Vendanges after Vendanges : Agnès's blog

 The main problem when the first are out is that they are sensitive to frost, and when this happens, the buds are destroyed. 

So for the last couple of weeks we were all very stressed out about the weather, but eventually, there is not much we can do and unfortunalely stress is not enough to rise temperature by 4 degres ! 

This massive freezing period happened tuesday morning. Just a few minutes at minus 4 were enough to destroy a lot of 2012 potential harvest.

This is annonying, but not dramatic, the whole Champagne has built a kind of insurance for the kind of cases. Every year, we are allowed to store a fraction of our production as "réserve". These wines cannont be bottled but in year like this they can be used to compensate the loss.

So eventually, we will be able to make some champagne next year, with this reserve and the grapes we are going to harvest.

But,at the end of the day, I can say to myself that this is OK, seeing the buds destroyed by frost is not cool. In a way, I think we all carry a part of the sorrow of the generations who preceded us. For my great-grand-father 80 years ago, or even for my dad 40 years ago, this would have been a real desaster.

 Your are planning a visit to Champagne area soon, of course you already planned to attend one of our champagne tasting course, and you mignt want to visit Reims Cathedrale, and maybe one or two big Maisons, have a stroll in the vinyard, but you might still be looking for accomodation !

Well here is a very nice adress in Epernay  : Les Epicurien is a luxury Chambre d'Hôte (this would be the French for Bed and Breakfast) in Epernay's town centre.

Obviously, I have never slept there myself as it is just a few miles from home, but Laure and I certainly have a lot in common, our passion for Champagne to start with !

Last year, the debourrement (the only word I found is the budding ? is that a noun ? an adjective ? well let's stick to French for this one, le débourrement is this time when the vegetation buds blossom (not the floral buds, that is going to happen in a few months).

Well last year, that happened on the 4th of April. And it was incredibly early.

Well, we are the 29th of March, and that is it, the vegetative cycle had started ! A week in advance compare to last year.

I feel like we might be harvesting early...

For many reasons, wine tasting is very difficult

First, on a cultural point of view, olfaction is not a sens we really educate. The very first things we would teach toddlers are colours not the smell of banana or liquorice. This lack of olfactive education makes it very difficult for human beings to put words on olfactive stimuli.

Another reason which makes tasting difficult is the social aspect of it. We are always a bit scared of getting it wrong, being ridulous, saying it smells like ham where in fact it was hibiscus flower. And as a result, the group would expulse us from the cave and we would be eaten by dinosaurs...

Maybe the biggest issue is that we are really bad at smelling. Physiologically we haven't got that much olfactive captors. Dogs for example are much better than us.

We are really good at seeing things, we see colours, and 3D, we see things that are close and things that are far away. But even with this really powerful sense, we stuggle sometimes to put the correct words on what we see ! For example, which colour is this square ?

For some us it 'd be green, for others it would be blue. So even with ths highly developed sense, we can't gove a definite answer ! So imagine the difficulties we face with smell...

Science and technology allow to precisely answer the question of the colour of the square, in any Pantone colour-chart, this is 320C, no matter where we are, the temperature or the time of day, this is 320C, this is an absolute.

But sofar science and technology fail to achieve this unquestionnable absolute for smells.

So our main problem remains, how to express the sensation we feel when tasting wine ?

Maybe a solution would be not to try to put WORDS on what we feel but to express it in another way.

I gave the question some thought 2 weeks ago, as I was in Milan for a tasting event. Chiara Giovoni who wrote the tasting sheets in Italian for the event associated each Champagne of the night with a painting.

I find this idea both brillant and effective. A few days before the tasting when she asked me who my favourite painter was, I imagined that was what she had in mind and started to think about what association I would make for each Champagne. And for the Absolument Brut we both chose :

To be honnest, the choice was limited to Matisse, Van Gogh et Klee. But us choosing the same painting is actulally not the point. the point is there are different ways of describing a wine than words.

We can refer to season or occasions : a Christmas wine, spicy and exuberant, a autumn wine with hints of nuts and fruit compote. We can refer to musical pieces or to landscapes.

"Take Five on a deserted beach" could say much more about what you feel than ready made sentences. 

The main thing, the only thing that we really matters is that it should be YOUR description, not your neighbour's, not the latest ultimate wine-book.

Last year, the guys at Transatlantic Bubbles had two of our cuvees tasted by Josh Raynolds from Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar.

The two reviews were really good with marks of 91 for the Absolument Brut and 92 for the 2002 vintage.

Most of the wines Jeff and Mike's selection got brillant reviews which shows how reliable these two can be when they taste. This was certainly not a big news to me ! (you might think my opinion is biased given that they have been importing our Champagne in the US for 4 years now, but they are amongst the most knowledgeable people I know about wine).

Nevertheless I suppose it is as nice for them to be recognised for their wise selection of Champagnes as it is for us for our Champagnes.