Paper planes

How time flies in Champagne.

The entrance to Ruinart’s home at 4, Rue des Crayères in Reims

For a while, one of my son’s favourite books was “The World Record Paper Plane Book”. There were twenty different models to cut out and build, from simple darts to convoluted swept-wing fighters. They became more complex as you progressed; with practise, you’d learn how to account for the space of the fold itself, for the tiny misalignments in the printing process, for the way the paper would bulge at the nose if you didn’t leave enough space. There were five copies of each model. One hundred chances to get it right.

Still, no matter how good the thing looked, you never quite knew how it would fly. Sometimes it would look perfect, but spin off into a dive almost instantly. Other times it would look a bit off, yet glide quite happily from one end of the room to the other. You’d go back to the book, always hoping the next one would be better - but always counting down the pages you had left to play with.

Cellar masters have a similar task; they select, they cut, they fold, they stick. They might be in charge of making wine thirty times in their life (if they’re lucky). Thirty vintages, thirty pages, thirty chances to get it right. Yes, there might be a few different models each year, but these are careers with fewer pages, in all likelihood, than there were in my son’s paper plane book.

Frédéric Panaïotis’ book is even shorter than it should have been. The Chef de Cave of Ruinart, in place since 2007, died on Sunday night in a diving accident. His obituary is now up at Decanter, featuring only a tiny fraction of the tributes that came pouring in. Although I didn’t know Fred for as long as many people, I was lucky to spend a decent amount of time with him over the last two years, tasting and talking through everything from Dom Ruinart releases to the experimental vineyard in Taissy, the ‘Blanc Singulier’ project - a particular passion of his - and, most recently, the stunning renovations at 4 Rue des Crayères in Reims. His death is an incomprehensible calamity.

With Fred in Reims last autumn, where he showed me around Ruinart’s beautifully-renovated home at 4 Rue des Crayères in Reims.

Fred was 60 years old. The idea that he was only a couple of years away from French retirement age is almost comical; rather like his wines he was almost impossibly youthful, an irresistible combination of confidence and inquisitiveness, of enthusiasm and humility. He was one of those winemakers that showed you their wines not as a business presentation - here’s what I did, and why, and the results are exactly as we’d hoped - but as discoveries. Discoveries that embody work, and knowledge, and intent…but also wonder, surprise and mystery.

When Dom Ruinart 2010 emerged after a decade in the cellars - just the third vintage, the third page in Panaïotis’ book at Ruinart - it flew. And it flew beautifully. That the hands that sent such a wine on its way through the dark, quiet chalk pits of Southern Reims would still be at the Maison a decade later to catch it, to show it to us, to watch us marvel in it, shouldn’t be be taken for granted in modern Champagne, either; it’s not unheard of for a Chef de Caves to depart before a single tête de cuvée vintage bearing their mark has been released.

Fred was there, though. As he was for the brilliant 2013. As he will be for a while; part of the reason these long-aged champagnes are so spellbinding is that, at their best, they glide through the years in weird, warped, fantastical space-time all of their own. Despite all the delicious warm light of age, upon first tasting them the folds feel crisp, the paper star-bright. A great distance has been travelled, but if you look up you can still see the whites of the eyes of the person who launched them in almost unnerving fidelity, egging us on, perhaps, to throw them once again into the future. To sit and wait another ten years, to play with their creation.

There is never enough time, really. If we measure our time on this Earth in Dom Ruinarts, Fred’s was a case of six. In another decade, though, of the world continuing to turn at whatever-the-hell this current pace is, we’ll still be catching the wines he launched for the first time. It will either be reassuring - or disturbing, depending on what the decade brings - to look up, and to feel it wasn’t so long ago.

Time flies - whether we want it to, or not.