June '23 Champagne Club: Louis Nicaise & Hervé Brisson

Louis Nicaise & Hervé Brisson

The first known depiction of Champagne on canvas comes in a 1735 painting entitled “The Oyster Lunch”, which is exactly what it sounds like: a tableau of foppish be-wigged aristocrats feasting on bubbles and bivalves. Which, fine, but it remains a bummer no Old Master ever captured the actual birth of the bubbly and called it  “The Invention of Champagne '' or whatever. Methode champenoise (or methode traditionelle) - the elaborate, labor intensive process/ritual by  which the world’s most famous sparkling wine gets coaxed into excellence  - may today be an essential part of its prestige, but it started out closer to slapstick.    

Sometime around the mid-16th-early 17th century, as nascent vignerons in Champagne attempted to compete with their neighbors in Burgundy, the local weather told a great joke. Colder temperatures in Champagne cellars prematurely halted fermentation in the bottles, leaving dormant, unspent yeast cells to awaken in the warmer spring season, and start fermenting again, producing carbon dioxide and building up pressure inside the relatively weak vessels. Eventually, tops popped all over the place,  bottles exploded, bubbles ran free and wine-making monks had to duck to avoid all the zinging corks. 

No wonder effervescence was considered the devil’s share, a flaw to be avoided if at all possible. And while legend assigns the lightbulb moment to the monk Dom Perigion, the famous story about him sampling a swig of the unintended bubbles and proclaiming “Brother come quickly – I am drinking stars!”, is actually a clever 19th century intervention by Dom Broussard, one of his successors. In reality, Perignon, like most of his contemporaries, spent his winemaking life standing a-thwart the hopping corks shouting “stop.” 

It’s appropriate that we know and celebrate his name though, as the list of his actual contributions to winemaking is long and crucial and includes: pioneering blending methods, vinifying red grapes white, and using cork to stopper bottles, amongst others. But the advent of sparkling wine and eventually Champagne as we know it today was  in fact a group effort, with the monks of Carcassonne in southern France (whose version still exists as Blanquette de Limoux) and even the English(!) deserving some credit. 

All of which is to say that tradition, in Champagne or anywhere else, is an unsteady story, wherein, as the great English historian Eric Hobsbawm  suggested, “‘traditions’ and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related.”  Making champagne remains a quixotic, counterintuitive endeavor, a science project ready to blow up in your face, no matter how many rules currently govern its productions; it’s never not amazing when it works out. 

Our two lucky and intrepid chemists this month are Louis Nicaise, run by a young  husband and wife team, in the village of Hautvillers, made famous by Dom Perignon, and so the fake alleged birthplace of Champagne; and Herve Brisson, whose exquisite work has not been available in the United States until now.  “Les Longues due Chemins” is his top cuvee, of which only 100 cases are produced, and we are thrilled to share it with you here.

Cheers,

PlumpJack Wine Team