Suppose you spent R300 on a bottle of wine, poured a glass for a few friends and knocked it back without particularly noticing the taste except to think it was passable. Or perhaps a little tinny or a touch too sweet.
Would you choose to buy the same wine again? No? What if it was champagne rather than wine? Whenever I think about people choosing champagne, I remember the chief executive of an Italian drinks company telling me that when it comes to selling, “taste is no barrier to anything”.
Champagne is perhaps the world’s most successful luxury food or drink brand, yet as I stood, glass in hand, in the splendour of Banqueting House in Whitehall at the annual champagne tasting in London, surrounded by earnest French men and women gliding from bottle to spittoon and back, what struck me most was that there were surprisingly few wines on the non-vintage (NV) table that I would choose to drink, let alone pay for.
One of the difficulties of getting to know what champagne you like is that it is too expensive to drink very often. Also, it tends to be opened on special occasions when it is not appropriate to start carping about quality.
But there is another problem. It seems extraordinary, given the prestige that each house maintains, but Champagne is the only wine region in France to allow a practice known as sur latte trading. This allows a producer to sell champagne that is already bottled but not yet disgorged (disgorgement is the removal of the sediment from the second fermentation in the bottle that gives the champagne its fizz) to a house that can then complete the process and stick its own label on the bottle. This means that a bottle of champagne bearing a famous label could actually have been made by anybody, provided it was in the Champagne region.
Buying champagne sur latte is a practice that no one ever wants to own up to but I have talked to enough co-ops and smaller producers who say they sell like this to know that it is widespread (they will never say to whom they sell, but often admit that it is wine they have rejected as being too inferior to bottle under their own label).
I like to think that the love of real champagne might bring about a sharpening of critical faculties — that we will reject lifeless fizzy wine just because it calls itself champagne and rediscover the joy of sublime, exhilarating champagne. There is plenty of it around, globally. —