10 reasons to drink Champagne during the pandemic
Don’t have much to celebrate this year? That’s no reason to eschew Champagne, which is better than ever, whatever the style, and we bring you 10 excuses to pop the cork in the middle of a pandemic.
At a time when Champagne consumption has suffered a major setback because of the pandemic, it seems only right to step back from considering the sales trends and focus on what this region does well. In any case, every time one thinks there’s a clear picture of Champagne’s fortunes, there’s another turn in Government coronavirus policies, and, with every new restriction, another blow is struck to the appellation that is the source of the ultimate celebratory drink. In 2020, this product, being so closely tied to national sentiment, has had a rollercoaster year, with, at times, almost no demand, then at others – notably during the relative freedom of a post-lockdown summer – an impressive uptick in consumption, highlighting the resilience of this great sparkling wine.
Meanwhile, our annual major db Champagne tasting – The Champagne Masters – was conducted later than usual due to the pandemic, but nonetheless run with the usual high calibre of judges and, for this year, physical distancing guidelines carefully observed. As always, it featured a high number of entries, taking in all major styles and producers from the region. Having chaired this tasting for more than a decade, it was clear to me what gives Champagne its lasting appeal, and I have broken this down into 10 points that together show the strength of Champagne’s foundations, with some suggested bottles from 2020’s Champagne Masters to prove it.
In other words, here are 10 excuses to pop the cork, even in the middle of a pandemic. So don’t turn your back on a brilliant drink just because times are bad, and use any of the below as a reason to consume Champagne in 2020.
10. Champagne now makes first-rate very dry fizz
When the craze for extremely dry Champagne began more than a decade ago, encouraged by sommeliers and critics, there were a host of launches from brands big and small proudly sporting their low sugar levels, be they brut nature or extra brut. But in certain cases, these new, drier additions to existing ranges were nothing more than similar cuvées with a lower dosage. The result wasn’t always pleasant, with these Champagnes finishing short, with a hard sensation – the bubbles seemed coarser, the acidity sharper. It seemed as though some of the pleasure had been taken away from Champagne.
But the demand for bone-dry fizz persisted, even if it came mainly from trade professionals, rather than Champagne drinkers. So the resourceful Champenois worked hard to refine their low-sugar cuvées in a bid to create a fizz that was both soft and bone dry. The techniques have varied, but tended to relate to sourcing grapes from top sites with plenty of ripe flavours, because any green characters become glaring with a low dosage. It also, in some cases, involved choosing a greater proportion of reserve wines, particularly from older, warm vintages, to bring a mellower element to the final blend. Then there was the ageing factor, with good extra bruts being given additional time maturing on and off the lees, to bring a bit more richness. And in one notable case, Louis Roederer, which launched a brut nature vintage Champagne with no malolactic fermentation, the pressure of the fizz was lowered to ensure this sugarless sparkling didn’t feel aggressive in the mouth.
Today, we have brilliant very dry options, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice quality to have low-sugar Champagne. Nor do you have to drink something that’s too biting, even bitter. Also, by perfecting fizz-making for low-or no-sugar cuvées, cellar masters have learnt how to better the quality of other Champagnes in their range. As for the good ones, among the big brands, these range from Louis Roederer to Pol Roger, Phillopponnat to Laurent-Perrier. There’s also an accomplished newcomer from Veuve Clicquot, Extra Brut Extra Old.
But from this year’s Champagne Masters, two names stood out. One was Piper-Heidsieck, for its delicious, toasty, slightly honeyed extra brut, called Essentiel. The other was from relatively new house, Champagne Brimoncourt, which offset its 2g/l dosage with ripe Grand Cru grapes, primarily Pinot Noir, although 20% Chardonnay is incorporated into the blend. In both cases, these Champagnes were tasted blind among competitors with Brut-level dosages, and none of our judges noted anything lacking in either of these two very dry Champagnes.
9. Champagne has mastered sweeter styles too
While experts in the trade have been calling for increasingly dry Champagne for a number of reasons, from its supposed greater purity, or suitability for serving with seafood, even its slightly lower calorie content, the growth area for the appellation has been sweeter styles. Indeed, with the launch in 2011 of Moët Ice Imperial, a Champagne with more than 45g/l, designed for serving over ice, demi-sec fizz has become cool. The addition of a rosé variant of this particular Champagne in 2016 made it even cooler – a development thanks to the inaugural blanc cuvée’s success, particularly in summertime resorts. Moët isn’t the only brand with sweeter variants with mainstream appeal, Lanson has a White Label Sec (32g/l) that has been designed for serving with various garnishes, from mint to red berries, while Veuve Clicquot went a stage further, unveiling a doux style of Champagne in 2016 with a dosage of 60g/l, specifically created for cocktails. (This should not be confused with its long-standing vintage-only Rich Champagne, which has a sec level dosage of 28g/l).
Such a swell in the number of these sweeter products from Champagne, commonly featuring distinctive packaging, is not surprising when one considers wider trends in the drinks market. The advent of sweeter fizz for mixology is necessary for Champagne to tap into the fast-growing and profitable cocktail scene. But beyond that, there’s prevailing consumer tastes. While it’s widely believed that drinkers today favour drier styles, in the sparkling market, it’s been the relatively sweet, soft-tasting Prosecco that has been the phenomenon of the century so far, and is now a sector twice as big as Champagne. If Champagne is to entice a Prosecco drinker looking to spend a bit more, it’s thought that a sec or demi-sec Champagne is more likely to satisfy their tastes than a Brut – which now tend to have dosages between 9g/l and 10g/l, between 2g/l and 3g/l lower than they were 20 years ago.
As for what’s good in the sweeter-than-Brut end of the Champagne sector, all the aforementioned labels deliver plenty of appeal, but the standout product in this year’s Masters was from Piper-Heidsieck. Cuvée Sublime has a dosage of 35g/l, and a pleasing combination of flavours, from yellow fruit, creamy coffee and grilled nuts, while it finishes with a soft, gently candied character on the finish, making it a pleasing apéritif or a fantastic accompaniment to fruit-based puddings.
8. Champagne’s co-ops can be a source of the region’s best-value cuvées
Although few consumers know about the different types of producer within the region of Champagne, they will recognise a Grande Marque. These great historic houses provide comfort for the drinker with a consistent look and taste, and an assurance of quality. But with such positive aspects comes an elevated price, particularly when it relates to the prestige cuvée sector, where you might pay a hefty sum for the luxury image conveyed, built through years of critical acclaim and marketing. But what if you want a brilliant Champagne and you don’t care about upmarket associations? Then your best option are Champagne’s co-operative-owned brands. These are often newer creations that don’t have centuries of history, celebrity associations or royal warrants like the so-called Grandes Marques. This means that such co-op brands are harder to sell at similar prices as their renowned competitors, meaning that they can offer a cheaper alternative.
Add to this the fact that the top co-operatives of Champagne have state-of-the-art winemaking facilities, and, thanks to their network of grower-members, access to large swathes of the region’s vineyards, and these types of producer are able to craft something with quality, complexity and consistency. The co-operative model also tends to see the cellar masters select the best grapes and wines for the group’s own brand, while keeping their production facilities running at capacity by making wines and Champagne for other players, from other houses or retailers, or their grower members who want to bottle something under their own name. Combine this model with a less well-known label, and you can find a good Champagne for a bargain price. After years of blind tasting co-operative brands alongside Grandes Marques in the Champagne Masters, I can recommend in particular the cuvées from Pannier (particularly its prestige Egérie de Pannier, which is not cheap at £75, but has bettered samples that cost three times as much), as well as vintage and blanc de blancs from Collet and Champagne’s biggest cooperative brand, Nicolas Feuillatte. But there are two stand-outs in this sector. Both are consistently brilliant, crucially when it come to their brut non-vintage offering, and also craft delicious cuvées in other styles, particularly vintage. They are Champagne Castelnau and Champagne Palmer. Indeed, the former was the only Champagne to gain a Gold medal in the sub-£30 sector.
7. Blanc de noirs is no longer an oddball niche
As cellar masters will tell you, Champagne needs Chardonnay. Even in small doses, this white grape provides a refreshing, toasty complexity to cuvées, and in warmer years, an appealing note of ripe yellow fruit too. But what if you want to create a Champagne based entirely on red grapes – can one achieve a similar quality standard without the addition of Chardonnay?
Judging by recent developments and the Champagne Masters, the answer may not be a definite ‘yes’, but certainly ‘almost’, as blanc de noirs quality improves markedly. Contrary to what one might think about a Champagne made only with red grapes, blanc de noirs aren’t always richer and fruitier, with pure Pinot fizz offering a fresh apple character, rather than something loaded with red-berry flavours. Plus, without the peach-like notes of ripe Chardonnay, blanc de noirs can appear more linear than their blended counterparts.
Blanc de noirs is also less of a tiny niche, with more producers embracing the style, including recent launches from Champagne Gosset, which is a blanc de Meunier to signify the fact it is not just made with 100% red grapes, but only with Pinot Meunier. Another is Pommery, which has unveiled an Apanage Blanc de Noirs to complement its blanc de blancs.
Bollinger too, the brand behind one of the rarest and priciest blanc de noirs of all – Vieilles Vignes Françaises – has this year added a baby brother to this legendary cuvée, called PN VZ15 (standing for Pinot Noir, Verzenay, 2015).
The other blanc de noirs that is made in tiny quantities and fetches extraordinarily high prices is Krug’s Clos d’Ambonnay – a £2,000 bottle of Champagne from a 0.68-hectare walled plot of Pinot Noir.
Meanwhile, Veuve Clicquot’s La Grande Dame prestige cuvée is gradually edging towards pure Pinot status, containing just 10% Chardonnay in its latest release from 2012.
The wonderful Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill from Pol Roger is another example of a great fizz that’s mainly Pinot (the house does not like to speak about the exact proportion).
Taking blanc de noirs more mainstream, however, is a brand such as Mumm, which owns 170ha of Pinot vineyards in the Montagne de Reims, covering Grand Cru sites such as Aÿ, Bouzy and Ambonnay. Under it’s RSRV label for more niche Champagnes, it has a brilliant 2012 vintage blanc de noirs with plenty of fresh apple fruit, pastry and chalk that sells for just under £40.
Also impressing in this year’s Masters was the pure Pinot Meunier from Beaumont des Crayères, which offers a different experience to the Mumm Pinot Noir. The Beaumont fizz has ripe, soft fruit flavours and a honeyed edge, but, being extra brut, a fresh, very dry finish.
6. Grower Champagnes are great, but don’t assume they are better value than famous brands
One fantastic development for the image of Champagne has been the rise in the number of vineyard owners choosing to bottle and market Champagne from their own holdings – known as Grower Champagnes. This has added to the diversity and complexity of the Champagne offer, giving new reasons for commentators to write about the region, and Champagne lovers something fresh to try. Some of these growers have achieved such widespread international recognition they have become brands strong enough to rival some historic houses – in terms of reputation, rather than scale. Such names range from Agrapart to Egly-Ouriet, or Pierre Péters to Selosse and Vilmart. Others have yet to establish fame, while in the region as a whole, the grower-Champagne segment is in decline, as more choose the reliable annual income of selling grapes to the maisons than bottling their own fizz, which may not easily find buyers. But despite the beneficial addition of a powerful grower-Champagne sector for the appellation, it would be wrong to think that these producers offer a cheaper option. Many of them are high-priced, relative to their long-established Grande Marque equivalents. This can be understandable, bearing in mind one is funding something so specialist.
As a final point, although this year’s Champagne Masters didn’t contain any pure grower labels, it has been apparent in past tastings that they don’t always perform well against the maisons, because much of Champagne’s quality and character comes from the ability of the houses and large co-ops to source grapes from a large area, then skilfully blend the resulting wines for depth, complexity and consistency. In contrast, a grower Champagne has a more limited space from which to draw grapes, and while it’s possible to add in depth and character from a large library of reserve wines, generally such a producer will have fewer options for the blend.
This is a restriction, and can yield a Champagne that appears to have fewer layers of flavour.
Nonetheless, such Champagnes have ardent followers, while reminding drinkers that Champagne is first and foremost a wine, and its quality is linked to the land and the climate.
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5. Buy vintage Champagne for brilliance without the bling
Vintage Champagne is a category that tends to be overlooked. Hailing from a single year, but not part of the prestige cuvée luxury segment, it often bypassed by drinkers who opt for either the base-level brut non-vintage, or indulgent in the upmarket nature of the top-end blends – dominated by a small but expanding number of players, the most famous being Dom Pérignon, Krug and Cristal.
But some of the greatest-value bottles can be found in the vintage sector of Champagne, probably because, caught in the middle, this sub-category struggles to command a higher price level. It offers the fruits of a first-rate year, a strict selection process of the best grapes, and a Champagne with a longer maturation period than brut non-vintage.
Over the years, it has been this area of Champagne that has had the highest proportion of top-scoring wines relative to the number of entries, while also offering the best quality-to-price ratio.
A string of fantastic vintages has helped, with the 2012s now widespread, using grapes from a brilliant harvest that’s considered on a par with the now legendary 2002. I also love the 2009s for their generous nature, while, for the more ascetic, the 2008s are a joy, with great ageing potential too.
As for the top picks from this year’s Champagne Masters, both Piper-Heidsieck and Palmer offer a fantastic chance to enjoy all the wonders of the 2012 vintage at a lovely stage in its development, while another fizz from this same harvest that wowed the judges in 2020 was from Charles Heidsieck.
4. Pure Chardonnay Champagnes are top performers
With Champagne historically planted almost entirely with red grapes, it is a relatively new situation that more than a third of the region is now given over to the white variety of Chardonnay.
Such is the demand for this single grape, areas that specialise in Chardonnay outside its heartland of the Côtes de Blancs, such as Côte de Sézanne and the Côteaux de Vitry, have experienced the fastest growth in grape prices of any part of the region this decade.
The proportion of Chardonnay in the Champagne appellation is still rising, as growers who replace vineyards are opting to replant them with Chardonnay, both because it is increasingly popular with consumers, but also due to it providing more regular yields.
But at the moment good Chardonnay is the most valuable raw material in Champagne, such is the supply shortage. This doubtless explains the rising prices for blanc de blancs non-vintage, which are now on a par with rosés on average.
Without considering those prestige cuvées based on purely Chardonnay,
such as Taittinger’s reliably excellent Comtes de Champagne, or the always delicious Amour de Deutz from Champagne Deutz, the vintage and NV sector of blanc de blancs offers a creamy-crisp style of fizz that’s understandably popular.
A consistent level of greatness was seen in this year’s Champagne Masters, with standouts from Henriot, Charles Heidsieck and Collet. At the top in terms of average scores was Mumm, a house better known for the quality of its Pinots, but also the source of a fantastic pure Chardonnay fizz from the Cramant grand cru, newly labelled RSRV (an abbreviation for ‘reserve’). It’s a delicious, benchmark, relatively affordable vintage blanc de blancs mixing flavours of citrus zest, hazelnuts and chalk.
3. Prestige cuvées are not style over substance
While I’ve said the vintage category offers the best bang for your buck in Champagne, there is some quality variation, and some years are better than others. That’s true too for prestige cuvées, which are almost entirely vintage offerings, but they tend to result from a stricter selection of grapes/wines than their cheaper vintage siblings.
So while Champagne’s range-topping products factor in a margin for the name, the rarity factor and the pretty packaging, the base product is a fantastic offer. I’m constantly impressed at the standard and pleasure provided by Dom Pérignon, for example, considering that the production level runs into the millions of bottles. Comtes de Champagne from Taittinger is another brilliant, reliable option. But from the Champagne Masters tastings, the standout has been Piper-Heidsieck’s Rare – which has now been hived off as, in effect, a house in its own right, and hence labelled simply Rare. Both its 2006 blanc and 2008 Rosé are remarkable, and were the two highest-scoring samples of this year’s competition. But others also wowed, such as Champagne Deutz’s Amour de Deutz, Pommery’s Cuvée Louise, Mumm’s Cuvée R Lalou, and Palmes d’Or from Nicolas Feuillatte. It was also a delight to be able to taste a sample – still commercially available – of the 2002 vintage under the Noble Cuvée label from Lanson. And a surprise to the judges, earning some of the highest scores of the day, was a top-end blend from Henriot, Cuvée Hemera.
2. Rosé is serious Champagne
When it comes to Champagne, rosé is a serious proposition, home to the region’s priciest cuvées, and most delicious offerings. But a high standard of pink Champagne in the region is a relatively new development, and it relates to vastly improved viticulture and winemaking for the production of still reds: rosé being mostly made by blending in Pinot-based reds with white wine.
Notably, while colour matters so much with still rosé – which has to be a barely tinged salmon pink – when it comes to Champagne, the shade doesn’t seem to matter. Perhaps that’s because so little of this upmarket fizz is bottled in clear glass – which fails to filter out potentially harmful UV light. For example, Ruinart’s fastest-growing line is its rosé, which is more like a light ruby than a pink.
Colour variations aside, the stylistic range of rosé Champagne is broad, with three main styles on offer: the rich, mature and wine-like; the fresh berry-scented and youthful; or the toast-and-chalk type that tastes little different from its blanc counterpart. Such differences may explain the greater brand loyalty seen for pink Champagne than for blanc.
Famous for their rosés are Laurent-Perrier and Billecart-Salmon, which are both rightly highly rated for quality. In this year’s Champagne Masters, top performers included the excellent Rare Rosé, but if you consider that more as a prestige cuvée than a pink Champagne, then Charles Heidsieck and Henriot are brilliant sources of this colour of fizz, and from a single harvest.
And at a more affordable end of the sub-category, and made in a non-vintage style, is Mumm’s Rosé Foujita, with a lovely combination of brioche and red berry fruit – another impressive option from its RSRV line.
1. Brut non-vintage is better than ever
For all the excited talk about relatively niche styles of Champagne, be they blanc de blancs or vintage offerings, it is brut non-vintage that represents around three quarters of the region’s production, and is therefore what most people drink. Consequently, the success of the appellation depends on this single style of fizz, the base level for all producers, and entry point price-wise for drinkers. It therefore must be good. But, it’s now better than ever before, and such quality improvement has accelerated this decade. I believe it relates mainly to a desire to better this vital basis for Champagne as producers face greater competition from outside the region, coupled with changes in the way Champagne is made. In terms of the latter, the single biggest impact is the increased use of reserve wine – now as much as 50% in a brand leader like Moët – when 20 years ago this may have been just 10%.
This is important because reserve wine gives a regularity to the style, and a depth to the taste. It can sharpen or soften a wine. And whatever role it serves, it adds complexity. That’s where Champagne wins over other regions, in my view. It has the a depth and breadth of reserve wines, and it knows how to blend them. Like those winemakers in the Douro who create Port to a house style with such know-how, so do the Champenois, with a savoir faire not matched by any other sparkling wine region. Not yet, that is.
As for who is making great Brut NV today, for value look to co-operative brands Castelnau and Palmer. Among the famous labels, Piper-Heidsieck is on song, with toast, honey, and fresh fruit in its cuvée. Others of note are Pommery and Henriot. And, don’t think that scale and quality are mutually exclusive, with Moët’s Brut Imperial, the world’s best-selling Champagne, emerging as one of the top-scorers of this year’s Masters, wowing for its blend of characters, from roasted nuts to ripe apple and freshly-ground coffee. Such a high level of quality in this global sparkling wine leader is another reason why the foundations for Champagne are rock solid, even if the sales right now are relatively lacklustre.
Read more
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