Let’s get fizzical – the power of bubbles

We are living in straightened times. You might think that caution and our more sober attitude to consumption would have dented sales of the world’s most conspicuously celebratory drink. Recent figures – from the UK Champagne Office - show that the British love affair with Champagne is not cooling.

We Brits import more Champagne than any other country. We drink almost double the amount than the number 2 importers, the Americans. (I like the thought of beating the Americans in a Champagne drinking competition.) The demand for Champagne almost exceeds supply, which explains the much-wrangled plans to expand the growing area currently being thrashed out by French lawyers.

It is a triumph of marketing and branding that Champagne retains its distinction and success despite cheaper rivals, even in tough times. But it is also a triumph of terroir – the intersection of place and people responsible for all individual wines that call us to seek them out. You can get wines to bubble in several ways, but bubbles are not all equal. The quickest, cheapest way to a bottle of fizz is affectionately known in the trade as The Bicycle Pump method. (Although I like to think of it more as a giant Soda Stream.) You end up with a wine. It has bubbles in it. But they are big and coarse, and (perhaps mercifully) do not intensify the flavour.

The nobler routes to sparkling wine are variations on taking a still wine and adding yeast and sugar to it. Rather than pumping Carbon Dioxide in, the wine makes its own, as a by-product of the yeasts feasting on the sugars before dying, exhausted (but happy). The Champagne method takes the harder road from this point. The cloudy bottles (all fermentation is a messy as well as a fizzy business) are left for at least three years. This is an expensive business, tying up your stock. But it’s the part that makes the most beautiful of bubbles, as those dead and dissolving yeasts ‘seed’ the tiniest, most delicate, most long-lived of wine fizz. This is why we call the taste sensation of bubbles in a Champagne a ‘mousse’ – great sparkling has that feeling a thousand gentle pin pricks on your tongue.

There is another reason behind Champagne’s precious potential for distinctive and hard–to-emulate quality. And this is the territory itself. Champagne’s northerly position, cool and breezy climate, and chalky soils, full of fossils from a long-gone sea, mean that the vines have to fight to ripen grapes. This healthy knife-edge gives Champagne’s base wines the nervy tension so critical to making great sparkling wines. There are very few places in the world that can replicate these conditions. Most of them are in England. But that’s another story…