Perpetual champagnes, built one year at a time

More producers are blending significant portions of their reserve wines together to create a perpetual reserve

- Eric Asimov

REIMS, France — All most people need to know about champagne is how to safely uncork a bottle. Pouring and savoring the wine are the easy parts.

Few champagne drinkers will interrupt their holiday celebrations to dwell on the laborious process of creating this wine, which can feel so elegant, refined, and delicious.

But in the Champagne region of France now, many producers are adapting a new element to their production method.

They see it not only as a significant improvement in non-vintage champagnes — the vast majority of the bottles produced each year — but also as a major hedge against the effects of climate change.

For many producers, climate change has altered both the way they farm the grapes and how they make the champagne.

First, a bit of background on how non-vintage, or multi-vintage, champagnes are created.

These cuvées are, as the name suggests, blends of several vintages.

To create one, producers will use a base wine from the most recent harvest, itself most often a blend of different grapes from different areas within the region. To this base, producers add wines from older harvests that they have kept in reserve, experimenting and tasting until they find what they consider the best possible blend.

HEDGING AGAINST HIGHS AND LOWS

Why do they do this? Blending wines and vintages permits a producer to aim for stylistic consistency while hedging against the highs and lows of single harvests.

While vintage champagnes vary from year to year, reflecting the characteristics of the growing season, multi-vintage wines are intended to transcend the nature of any single year.

Small producers which have limited storage space and resources may have only a few vintages on hand to blend. Big houses, especially the most prestigious like Krug, have access to far more reserve wines and so are able to create more complex blends.