Champagne exudes sparkling riches. But it’s what happens in the dark that gives the "king of wines" the light.
In the cruel winter months, Michel Bautrait rises like a soldier hours before sunrise. “Mr Mumm,” as he’s known after his 40 years at at a company that traces its roots back to Germany, meets his 20-strong team of vineyard workers in Mailly-Champagne, a traditional village that supplies grapes to Mumm’s production plant in nearby Reims.
The workers slosh through snow, rain and mud to prune a million vine pods in this vineyard, designated “grand cru” because of the exceptional grapes it can produce.
Champagne, the lightest and most delicate of white wines, is made predominantly of black grapes: powerful, voluptuous Pinot Noir that would otherwise give Burgundy its red colour, berry aromas and astringent taste, and its cousin, the Pinot Meunier that is used only in Champagne to bring fruitiness. Chardonnay, the white grape, only makes up one-third of the overall production.
In few other places on earth do winemakers make their lives so difficult in search of perfection. The extraordinary steps to turn dark-skinned grapes into exquisite white wines mean the grapes have to be picked by hands and transported carefully without breaking the skin, then pressed at low pressure before going through special vinification processes.
The window for harvesting Champagne is one of the narrowest in the world. Since the Champagnois cannot count on good weather, when the grapes are finally ripe they race to collect all the fruit before rain falls again.
At the height of the picking period some 100,000 harvesters from all over Europe labour in the fields of Champagne. The work transforms those that touch it: brigades of nurses, students, SNCF train drivers and office workers shed their normal routines to dedicate a few weeks of their life year in, year out, to a viticulture work-vacation that gives them around 100 euros a day.
It is punishing work for the pickers, who cut the bunches by hand and move 80 kilogram boxes up and down the hilly terrain. Modern technology has not yet produced a commercially meaningful way to automate harvest without breaking the thin skin of the black grapes, which would turn the wine into rosé.
Historically, harvest starts late September or early October, but climate change has pushed the period forward drastically. This year’s harvest takes place during the summer, when most of the French people are on holidays. Mumm had to source many of their 800 pickers from less experienced students, and from Poland.
Bautrait’s alarm rings at 5:00 am. By 5:05 am he’s dressed. After he delivers a briefing, his team fans out into their functions in the press house and across the vineyards to meet pickers. The cool blue of dawn is soon replaced by a scorching sun. It is one of the hottest years on record. Sweat pours from exhausted workers, most of whom have come from the comforts of home or office to kneel in the mud.
Bautrait spends his days driving in his jeep to the vineyards and press houses in circles solving problems. On the first day, the pump momentarily failed at Verzy press house, causing a commotion as the freshly picked grapes laid warming in the sun. The bus also broke, trapping the Polish team in the same heat.
By carefully harvesting whole bunches by hand, and transporting and crushing the grapes in the gentlest way, winemakers can extract the white juice beneath the pigmented skin to create a wine stripped of tannins.
Chemist Barbara Fromentin, joint-leader of the technical teams, came to Mumm in 2008 when there were almost no machines. Working with deputy cellar master Magalie Marechal, she built a busy laboratory where they control quality and work with innovation researchers to hunt for new scents.
After a frantic day of work at the lab during harvest, Fromentin, her team and Marechal pop open an unlabelled magnum marked for machine testing. “Santé,” they raise their glasses to this most important round of analysis.
Far away from the sun-bathed vineyards, deep down in Mumm’s 25 kilometres of dim cellars, time is slowly working on the 25 million bottles.
Once a week Jallat learns manual riddling from his retiring colleague Gerald, Mumm’s last riddler. Before the gyro-palette replaced this centuries-old technique, men used to turn tens of thousands of bottles each day with their hands, rotating them a little while tilting it up a slight angle on the bottle rack. As the angle of tilt increases over several months, gravity draws the sediment into the neck, which is now pointing to the bottom, ready to be expelled.
Stéphane Jallat, 48, operates the gyro-palette -- rows of slow moving robots that slowly turn the bottles so yeast and wine mix evenly to create fine bubbles.
These people are the behind-the-scenes workers who put so much of themselves into the bottle. Their effort makes it an inevitable luxury product, cross-examined by discerning wine critics and consumers alike. Flaws cannot be tolerated.
Winter life takes on an eerie, even spiritual, rhythm in the world of Champagne. St Vincent’s Parade remains an important ritual in January, where people in towns and villages like Mailly-Champagne honour the patron saint of wine and pray for good weather. After the festival ends, the villages sink back into silence.
COPYRIGHT 2019 BY JUSTIN JIN. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.
Justin Jin photographs and writes stories for the world’s leading publications.
Justin presents real, deeply reported multimedia packages that tell the story of wines (and many other themes).
International prizes attest to his dedication. He was awarded the Magnum Photography Prize, a place at the World Press Photo Masterclass, Canon Prize, among others.
He is also a knowledgeable wine-taster, having been in his younger years the prize-winning captain of the Cambridge University blind tasting team.
Justin speaks five languages -- English, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Russian, French and Dutch. He splits his time among Brussels, China and wherever the story takes him.