Not much above the ground is interesting in the French town Epernay.
Hoons in Renaults break the peace of the square. A woman waits for her poodle to poop. Very few old houses or churches – the legacy of war.
But underground is a different story. Since 1743 a vast system of tunnelled cellars has been continuously hewn out of the chalk. Now there are 28 kilometres of cellars storing 108 million bottles of Moet and Chandon champagne in various stages of production.
The undistinguished Epernay – 120 kilometres north-west of Paris – is the centre of the French champagne-producing area. The grapes come from kilometres around, but it is here that the vast portion champagne is produced by a score of producers, Moet and Chandon the best known.
The chalk rock has significant advantages. First, it is easy to cut through. Moet and Chandon began in 1743, well before mechanisation. Secondly, the chalk provides temperature and humidity control – absorbing water more readily than other rocks. In the cellars it is a constant 10 to 12 degrees.
In this environment, champagne – a cold-climate wine – can be stored.
Moet and Chandon (incidentally, impress your friends with the correct pronunciation; the Moet has a pronounced hard T) use three grape varieties: chardonnay, pinor noir and pinot meunier. Others, especially Australian wine-makers find no need for pinot meunier because their chardonnay gives enough roundness and bouquet. Incidentally, Australian producers are not allowed to use the word “champagne” on their labels under a Federal Court ruling that says the word describes wine from the Champagne district in France. Consumers of Australian product have to guess the contents of those strong bottles with wired-in corks.
Moet uses pinot meuniere because its wants to produce a constant quality from one year to the next by blending. Using three varieties rather than two or one and adding from previous year’s wine if necessary gives a wider range of combinations for blending to achieve constancy of quality. It is high-end commodification.
If the year’s pickings warrant it, Moet also does differently labelled vintage champagne. With this, all grapes come from one year with the same percentage of each grape variety from year to year, giving a distinctive taste for each year.
Moet also does the Dom Perignon (chk spell) label – purely vintage from only pinot noir and chardonnay grapes. It comes from the top “crus” – or sections of vineyard.
The crus are rated – grand, premier and lesser ones. Moet has 13 of the 17 grand crus and 25 of the 41 premier crus.
All this top quality stuff has meant some top-rank clientele. There seems to have been a symbiotic relationship between Moet and whomever was in power at the time. Moet has practised the art of survival for 250 years. It supplied both Louis XV and Louis XVI.
When the champagne producer proved to have a more secure head than the client, it quickly changed allegiances. It found a new favoured client in the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte – hence the Brut Imperial and the Brut Imperial Vintage.
When the Prussians occupied that part of France, their looting was seen as a form of advertising the Moet label in Prussia.
Our guide was a bit ambivalent about World War II. She suggested that the Resistance might have used the caves but agreed that the Nazis certainly took their share of the goodies.
The Moet cellars were too well known to be a Resistance hide-out. The Nazis were notorious looters but they would no doubt have wanted the goodies to keep flowing so Moet survived the war.
Now the company is By Appointment to British, Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourg and Netherlands royalty.
The quality comes in production. First comes caring for the vine: debudding, pruning and training. Then comes harvesting, pressing and fermentation. After this primary (vat) fermentation (each grape variety separately), the sentiment settles and the wine is drawn off and blended. After bottling an initial cellaring, the bottles are placed in pupitres with necks down and turned around by remuers every day (now mostly done by machine). The sediment goes to the neck. The neck is later snap frozen trapping the sediment which is expelled by pressure when the bottle is opened just before the last production stage. This is the adding of a small quantity of liqueur made from wine and sugar. Increasing the amount of sugar gives sweeter champagne – from brut, sec to demi-sec.
The bottles are then corked and wired and laid for a further four months or more before labelling. Only one in 10,000 bottles breaks.
The tour ends with – yes, a glass of bubbly and steps leading conveniently from the cellar to the Moet and Chandon shop. There you can buy the M and C ice bucket, the M and C cork screw, the M and C apron, waist belt with glasses and bottle and so on.
Of course, you can get the full range of champagne in both quality and size.
The plain Moet starts in quarter bottle size, then a half, ordinary bottle, a magnum (equivalent to two bottles) ranging up to the 672 Euro ($1350), 15-litre Nabuchodonosur (20 bottle equivalent) – for which I had neither enough room in the boot nor Euros in the wallet.