If you checked out last week’s post on the Traditional Method, you’ll know that bottle fermentation is made via the addition of a carefully-calibrated amount of sugar - usually 24 g/l - in order to create around six atmospheres (see-what-i-did-there) of pressure. This fermentation also adds over 1% to the alcoholic content of the wine; if the grapes were harvested at 11% potential alcohol, the finished champagne will be over 12%:
So what happens, in the age of ever increasing levels of ripeness, when you want to harvest grapes at 12%? Here in Champagne, growers are finding they have to wait for higher degrees of potential alcohol to get the flavours they want. Do the wines risk getting too alcoholic?
Louis Roederer Chef de Cave Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon told me a couple of years ago that he thought that there was “no hard line for alcohol - in 2019 I picked my Chardonnay at almost 12%. The only hard line is botrytis.”, meaning that grapes can hang as long as they need to reach ripe flavours so long as they remain healthy.
Houses, though, have more material to play with and blend to achieve balance. What about growers working with a small number of plots? What if they all get to 12% before being ripe?
It turns out that there is an elegant - if slightly controversial - solution. It’s one that makes its case, too, as the first major change in the fundamentals of the Traditional Method since the invention of riddling to produce perfectly clear champagnes in the early 19th Century.
Champagne 2.0
The discussion kicked off with one grower (who wanted to remain anonymous) on the warm South-facing slopes of the Montagne de Reims in January, although I had spoken to Benoît Marguet in nearby Ambonnay about it before, too (as well as a few others, such as Pascal Agrapart). All are part of a fairly quiet, but growing, band of vignerons who are trialling using their own fermenting grape juice, usually from the following harvest, to initiate the bottle fermentation.
“It’s amazing”, he said. “We picked at an average of 12.7% (potential alcohol) in 2022, and the finished champagne is at 12.7% - not 14%!….the alcohol does not increase, because the sugar is diluted in the juice”. Essentially, using juice to feed the bottle fermentation means there is no rise in alcohol percentage because there is no overall change in the ratio of sugar to water in the wine.
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