Marching to the battlefield

As the search for sparkling perfection continues, the focus of Champagne makers is turning increasingly away from the cellar and out to the vineyards, as Patrick Schmitt discovers.

As those who read this magazine regularly will know, we’ve written extensively about cellar-based changes in Champagne. From pressing techniques to fermentation vessels, lees ageing to dosage levels, the focus of our reporting has been the winemaking. We have, however, been less focused on the approaches in the vineyard, and that’s because it’s the cellar techniques that most directly affect the style of Champagne.

But if one considers the level of quality in Champagne, one also needs to consider the techniques in the vineyard, because it’s the nature of the grapes that makes the difference between a good and a great wine. And, as highlighted in last month’s report on the annual Drinks Business Champagne Masters, the famous French fizz is getting better, a change that is notable in its most commercially significant category: brut non vintage.

Notably, the region’s leading names seem to be placing greater emphasis on what’s happening in the vineyard, aware that better viticulture is needed to reach the next stage in the quality advancement of Champagne. As Pol Roger’s managing director Laurent d’Harcourt says, “Champagne has the best two competitive advantages: bad weather and bad soil… and it’s advances in viticulture that are probably the next big step for Champagne.”

Similarly, Gilles Descôtes, chef de caves at Bollinger states, “The main goal right now in Champagne is to get riper and healthier berries – there is a lot to do in winemaking, but there is a lot more to do in the vineyards.” So what are the changes taking place among the vines to bring about an improvement in quality? How are the Champenois yielding riper and better berries?

Well, one aspect that should be stressed at the outset is the difference between berry ripeness and grape quality in Champagne. The former is primarily influenced by aspects beyond the grower’s control – the weather – the latter is a question of vineyard management.

Battling the elements
Descôtes explains, “When considering ripeness, the first thing is climate change, and if you look at Champagne over the past 20 years and compare it to what is happening now, we have doubled the yield, and at same time we have increased ripeness by 1% in natural sugar, while acidity has decreased by about 1g/l of tartaric acid. This big change in the composition of the berry is caused by climate change in Champagne.”

Furthermore, he points out that such changes are not the result of delaying harvesting: “At same time we are picking earlier and earlier; in the past 10 years we picked three times in August, but the last time we did that was more than a century before – in 1893.” Despite such climatic change, Descôtes says that Bollinger is “still trying to get riper grapes: the average now is around 10% natural sugar, but we are aiming for 10.5%, and the best way to do that is to control the yield.” While saying that he can achieve a high yield and maturity with Chardonnay; for Pinot Noir it is necessary to restrict vine productivity to achieve Bollinger’s required ripeness level in the berries. “12-13,000 kg per hectare in an average year is close to what you get from a vineyard with Pinot Noir, and if you go higher, then you get some dilution,” notes Descôtes.

Of course, yields are regulated in Champagne, and with the demand for grapes falling more closely in line with the supply, limits on yields have fallen in the region, although they are still high relative to non-sparkling wine producing areas. “I remember when yields were set 20 years ago by the CIVC at 18,000 kilograms per hectare, but now they are around 11,000, and maximum 12,000,” says Champagne De Castelnau’s marketing director, Louis-Charles Pluot. Importantly, lower yields means that growers are using “less fertiliser and less nitrogen” according to Champagne Drappier owner Michel Drappier, which results in “less botrytis”.

This is for two main reasons. Firstly, with fewer fertiliser applications vine vigour declines, helping to open up the canopy to air and sunlight, reducing botrytis-inducing humidity in the bunches. Secondly, too much nitrogen and the berries grow quickly, with thinner skins, leaving them more susceptible to botrytis, which shrivels the berries by piercing their skins.

But there’s a further correlation between yield regulations and quality. With lower limits, those who are managing productive vineyards are more likely to choose only the best bunches for Champagne. “Now the yields set by the CIVC are lower, it allows growers to pick the best bunches and leave the rest, and it is best to do the sorting during the picking,” says Pluot. Moving away from climate, yields and ripeness to berry quality, it appears this has much to do with improved soil management in Champagne.

Charles Philipponnat, manager of the house by the same name, explains the change: “The first symbolical point in the progress [of soil management in Champagne] was the banning in the early ‘90s of the infamous urban compost,” he recalls, adding that this was followed by the reduction in the use of herbicides and consequently greater grass cover in the vineyards. “The vineyards used to be blue in winter – from the blue plastic in the urban compost – and then brown from the bare soil, and now green from the grass, so it is a big visible change.”

Encouraging grass to grow in the vineyards is an important change in Champagne. Philipponnat explains, “The grass competes with vines for nutrients and reduces vigour in the vines, and one consequence of this is lower yields and bunches with slightly smaller berries and thicker skins.” He adds, “This is better for protecting against botrytis, but it’s not necessarily the objective, because smaller berries have more phenolics and tannins, and for Champagne the aim is to have clear juice.”

However, botrytis is the greatest threat to Champagne quality in any one vintage because infected berries will speed up oxidation in the must and wine. Indeed, it is the threat of botrytis that can decide picking dates, with growers preferring to harvest grapes with lower natural sugars than risk more advanced ripeness and botrytis infections. While the ‘09, ‘10 and ‘11 vintages saw low levels of botrytis in Champagne, the threat of rot was high in 2012 and 13 due to a combination of August heat and moisture. And, in certain parts of Champagne this year, botrytis was again a challenge for growers. Drappier explains, “Global warming means more humidity and therefore more botrytis.” Furthermore, he says that greater extremes of climate in Champagne are making it easier for botrytis to infect the grapes. “Global warming means more overcast days and more burning sun days which weaken the skins of the berries.”

Global impact
Veuve Clicquot winemaker Cyril Brun also identifies problems from changing weather patterns in Champagne. “Global warming has created more distortion, it has amplified the difference between plots, and it’s not just about high temperature, but the distribution of rainfall over the year is more chaotic, so we might have one month’s rain in two days,” he reports.

Helping growers to tackle such challenges is the management of soils and vines for increasing resistance to extremes. Key to this is the use of ploughing in the vineyard to encourage vine roots to penetrate deep into the region’s chalk soils, where mineral, nutrient and moisture levels are more stable than in the region’s thin top soils. “The work on the soil and subsoil is the big area of improvement in the last 10 years, and we feel that we are just bringing new potential to our vineyards by coming back to the original way of working,” says Brun, alluding to the use of ploughing in place of herbicides, and spreading mulches, not chemical fertilisers.

In particular, speaking of ploughing, he says, “we manage the soil so the root system goes much deeper, not just the first 20 inches. This gives a much better identity of each terroir – a bigger impact of the chalk – and we get more consistency because there is less nutrition but also less water stress. Continuing he says, “One point to global warming is that we are getting very warm days at the end of the maturation period which can generate stress and slow down the ripening process, which can create a distortion between sugar levels and phenolic ripeness – you might find the sugar goes up, but the phenolics don’t ripen.”

Champagne Bruno Paillard’s Alice Paillard is, like her father Bruno, a strong believer in the benefits of encouraging vertical root growth. “It makes the vines much stronger and more resistant to excesses in climate from drought to too much water, as well as extremes of temperature and humidity,” she explains. At the beginning, however, Paillard records a 40% drop in yields as the lateral roots of the vine were severed by the plough. “But the vine reacts quickly, and in three seasons you see a difference, and the fruit gains vibrancy, minerality and tension [as it roots more deeply] although it takes up to nine years for the yields get back to a quantity of 12,000kg/ha.”

Acknowledging the difficulty of working the vines with tractors during wet periods, particularly where the soils contain a high clay content, Paillard says that the house now leaves a strip of protective turf between the lines of vines to support the tractor, and uses the plough to turn the soil beneath the vines – a technique made possible by a tool that automatically retracts the plough before it hits the vine’s trunk.

For Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, vice-president and head winemaker at Champagne Louis Roederer, who oversees the region’s largest biodynamic estate with 65 hectares managed according to these principles, ploughing is a vital element “to make subsoil, not top soil wines.” But he also employs 25 horses to pull the ploughs “not to make pictures, but to recreate the link between the human being and nature, which has been disjoined since the ‘70s.” With a tractor, he says you lose the feeling for the soils, but with a horse, which must be guided by man, one can see the animal’s response to different levels of soil compaction, something that could explain variations in vine health.

Tech saviours
A further change in the battle against botrytis specifically comes from developments in technology, both to prevent the initial fungal infection, and then its advance. In particular, the widespread take-up of harmless pheromone capsules to prevent the laying of vine moth larvae has had a dramatic impact. Bollinger’s Descôtes explains: “Botrytis needs a vector and usually it comes with the butterflies that lay eggs on the grapes in July, but if we fight these then we don’t get the eggs, and we don’t get the botrytis, which is why 99% of Bollinger’s vineyards are protected [using the capsules], and we don’t use insecticides any more.”

As a result, Descôtes records, “10 years ago we would have done three botrytis sprays: one during flowering, one just as the grape is closing in July, and the last one in mid-August at veraison. But now we would only spray during flowering in sensitive places and both during flowering and in July in very sensitive places – so we use fewer products against botrytis.”

Furthermore, due to the aforementioned techniques from increasing root competition for nutrients using grasses or ploughing to force roots deeper, Descôtes adds, “we also get less botrytis because the grape skins are thicker.” As for advances in treating botrytis infection, Drappier stresses the impact of new spraying technology. “Spraying is most important. We have invested this year in new top quality sprayers which use less product and reach the berries with more efficiency,” he says.

Accelerating such technological advancements and their take up have been new CIVC regulations. “Two years ago helicopter spraying was banned,” records De Castelnau’s Pluot. “Before it was possible to use it where the slopes were very steep, but the ban has provoked the improvement of machinery to allow growers to spray under, rather than over the leaves.”

Pol Roger’s d’Harcourt also notes the decrease in treatments and suggests that 10 years ago growers “may have been overprotecting” when it came to spraying against potential vineyard diseases. But for him, “the biggest change in the last 5-10 years in quality is connected to the way we do the picking”. Because whole bunches are required for Champagne, all harvesting is done by hand, allowing for a high level of sorting in the vineyard, which is vital in the avoidance of botrytis-infected bunches.

Nevertheless, d’Harcourt stresses, the pickers must be incentivised to select only the best grapes. “We have to be very careful to sort when we pick, and to make sure this is done properly, a lot of the serious houses are now paying picking teams by the hour, not the kilo. This ensures that people are not just trying to get as much as possible in the least time.”

Phillipponnat agrees, adding, “You need to be on top of the pickers at all times, and one way to keep them motivated is to pay them more, and we do,” he begins. “Picking is a very expensive part of the vineyard management: picking and transporting accounts for around 20% of all the viticultural costs and 10% of the value of the grapes, but it would be too dangerous to try saving on that… Picking is key to quality, but it’s still not perfect in many instances.”

Taste testing
For Veuve Clicquot’s Brun, a further advancement in berry quality, as well as ripeness levels, comes with more comprehensive analysis of the grapes before harvesting, and consequently, a greater understanding of the best time to harvest according to each plot. “We have increased a lot the precision when it comes to choosing the perfect date of the harvest, which is a critical decision,” he says. “To be more precise we not only look at the acid and sugar levels but we also taste the berries to see how the ripeness is evolving in each plot.”

Using a team of tasters, each site is evaluated to see if the grape phenolics are under or overripe, because, Brun stresses, “the level of phenolic ripeness is not fully in accordance with the sugar level: sometimes the fruit is fully ripe from a sugar point of view, but not fully ripe from a phenolic point of view, and sometimes it is the opposite.”

In essence, the Champenois are increasingly focused on achieving greater consistency in berry ripeness and quality, both from vintage to vintage, but also across its varied sites in a single harvest. Complicating this endeavour is climate change, which appears to be bringing the region greater potential for riper grapes, but also more stress to the vines from increasingly extreme weather, as well as raising the pressure from botrytis. Reducing yields and encouraging more deeply rooting vines are two key developments across the region to enhance berry ripeness and quality over the last 10 years. Augmenting this are efforts to ensure that only the best bunches are selected, and that they are at optimum ripeness. Summing up, Pol Roger’s d’Harcourt draws attention to the need for a quality focus at every stage in Champagne production if the sparkling wine is to remain a global benchmark. “We have to remember, we are producing a wine, not just a name.”