As the inventor of champagne, celebrated, at least in the sparkling beverage. Winemakers reflect on old traditions, and want to get away from the taste.
By Patricia Bröhm
It is only a tiny alley that leads to the entrance to Champagne Leclerc Briant up the slope. But anyone who follows her, even when she becomes a narrow dirt road between green hedges, who discovered a treasure: A small vineyard, where birds are chirping and the bustle of the champagne town of Epernay is the same forget. In the summer of clover and Arugula, dandelion and Marigold, butterflies flutter around here grow between the vines. This is hardly a 0.6 hectare of Hervé Jestin, the basement Briant champion of Leclerc is, as proud as any other of his vineyards. “This vineyard is life,” he says, satisfied.
“La Croisette”, the Name of the little Paradise, is for him what is for Harry Potter platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross Station: the gate to another world, the world of biodynamic agriculture. “The soil of La Croisette has never experienced the chemistry,” says Jestin, “and that is in Champagne as in every other winegrowing region in the world today a great rarity.” Already in the sixties, when the blessings of the chemical industry in the vineyards around Epernay, they decided the family Leclerc to continue as their forefathers did, and sat on biological cultivation since 1990, even biodynamic. At that time, the exotic was, today the small, fine champagne house is considered to be a pioneer of a movement, of connecting more and more winemakers in the Region.
The Champagne, the green, gently undulating hill country to the South of Reims, in the past few years, thoroughly moving. Engaged and personally run companies such as Leclerc Briant oppose the branded products of the great houses, a new wine profile: champagne with personality like the facets of La Croisette, of which there are only 3000 bottles per year. More and more wine-growers decided in the past few years, their precious grapes to the big houses such as Moët & Chandon (60 million bottles in the year), but own wine to expand. “Champagne de Vigneron”, grower champagne, is in the Trend. Of the 15 000 wine-growers in the Region, with a third now on the Venture of the own production, investing in cellar technology and relies on the Strengths of individual locations.
Around the wine town of Epernay, where for centuries every available square meter for the vines is used to carry sound, the villages name, the champagne and friends in the ears, because you have layers of valuable Grand Cru: Ambonnay and Avize, Bouzy and Cramant, Mesnil-sur-Oger, and Verzy. Today, Some of the best drops in pretty Châteaux behind wrought-iron gates, but often in the most unlikely addresses. The buzz word from “garage winemakers”, when the car in the 1000 souls-the wine village of Verzenay in front of a modest apartment building parks. Here David Pehu produced on six acres, almost exclusively prestigious Grand Cru, champagne, Stefan White, the chief buyers of the Munich fine Dallmayr food, in a tasting so fascinated, that he secured from the state the exclusive representative for Germany. Pehu, a down-to-earth man in Jeans and a plaid shirt, is not a man of marketing, he has a Website of its own. “My vineyards to speak for themselves,” he says. Therefore, he builds on each parcel in the basement, individually, in order to bring its characteristics in the best way possible.
