In the cold, chalky cellars deep underground at boutique winery A.R. Lenoble, co-owner Antoine Malassagne shares his worries about the future of the world-famous fizz from Champagne, France. The region’s classic style depends on crisp, zingy acidity combined with edgy, fruity and salty mineral flavors that come from deep, chalky soil and, until now, a very cool climate.
Here is Malassagne’s question: How can the adored taste of champagne stay the same in the face of climate change?
So far, global warming has mostly put chilly Champagne in a climatic sweet spot, with average temperatures that ensure grapes ripen every year.
However, that is not the whole story, Malassagne said.
Buds appear earlier, so spring frosts are more destructive. Warmer nights push maturity, but also encourage new pests and diseases.
“Harvest is two weeks earlier than it was 20 years ago,” he said on a very hot morning last month at his winery in Damery, a 15-minute drive from Epernay, Champagne’s epicenter.
“It used to be mid-to-late September. Now, the harvest often starts in August, as it will this year, but maturity during hot days and nights results in lower and lower acidity in the grapes, which means less freshness in the wines,” he said.
It is also essential to Champagne’s taste: Acidity is what allows the wines to age.
In 2010, Malassagne started working on ways to make sure there was enough “zing” in his future bubbly.
Champagne’s basic technique of blending various varieties of grapes — chardonnay, pinot noir and sometimes meunier — vineyards and vintages is the way that winemakers compensated for poor years. For example, reserve wine from older vintages added depth, complexity and richness when grapes did not fully ripen.
Now, Malassagne is creating reserve wines to add “freshness,” too. He conserves them in magnums under natural cork to preserve brighter flavors. About 70,000 of these are stockpiled in the long, dimly lit cellar. His two lively, delicious new blends — Lenoble Intense “mag14” and Lenoble Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Chouilly “mag14,” launched in May — are the first to incorporate these new reserves.
That is only one of the many ways in which Champagne growers are trying to maintain their renowned sparkling style.
Champagne Bruno Paillard is experimenting with covering the soil in vineyards with straw to prevent sunlight from destroying microbial life. Others are using winemaking techniques such as blocking malolactic fermentation — the second fermentation in the barrel that converts fresh-tasting malic acid to softer lactic acid — to bring greater perceived acidity to the wine.
Over the past two decades, Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, the head winemaker at super-star winery Louis Roederer, has been systematically experimenting with everything from biodynamic viticulture to DNA analysis of yeast to gentler forms of pruning and reinventing winemaking techniques for chardonnay — all “to maintain what has made Champagne’s reputation.”
Roederer is the most innovative large producer in Champagne right now, and its superb wines are just getting better and better.
The non-vintage Brut Premier is widely acclaimed and the just-released, brilliant 2008 — from an old-style, cool vintage with a late harvest that continued into October last year — has a precision and purity that seem almost electric.
One of Lecaillon’s solutions to climate change is to give more natural resilience to the vineyard ecosystem so that the vines can withstand new insects and more extreme conditions.
“My conclusion is that with biodynamics, the vines have more energy,” he said. “With deeper roots, they’re better able to handle heat and drought and the wines have more freshness.”
Lecaillon sounded hopeful as he reminded me: “We invented bubbles to make up for unripe grapes. As farmers, our job, our life, our passion has been to adapt to climate change for hundreds of years.”
“If the future heats up too much, we’ll just have to make Burgundy,” he joked (I think).
The 2003 heat wave, when France baked in record summer temperatures, was a wake-up call for many growers.
Over the first six months of this year, according to the Champagne Committee (CIVC) trade association, the region has been 2 degrees hotter than normal and this will be the fifth vintage of the past 15 to start the harvest in August.
Growers say it is alarming that temperatures have risen so quickly.
A European Academies’ Science Advisory Council report published earlier this year also described how droughts, fires, freakish weather patterns and extreme heat waves have more than doubled since 1980.
However, despite heat and several violent hailstorms, this year will see a bumper crop — unless hail hits again before the harvest.
Technology offers promising solutions.
Over breakfast in Reims, CIVC communications director Thibaut Le Mailloux outlined one of the organization’s long-term projects, a team effort with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research to invent new hybrid grape varieties that would ripen more slowly in warmer conditions and be more resistant to pests.
Since 2010, their scientists have been crossing pinot noir, chardonnay and meunier — the three most important grapes — with super-genitor varieties. Starting with 4,000 seeds planted in CIVC’s experimental vineyard, several will eventually be selected that seem to have resistant genes, and also — this is the catch — offer the same distinctive flavors and acidity. The next step would be to see whether wines made from those grapes age in the same way. All this will take a couple of decades.
Only seven grape varieties are permitted in Champagne. In addition to the three most important, four mostly forgotten grapes — petite meslier, pinot blanc, fromenteau and arbane — might gain prominence in the future.
For example, lean, green petit meslier grapes retain huge acidity, even in very hot vintages. Family-owned Champagne Drappier is one of a handful of wineries reviving these.
CIVC first assessed the industry’s carbon footprint in 2002. Since then, the region’s growers have significantly cut emissions, taken to recycling all the water used in wineries, reduced pesticides by 50 percent and begun using lighter-weight Champagne bottles, the equivalent in emissions of removing 8,000 cars from the road each year.
Future-focused Drappier became the first Champagne house to become carbon-neutral, and last year began using a bottle made from 87 percent recycled glass. To encourage electric vehicle use, it has set up charging stations.
The younger generation, such as Cedric Mousse, who manages his eponymous family winery, has a heightened sensibility about climate change. Mousse was 23 when CIVC began talking about producers reducing their carbon footprints.
“There are 1,000 small things we can do,” he said, as he walked me through his eco-conception of a winery. “I think about every choice, from how to plant vines — so that grapes take more time to mature — to using bottles, labels, shipping boxes and machinery produced less than 80km away.”
However, will it be enough?
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