Champagne's dark side

Article by: Alex Landragin, August 2005

My father keeps a postcard pinned on the wall above his desk, showing a group of swarthy peasants in aprons and tunics, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, standing among vines, surrounded by leaves and baskets full of grapes. It's the vendange, or grape harvest. One of these swarthy types is my great-grandfather, sporting a walrus moustache. Their faces are tired - their backs have been bent all day in the sun – and I wonder if there isn't a kind of vague defiance in their expressions.

The photograph was taken in the village of my birth in France’s Champagne region at the turn of the twentieth century - the height of the postcard craze, and the time when champagne fully assumed its iconic status. My father’s family had already been making champagne for over a century - since 1772, in fact. At that time, their grapes would have been sold to become wines both still and sparkling – possibly to one of the local monasteries where champagne was developed by two monks a century earlier.

My uncle would start each day with a glass of champagne mixed with tap water

In the days before brands, products were differentiated by geography, which is the rationale behind the industry's refusal to allow sparkling wines from other regions to use the champagne name. According to this world-view, champagne can't be champagne if it isn't made here – it's a contradiction in terms. Almost every villager works in the champagne business. They benefit from the village's classification as a grand cru commune, one of 17. This means that because of the historically high quality of their fruit, vignerons can charge buyers full price for their grapes. This system of classification dates back to around the time of the postcard, and its introduction led to riots by sceptical vignerons. Maybe that's why my great-grandfather looks so peeved.

It's a quiet hillside village surrounded on almost all sides by rows of vines, but history hasn't spared it: the Prussians invaded in 1870, the phylloxera bug wiped out half the vines in the 1880s, and WWI flattened the village. Prohibition and the Depression hit hard, and then the Germans marched in a third time in 1940. Ironically, the Germans have played a decisive role in champagne's history. Their love of the drink built the industry in the 19th century, and Nazi patronage meant that the industry survived WWII largely unscathed.

Champagne has always been an everyday thing to me. It was always there on the kitchen table, where the conversation often centred around acreage and tonnage. My uncle would start each day with a glass of champagne mixed with tap water.

The Napoleonic Code still requires deceased estates to be shared equally among siblings and vigneron families struggle to survive on their small allotments. My father's was so small he left the village to make wine in what the champenois call 'le nouveau monde', but he always refused to call his sparkling wines champagne. Once, my aunt showed me a legal document she had recently found hidden away in a wall of the winery she's lived above all her married life. It dated from the 1840s, at about the time when, thanks to advances in the chemistry of winemaking, the village began to specialise in sparkling wine. It was a legal document declaring that the then occupants had been found guilty of infanticide - a drastic but not isolated solution to the dilemmas of inheritance.