Champagne's revolution is
wonderful, with so many small producers making their specific wines from a
single vineyard ... it is unstoppable and very exciting, as long as we do not
forget or belittle the wonderful art of blending.
Champagne and Burgundy were
always rivals, historically speaking, until that doctor said: "the king
should only drink wines from Burgundy to improve his health" and that
caused Champagne to stop innovating and improve its still wines and focus much
more in its "common and frequent accident that exploded its bottles".
I insist that the current
revolution in Champagne is wonderful and I really enjoy it when I am lucky to
try these new plot wines ... they are like "soloists", making a
musical metaphor, but I want to defend today that fine art of blending ... like
Krug, for example, who usually mix about two hundred wines from a dozen
different vintages to offer us his "Grande Cuvee" ... blending is an
art, if it is done badly, it is only "mixing" ... the Grande Cuvee de
Krug (and many others) is a symphony orchestra, not a soloist.
Champagne is not Burgundy,
nor does it have its diversity of soils. Champagne is wonderful in itself, without
the need to "compete" with Burgundy or any other wine region in the
world.
Already Dom Perignom did a
much more serious and rigorous work in the classification of
"terroirs" and other matters that the one that the romantic and false
legend attributes to him with the famous phrase: come, I am drinking stars!
The key to blending well
done (I insist, a sophisticated and difficult art) is that you know exactly
what you will find in the bottle, every year, regardless of the vicissitudes of
the particular vintage ... but we live in a world where the "novelty"
prevails and that of "knowing what you are going to find" no longer
excites anyone.
When a couple of human
beings love each other, as time goes by, they enjoy much less "first
time", they get to know each other more and more and they "know what
they will find when they have sex with each other," that doesn't mean I
can't be wonderful ...
Once I was lucky to enjoy a
tasting of base wines in Bollinger ... it was incredible, didactic and I
learned a lot to understand Champagne better ... they were extremely different
wines among them: some like acidity knives, others more mature and dense , some
minerals such as stones in the mouth ... and to all this add its "reserve
bombs", of other vintages, to polish, compensate, correct and balance its
final mixture of those base wines to offer in the end its "symphony
orchestra" .
There is a meme circulating
on social networks that says something like this: I am in favor of same-sex
marriage, but I am also in favor of sex between people of the same marriage,
which is being lost.
So here I leave you my
metaphors for the controversy (which is what I really like, feed the debate):
soloists and symphony orchestras, promiscuity and fidelity in marriage ...
Another day I will talk
more deeply about this land of chalk and iron masks ... I think it is important
to defend the wonderful and enigmatic art of blending ... I would give anything
to be able to be with a chef de cave in that process ... tasting
countless times a huge amount of different base wines, watching how they
change, listening to the experts how they try to guess the evolution of each
one of them ... because that is the Art of Champagne and that and no other is
their great legacy ... that is his enormous knowledge of each terroir, of each
vineyard in symphony with the vicissitudes of each vintage and its climatology
...
And no, Champagne is much
more than "drinking stars" ...
Some people don’t blend, they just mix.
Jean-Marc Lallier – Deutz
The interest in blending is the aggregation of positive components.
Francis Egly – Egly-Ouriet
Champagne can only be made in Champagne. Why? First, we have very bad weather. Second, we have our three grape varieties and chalky soil and all that. Third, we have 330 pages of regulations.
Pascal Lecrerc-Briant
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