What's the point in reading old wine books? Surely we have a much better understanding of terroir, viticulture and winemaking today than any author did in the 1950s or 1960s? Aren't they just museum pieces, useful for wheeling out a few choice lines whenever one is required to appear recherché?
Sometimes it feels as if the discourse in specialist, close-knit fields such as wine falls into a same-iness that goes much deeper than Zeitgeist-affirmation, narrowing itself into self-referential (or deferential) circularities. Peter Pharos writes that “narratives are simultaneously historical and ahistorical” in his rather brilliant post on wine’s ‘postmodern’ era at timatkin.com, and I know what he’s getting at; our longing to belong in a narrative is so engorged by The Feast of the Scroll (in which each of us is head of our own table) that we hold the illusion of our thoughts and scribblings being well-contextualised. But the feed doesn’t feed, really. It’s the cabbage diet - artificial bloat.
About a year ago, after revisiting Patrick Forbes’ brilliant “Champagne - the Wine, The Land, The People’ from 1967, I found myself hungry for more bygone treasures. A quick trawl on Ebay revealed a long list of out-of-print titles on Champagne, so I filled a basket, not expecting much beyond genteel hagiography of ‘Krug, House of Champagne’ by John Arlott, ‘Bollinger, Tradition of a Champagne Family’ by Cyril Ray or ‘Champagne Taittinger’ by Claude Taittinger himself, nor anything especially novel (in terms of information) to today’s bubblehead from André Simon or Tom Stevenson writing in the 1960s and 1980s respectively.
I was wrong, of course.
Personalities and Process
Tom Stevenson’s Champagne, the newest of the ‘old’ books, is the only one that devotes serious paper-estate to Champagne’s vineyard. It includes a rather colourful and opinionated - village-by-village account of every Premier Cru and Grand Cru -rated village in the region (pictured below), as well as pruning methods and even keys to foliar identification of the major varieties (which is something I’ve never really cracked). It’s a genuinely useful technical reference even now.
Away from Stevenson, though, the focus of almost all of the older books on Champagne is on the families, the personalities and the actual goings-on behind the cellar doors; much more so than any modern books on Champagne on my shelf. The blending process itself, which seems almost unfashionable to talk about today, looms especially large. Cyril Ray writes evocatively on ‘Madame Jacques’, Lily Bollinger, observed at a blending session for ‘Special Cuvée’, who wears,
“…the quiet, dignified, customarily expressionless features of a Scottish gentlewoman…with the cock of the eyebrow and a pursing of the lips, this Avize 1928, that Bouzy 1964, will or will not do with the finished cuvée - and it is Madame’s cock of the eyebrow or pursing of the lips that the others watch. I do not say that no-one would disagree, but he would taste again, to be quite sure of his own mind….”
Indeed there is a full chapter of close to thirty pages on the cellar work during one winter at Bollinger in the 1970s. It’s a luxury afforded by the ability to write a whole book on just one producer, and a product of a time when there were fewer names on the shelf, less call for diplomacy, fewer allergies to ‘brand’.
Today, as Champagne’s Houses are often trying to appear smaller than they are, this sort of familial, personable tale of blending is kept rather quiet; indeed I talked to one head of a champagne house last week who was at pains to point out that he doesn’t want his wine thought of as ‘a blend’. The subjects of these books would be puzzled indeed.
What’s new, and what isn’t
“In essence his problem is that posed to all the old champagne houses : which is, simply enough, whether there is a permanently viable place for a true champagne - the skilful blend of different, good quality black and white grapes from Champagne vineyards subjected to all the established processes and faithfully matured - in face of the competition of one vineyard or one-village champagnes….”
I was quite astonished to read this in “Krug, House of Champagne” from 1976; we tend to think of the grower challenge (and the ‘Burgundification’ of Champagne) as a much more recent phenomenon, but here is John Arlot reporting on Paul Krug II worrying about it fifty years ago.
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