the platz

ENJOYMENT | Champagne
Scarlett Johansson’s favourite drink is Moët & Chandon, rapper Jay-Z prefers
Cristal, Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly swore by Dom Pérignon.
There is a seemingly endless list of celebrity champagne aficionados who
love this drink with its fine bubbles. It represents luxury, glamour, indulgence
and style — and everything that’s epitomised by the wealthy and
beautiful. However, this sparkling wine which emerged from north-eastern
France has humble beginnings. While wine has been produced for over
1,500 years, sparkling wine is a comparative newcomer. Up until the 17th
century, allowing wine to become carbonated was seen as the winemaker’s
number one error. Wine had to be still. Only the British in their national
wilfulness liked sparkle; they preferred to buy the “waste product”. In 1668,
this fondness of the islanders gave a French Benedictine monk the idea for
a business. He experimented with different types of grapes suitable for producing
carbonated wine, bottled the resulting grape juice on a large scale and
marketed it. This astute monk’s name? Dom Pérignon.
Only genuine from Champagne
These days, some 340 years later, the renowned brand of champagne known
as Dom Pérignon is part of the Moët & Chandon winery. Competitors include,
among others, Mumm’s, Veuve Cliquot and Pommery. What these
brands all agree on is that only their products may properly be called “champagnes”
because only their grapes are sourced from that roughly 34,000-hectare
French winegrowing region known as Champagne, and are cultivated
and pressed to highly exacting standards.
In 1927, the areas under cultivation for champagnes were fastidiously determined,
as were the precise methods of manufacture. But then, as the region’s
winegrowers were hit by a string of ruinous harvests at the beginning of the
last century, the largest manufacturers simply ordered their grapes from other
regions while still continuing to call their sparkling wines “champagnes”.
The winegrowers from the actual Champagne region were furious, and the
resulting outrage and uproar were so great that the government had to send
in 40,000 soldiers to calm the situation. Today, this small area is responsible
every year for the production of 300 million bottles whose contents have
been completely produced by hand.
A thirst for luxury
Champagne’s unadulterated clarity is due to a long drawn-out procedure that
removes the yeast residues after the process of fermentation. The bottles are
laid horizontally on a “jiggle-board” and a specially employed “shaker” —
known as the “remueur” — gently agitates and spins the bottles daily around
their own axis. At the same time, the angles of the board are adjusted to a
steeper gradient until the neck of the bottle is pointing downward. After
21 days, the yeast which has collected at the bottleneck can then be removed.
The champagne is then left to settle for at least 15 months, though it can take
up to three years for wines of a particular vintage to be ready. Good things
take time — and that comes at a price. While you can buy a non-vintage
champagne for 30 euros, certain vintages can fetch 200. There are other
champagnes which are in a wholly different price range. For his 38th birthday
celebration, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio paid for 18 cases of Armand
de Brignac. A bottle of this aristocratic tipple will set you back a cool
quarter of a million dollars.
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