champagne

On the road in Champers Matt spent a fair whack of time at Bernard Remy. Here’s Matt having a glass with winemaker Rudy and Rudy filling a glass... even winemakers can’t pour straight! Check out the vid too as Remy and Virginie explain riddling, disgorgement and adding the secret Liqueur d’expedition. Champagne starts its life as a normal, still wine but the ageing on lees (dead yeast cells) and the final addition of liqueur, generally made from a blend of aged reserve wines and a little sugar transform it from the ordinary into something special. Wineries like Bernard Remy who start with much higher than average quality fruit start at special and work their way into magical territory.

[caption align="aligncenter" width="420"]Even winemakers have trouble pouring wine...[/caption]

After quality of fruit, the time the wine spends on lees in the bottle makes a biggest difference to the finished product. The minimum period on lees required for a wine to be called Champagne is 15 months. Moet

Matt spent some time in Cramant on his recent expedition hunting for more Champers. In addition to being a beautiful place, it is also home to 100% Grand Cru vineyards. There are only 17 villages in Champagne considered Grand Cru, out of over 300 in total. Fair to say Matt found some very good stuff. Stay tuned.

Prowein is the biggest and best run wine show in the world. This year over 6000 producers were hawking their wares, including an extremely large contingency from Champagne. We visited about 40 Champagne producers and found time to check out some Spanish and Italian wines too. While not as exciting as getting your hoofs on the ground in a wine region it is a brilliant way to look at a huge amount of wine in a short space of time. It’s good exercise too. We managed to cover about 13kms a day moving from meeting to meeting. Even managed to take a virtual ‘Tour de France’.

Matt based himself in Epernay during his tour of Champagne. It’s certainly a pretty place and one of the major hubs in the region, along with Reims. As you might expect, lots of architecture from eons ago and pretty streets to boot.

Since the 1960’s the vast majority of Champagne has been produced without any use of oak. Most Champagne begins its life in stainless steel, where the juice is fermented, becoming a still wine. Stainless steel allows for easy temperature control and is much easier from a hygiene perspective than managing oak.

After the initial ferment in stainless steel, the wines undergo tirage, being mixed with an active yeast culture and sugar, which creates the ‘sparkling’ fermentation inside the bottle. After 14 months in bottle on lees (the dead yeast cells) the lovely biscuity, nutty toast characters we love begin to emerge.

That said the last 20 years has seen a slow return to the use of oak for about 100 producers, some simply ageing some of their reserve wines in oak, others maturing entire wines for a period in oak before tirage. Some use oak because it allows a gentle oxygenation of the wine, producing flavour and texture development, others looking to oak for adding a gentle suggestion of

We’ve been hinting of late of great things to come, namely the Champagne we have ordered from the prestigious Côtes des Blancs subregion. While we are not yet ready to reveal details of the Champagne itself, we thought it might help whet the interest of the Champagne lovers amongst you if we revealed the international Wine Expert we referred to in a previous post ‘Champagne is en route – and picking up resounding endorsements!’ To recap: we’re very chuffed to have discovered that an international Wine Expert selected one of ‘our’ Champagnes right up there amongst her Top 10 favourite Champagnes in a list published in an overseas magazine. Janna Rijmpa is a Dutch viticulturist, wine writer (for Decanter and Mundus Vini), wine consultant, international wine judge and self-professed Champagne Lover. Janna’s list of Top 10 favourite Champagnes includes many a prestigious Champagne and features Vintage Pol Roger Winston Churchill (which retails in Oz at $250-300 a bottle), Vintage Pol Roger

The first shipment of ‘our’ Champagne is on the water and will be with us in about a week. We are not ready to unveil to you which particular Champagnes are soon to be hitting our shores, and more importantly, our warehouse, however we can tell you that we are very, very excited and can’t wait to chill and pop the cork of ‘our’ newly arrived French bubbles to ‘wet the head’ so to speak. We’re particularly tickled that since we placed our order an international Wine Expert who lists Champagne as their favourite drink, has given one of ‘our’ Champagnes a wonderful endorsement. This particular Champagne lover - not naming names as yet, however... Denk je nederlands spreekt, ja? - is a viticulturist, wine writer (for Decanter and Mundus Vini), wine consultant and international wine judge who has fallen in love with a Champagne we are importing and has given ‘our’ Champagne a resounding endorsement. ‘Our’ Champagne has been selected as one of the very best of this particular expert’s Top 10