Base Wine & Blending

In Champagne, grapes are picked by hand—the rulebook demands it. Harvest starts earlier than for still wine, so the acidity stays locked into the base wine. From there, the grapes go straight to the press, whole clusters, pressed slowly and gently.

From 4,000 kilograms of grapes, only 2,550 liters of must may flow: 2,050 liters of cuvée, the fine first-run juice, and 500 liters of taille, the heartier second pressing. One bottle requires roughly 1.2 kilograms of grapes. The rest, the rebêches, heads off to the distillery.

When the base wine is pressed from Pinot Noir alone, the resulting champagne is called Blanc de Noirs, like Devaux's Cœur des Bar. Rosé comes about in two ways: through blending white and red wine before bottling, or through saignée, where juice is drawn off red must, as with Fleury's Rosé de Saignée.

Cédric Bouchard in Celles-sur-Ource takes the opposite path from blending. Every wine from his estate, Roses de Jeanne, comes from a single variety, a single parcel, and a single year, with no blending whatsoever. The Roses de Jeanne label thus becomes a series of single-vineyard wines.

Devaux, by contrast, blends deliberately. The Cuvée D consists of 70 percent Pinot Noir and 30 percent Chardonnay, the latter sourced from Montgueux near Troyes and from the Côte des Blancs. Here, Pinot Noir provides the backbone, Chardonnay the freshness.

A vintage champagne comes from a single harvest year. At most 80 percent of an estate's annual yield may be bottled this way; the rest is held back as reserve wine for blending. A non-vintage champagne blends multiple years and reserve wines, keeping the house style consistent year after year.