West Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, even as far west as Devon and Cornwall, hundreds of acres of new vineyards have been planted in the last 10 years, with far more projected.

The same geology visible in those famous white cliffs also plays a role in the rise of winemaking here. In Champagne, the best vineyards often lie in chalky limestone soils, sometimes mixed with clay. A line of this limestone stretches up from Sancerre and Chablis, through Champagne and across the Channel to England, past Dover and across southern England. The vineyards along this chalk belt are mainly growing chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, the three grapes that go into Champagne.

Christian Seely, who owns Coates & Seely vineyards in Hampshire with his partner, Nick Coates, has high hopes for their 30 acres of vines, planted on south-facing slopes of chalk and flint, and their two vintages of sparkling wine, 2009 and 2010, aging in bottles.

“I believe that there is the potential to make something really great, if one finds the right place,” he said.

“Above all, it’s the existence of terroirs that bear striking geological resemblance to what exists in Champagne,” said Mr. Seely, the managing director of AXA Millésimes, the arm of the French AXA insurance group that runs a portfolio of top wineries in France and elsewhere.

If few people in history ever thought to plant Champagne grapes in southern England, it was not without reason. Champagne itself, 49.5 degrees latitude at its northernmost point, pushed the climatic boundaries for making fine wine. In fact, the perennial problem of ripening grapes sufficiently in Champagne made sparkling wine the perfect solution: to achieve a crisp, refreshing quality in sparkling wine the grapes must ripen enough to no longer be stridently acidic, yet they must retain sufficient acidity to be brisk. Hence, grapes destined for sparkling wine are harvested at lower degrees of ripeness than grapes for still wine.

Here in Ditchling, Ridgeview Estate is 88 miles northwest of Champagne, approaching 51 degrees latitude. For centuries Sussex and the surrounding counties were considered too cold to grow grapes for fine wine. Yet climate change has warmed things up just enough to make that possible.

“I don’t know that I buy into climate change, or at least that the cause is human rather than cyclical, but it’s there and has certainly had an effect,” said Andrew Weeber, a South African orthopedist who in 2004 began planting Gusbourne Estate in Appledore, Kent. He now has 50 acres on a slope facing south, looking down toward the flat Romney Marsh and the sea.

The pace of planting has accelerated in the last few years. In 1990, two years after an American couple, Stuart and Sandy Moss, planted Nyetimber in West Sussex, the first major vineyard for sparkling wine, England had about 140 acres of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, according to Stephen Skelton, the author of UK Vineyards Guide 2010. By 2007, more than 660 acres had been planted, and by 2010 that figure had doubled, to about 1,360 acres.

Among the newer plantings is Bride Valley Vineyard in western Dorset, a natural amphitheater of chalk soils facing south, owned by Steven Spurrier, a columnist for Decanter, and his wife, Bella. Just after buying the property in 1987, Mr. Spurrier said, he noticed the chalk soil and sent it to Chablis for analysis. It was pronounced auspicious for chardonnay.

April 2011

In Albuquerque, French-Style
Wines That Sparkle

By SARAH KERSHAW

Photo by Mark Holm.

It would be really easy to whiz past the demure sign and stately entrance of the Gruet Winery on the Pan American Freeway here, not far from Target and almost subsumed by an R.V. dealership on one side and Tuff Shed on the other.

Inside, though, a sister and brother who moved here from the Champagne region of France 27 years ago and took the risk of planting grapes in this high desert climate are producing what have become phenomenally successful domestic sparkling wines. While the recession has pummeled wine producers in Champagne, Napa and elsewhere, Gruet has held its own, and even made headway in some markets, with only some minor wholesale losses.

Credit for this goes to budget-minded pricing: most of Gruet’s sparkling wines sell for well under $20. Customers wanting Champagne or sparkling wine have been moved to taste less-expensive products, wine buyers and restaurateurs say, giving these French expatriates in New Mexico a timely edge. Their sparkling wines are especially popular in New York and California, and have, in the last 10 years, appeared on the wine lists of high-end restaurants, including Craft, Del Frisco’s and Bar Americain in Manhattan.

The siblings, Nathalie and Laurent Gruet, were pioneers when the family planted an experimental vineyard in 1983, in Lordsburg, N.M., and then settled a year later on land near Truth or Consequences, a small town about 150 miles south of here known among local tourists and retirees for its natural hot springs and mild climate. As it turned out, the climate was an advantage for winemaking, with cool evening temperatures that slow the ripening to produce a pleasantly sharp acidity.

Some critics say that despite its high quality-to-price ratio, Gruet pales beside unquestionably superior sparkling wines made in France and even in California. But many wine buyers and reviewers see Gruet as a source of affordable domestic gems that hold up to—or can even outdo—more expensive domestic products.

“You can get decent things from the Finger Lakes, and Virginia is doing some nice sparkling wines, but there are very few that are classics, and I think Gruet is a classic now,” said Tracy Wilson, general manager of the cafes at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where the Gruet blanc de noirs is served at Terrace 5 for $12 a glass, or $44 a bottle. “Its profile is beautiful, it drinks like a French wine, but it’s got this twist on it, so it’s not as minerally. It’s crisp. It’s just a pleasant drink.”

It makes sense that Gruet drinks like a French wine, because the family behind it has deep roots in France. Gruet et Fils was established in Champagne in 1952 by the family patriarch, Gilbert Gruet, in Béthon. Mr. Gruet, who died in 1999, was an architect who agreed to help build a winery in Champagne in exchange for lessons in making the region’s sparkling wine.

He founded the first wine cooperative in Béthon in 1967, persuading the villagers to rip out the sugar beets in the fields and plant grapes instead, family members said.

In the early 1980s, like other winemakers in the region, Mr. Gruet decided that with a change in the French government and impending tax increases, it was time to start a winery in another country. With two of his four children, Nathalie and Laurent, he toured California, Texas, New York and finally, on the suggestion of some European winemakers he knew there, New Mexico.

“We were pretty charmed by the rugged beauty of New Mexico, and to see these lush vineyards in the middle of the desert was very intriguing to my father,” said Ms. Gruet, 47. The land was also less expensive than other options they considered, she said.

New Mexico had a centuries-long history as a leading producer of American wine. But in the early 20th century, flooding and groundwater in the state’s wine country, near the banks of the Rio Grande, became a crippling obstacle, turning fertile land into swamps. By 1920, there were no wineries left. It was not until the early ’80s that a government-sponsored study meant to attract European vignerons, some of whom were beginning to set their sights on California and other states, reported improved growing conditions.

But the early years were not easy for the Gruets. At the first vineyard in Lordsburg, the brother and sister, together with Ms. Gruet’s husband and their 5-month-old baby boy, lived in a trailer on a small plot of land. They soon discovered the area was too hot for chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, sold the land and planted a new vineyard 100 miles east, in an area called Engle, about 10 miles outside Truth or Consequences.

“We didn’t speak a word of English and we were in the middle of nowhere,” Ms. Gruet said. “That was pretty strange. But when you’re in your 20s, you take a challenge better. You have a bit more adventure in your soul.”

They wanted to try the Champagne method of making sparkling wines in New Mexico, so they had samples of the sandy and earthy soil sent to France for testing, to make sure the vines could grow the deep roots they needed to thrive. Encouraged by the results, they imported their first press and other machinery from France and rented a small production space in Albuquerque, as their father financed an operation that grew in small increments over 20 years.

“We started very small, we didn’t know if it was going to work,” Ms. Gruet said. “I think my father was living his dream through his children. He had a pioneer spirit, a spirit to start something totally oddball in the middle of nowhere.”

They went from producing 2,000 cases of wine in 1989, to 100,000 cases a year now, doing everything but the growing in a 45,000-square-foot plant in Albuquerque. The French and New Mexican wineries now produce about the same amount of wine, the Gruets said. (Their other two siblings, twin sisters, stayed in Champagne and now run the operation there.)

The New Mexican branch of the family said that they have found the climate here even better for grapes than in Champagne; the days can be very hot, but the nights, as much as 30 degrees cooler, slow the maturation process in what would otherwise be a short growing season. The arid air that wards off rot also helps with the wine’s consistency, Laurent Gruet said, adding that they use no pesticides on the vines.

Before they hired a distributor, Mr. Gruet and his brother-in-law carted cases of wine across the state to restaurants, liquor stores and tasting events, aggressively marketing it any chance they got.

“We started with one state, then two states, then we were adding states and it took over 20 years of labor,” said Mr. Gruet, 45. “We would tell the distributors, ‘We’re from New Mexico, open the bottle and taste it.’ Sometimes it would be a long time between when they received it and getting them to taste it.”

Within a few years, mentions in newspapers and wine magazines helped the Gruets capture the attention of wine buyers and distributors far beyond New Mexico. Their wines are now sold in 49 states—60 percent of it at about 5,000 restaurants and the other 40 percent at retail stores, Mr. Gruet said. The winery produces seven sparkling wines, four that retail for an average of $15 a bottle, as well as three more-expensive vintage sparklers, which range in price from $17 to $46. They also produce a small amount of still chardonnay and pinot noir.

Robert Lemberger, the wine buyer for the Artichoke Cafe in Albuquerque, one of the first restaurants to serve Gruet, was working at a bistro in Florida 10 years ago when he first heard of Gruet, which was on the wine list there.

Gruet is produced “in such high-quality fashion that the flavors just layer in their wines,” he said. “Their grand reserve is beautiful, with the taste of caramel and apples, citrus and a little bit of vanilla, as good as a reserve should be, and the blanc de noirs is wonderfully complex.”

The region around Truth or Consequences also produces chilies and other crops, but all of them are grown closer to the Rio Grande than the Gruet grapes are. Water for irrigation has to be pumped about 15 miles to the vineyard, which proved to be too cumbersome and expensive for the other wineries in the area. Gruet is the only one left, according to Olivia DeCamp, executive director of the New Mexico Wine Growers Association. Ms. Gruet said that the winery was doing well enough to sustain the extra cost and that the family decided it was not worth uprooting a vineyard that was consistently producing quality grapes.

As to whether the Gruets would consider striking out again, adding another Champagne house or American winery, Ms. Gruet laughed and sounded a bit weary.

“That’s for the next generation,” she said.

June 2010

Produced in Champagne,
but What Do You Call It?

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

Makers of sparkling wine in the United States, Russia and Ukraine can appropriate the Champagne name for their products, but an innocent biscuit maker in this tiny Swiss town is out of luck.

Marc-André Cornu was salmon fishing in Norway when he got word. His secretary was on the line, saying that lawyers for the Swiss distributors of French Champagne had written to say he could no longer use the brand name his family had used since the 1930s. Three generations, beginning with his grandfather, had labeled their baked goods “de Champagne,” after their Swiss village, nestled among the vineyards that creep north from the shores of Lake Neuchâtel.

The lawyers’ letters were only the first twist in a legal tangle as intricate as the gnarled and knotty grape vines hereabouts.

In 1998, Switzerland reached an accord with the European Union that allowed its former national airline, Swissair, to make stopovers in European Union cities. In return, Switzerland, which is not a member of the union, agreed to forbid the people of Champagne, population 710, to use the town’s name on their products.

In demanding the quid pro quo, the Europeans were doing the bidding of France, ever vigilant about defending the integrity and identity of Champagne. But that vigilance has not extended to threats from the United States and other big countries. In 2001, Swissair went bankrupt, and its successor, Swiss International Air Lines, is owned by Lufthansa. Yet now, Mr. Cornu, 46, and his baked goods company, which employs about 80 people, including his children, risk a fine if they invoke the name of their town. So, too, do the winemakers here, who in the best of years before the ban sold about 110,000 bottles of their light, nonsparkling wine, but now, without the Champagne label, are down 70 percent.

“Our village is first mentioned in a document from Feb. 15, 885, in a transaction between the Emperor Charles the Fat and a local governor,” said Albert Banderet, the former mayor, who grew grapes until he entered public administration, leaving the vineyards to his son.

Recently, the local people have organized demonstrations to draw attention to their plight. Earlier this month, they used a forklift to rip up a road sign bearing the name Champagne at the village entrance, to which they affixed a French flag and a bottle of French Champagne. Swiss-style, they carefully replanted the sign after the demonstration.

“Our goal is not to be the bin Ladens of wine, to be terrorists or ideologues,” Mr. Banderet, 59, said, “but wine is a reality here.” His son cultivates 70 acres of grapes, compared with 79,000 acres given over to the production of Champagne in France.

The French say they are struggling to protect an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or A.O.C., a convoluted certification that authenticates the content, method and origin of a French agricultural product.

“Yves Saint Laurent came along in 1993 or 1994 and wanted to introduce a Champagne perfume, and before that a tobacco company wanted a cigarette called Champagne,” said Daniel Lorson, spokesman for the Interprofessional Committee of the Wines of Champagne, a trade group in Épernay, France.

Harrods, the London department store, sold a mineral water called Champagne a few years ago, at $20 a bottle, Mr. Lorson said by telephone. “You put our name on it, and it’s worth $20.”

“Why is it worth so much to us?” Mr. Lorson asked. “To prevent it from becoming a generic name, on yogurt or toothpaste, and lose its authenticity. That’s why we carry the fight daily.”

Mr. Lorson says it was not his committee that began the scrap. A few years ago, a Swiss vintner sold about 3,000 bottles of wine under the name Champagne to a French supermarket chain. An anti-fraud agency, which inspects food stores, reported them.

The Swiss villagers admit there have been bad apples in the basket. After World War II, a farmer came here and made sparkling wine that he sold as Champagne, though only in Switzerland, said Mr. Banderet, seated in the dining room of his family’s sprawling 17th-century home.

More recently, a stranger from La Côte, along Lake Geneva, tried the same trick. “That triggered the issue,” said Thomas K. Bindschedler, spokesman for a committee established to protect the village’s name. “Everybody was upset about it, not only the French.”

Mr. Bindschedler, whose father was Swiss and mother Norwegian, was fishing with Mr. Cornu when the fateful phone call came. He runs salmon farms in Norway but lives in Champagne, where he is turning centuries-old farmhouses into deluxe apartments.

“I am not a winemaker, and I’m not a biscuit maker, so I’m not defending my own interests,” he said. “But I sincerely think that this is illogical.”

Mr. Bindschedler called the French action “arrogant and shocking,” and added, sarcastically, “They produce something very high class, and we produce rubbish.”

In 2004, the last year the villagers could use “Champagne” on their wine labels, they sold 110,000 bottles. By last year, sales had plummeted to 32,000. The vintners have tried using names like Libre Champ, Champagnoux and C-Ampagne. “Those were really artificial names,” Mr. Bindschedler said. “It’s deadly not to be able to use your own name.”

Mr. Cornu said French Champagne makers obtained a court order in Paris in 2005 barring him from making and selling products with the brand name “de Champagne,” and from using his company’s Web site. The decision is a delicate matter because he has a factory in Besançon, France, and is appealing the rulings. Mr. Cornu accuses the French of bullying tiny Switzerland. “They are less aggressive toward Russia, Ukraine or the United States,” he said, where the French allow the use of the name Champagne as a semi-generic term for sparkling wine. “We have a problem understanding this.”

The villagers also mock France’s recent decision to increase the number of officially designated plots of land where grapes may be used to make Champagne with a capital C, as global demand soars. “On the level of credibility,” said Mr. Banderet, “if you’re going to enlarge the Champagne country, why not enlarge it all the way to here?”

Mr. Bindschedler said no one here expected a full victory. “On the legal side, we don’t expect to break the legal decision,” he said. Under a compromise, the villagers might keep the right to use their name, he said, but would be obliged to police possible violations.

“If some Korean came over here and started making sparkling wine for the French market,” he said, “we would be responsible.”

April 2008

A Second Life in Champagne

By ROGER COHEN

Jérôme Philipon, the managing director of Bollinger, the venerable house that makes perhaps the world’s finest Champagne, grew up on a Picardy farm. As a boy, he would find scraps from World War I battles: belt buckles, helmets, shell fragments.

These relics fascinated him. They summoned a remote world of Franco-German carnage. But never did he expect to see with his own eyes a triage of the dead.

“I suddenly found myself in a world I’d only imagined,” he tells me. “Bodies covered in mud and blood arriving on pick-ups and being sorted in front of me and my wife, piles of dead to the left, survivors to the right.”

As Philipon recalls this post-tsunami scene, we are seated at a wooden table in a handsome room in the heart of Champagne. Below us run cellars that stretch for miles and contain 14 million bottles. Around us are hills of fine pinot noir vines.

Everything speaks of a rooted place: the 2007 vintage won’t go on sale until 2016. Almost a decade is needed to usher fruit and acidity to perfect balance.

Tumult and equilibrium: it is not easy to marry these images of devastation and death on the one hand, patient purpose on the other. But if I were to try, I would say that after unimaginable loss, we strip away the superfluous and, guided by a kind of homing instinct, return to the essential.

Modern existence scatters us. It can take tragedy to gather us in. Modernity is about me. Loss can be an awakening to service.

On Dec. 24, 2004, Philipon, then a Bangkok-based executive with the Coca-Cola Company, checked into the Sofitel Hotel at the Thai beach resort of Khao Lak with his wife, Florence. With them were their four young children: 8-year-old Mathilde; Charles, aged 7; Auguste, 4; and 1-year-old Octave.

The children had been born across Asia—in the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand—as Philipon, working first for Nestlé and then Coke, moved across a region that inspired him.

He felt unshackled from heavy French habits. New products prospered in expanding markets. Even on a Christmas Day far from home, there was a feeling of “plenitude.”

Then the tsunami struck. After breakfast together on Dec. 26, the family had scattered: Florence and Mathilde to their room, the three younger children with a nanny to the “Kids’ Club” on the beach, Philipon to an adjacent gym.

He was on a treadmill when he saw people running. A post-Christmas prank, he thought, until he saw the wall of water. He jumped from the machine as the gym windows exploded. The wave flipped him as if he were “in a huge washing machine.”

Wedged under a pick-up truck, he thought: this is how it ends. But the debrisfilled tide dragged him onward. Breathless, he clung to a palmtree. When the water rushed back out, he cleaved to a plastic cooking oil container.

On the first floor of the hotel, he found his wife and daughter, who had scrambled to safety on the roof. They looked down at the Kids’ Club, a flattened ruin among corpses.

Philipon scrambled onto the beach but could not find his kids. Evacuated to a hospital, he witnessed the triage of the dead, before returning. Charles, his oldest son, had been a champion swimmer. Might he?

But there, under the ruins, was the boy’s corpse.

It took six months to identify the other boys—Octave on April 1, 2005, and Auguste on July 3. “It was impossible for me to think of the future until I had found their bodies,” Philipon says.

Three children gone: the hardest thing still is considering what they might have been. “But we had to start again and knowing that life can be very short, really knowing that, we knew you must do what you love.”

Philipon, 45, has brown eyes of a boyish candor. He is bereft of self-pity, a man who’s come home. The stoical are discreet.

Coca-Cola brought him back to Paris to a great job, but when the offer from Bollinger came, he had no hesitation. The very French history he had fled now provided ballast. Here was a family business offering the top job for the first time to an outsider: tradition and innovation.

Philipon and his wife found strength—in their Catholic faith and their roots. In October, 2006, they had a son, Constantin, and late last year, a daughter, Penelope. “We now have three on earth and three in the sky,” he says.

This Wednesday, he tells me, Constantin will be exactly the age Octave was when he died. As in the Bollinger cellars, past is woven into present and future. Balance is all; and bravery at once the most silent and eloquent of virtues.

March 2008