Champagne All Around

Winemakers in Reims, Epernay, Tours-sur-Marne and other towns in the Champagne district of France last week observed a familiar three-century tradition. In antiseptic rooms, committees of tasters eyed, sniffed and sipped six-month-old white wine, neatly spit out each taste into marble basins. Testing 25 to 45 varieties, they matched the acidity of one with the sweetness of another, the weakness of one with another's strong alcoholic body. When they were done, the formula had been arrived at by which such famous champagne houses as Krug, Mumm, Moet et Chandon and Pol Roger will blend their 1965 product.

Sunlight & Rain. The '65 champagne, because of a scarcity of sunlight and excess of rain during the grape-growing season, will not be a great vintage product. Nevertheless, for the sixth year in a row, France's 140 champagne makers will set a record in production and sales. In all, last year, they sold 78.6 million bottles worth $200 million.

Champagne companies think of their product as an ambiance, or way of life, but the way is changing. The wine is still aged, bubbled in the course of a second fermentation in the bottle just as Benedictine Monk Dom Perignon did it in the 17th century. But large champagne companies have now air-conditioned their fermentation rooms, automated their packing lines and replaced wooden vats with 500-gallon, glass-lined tanks. They have also begun to sell their wine in French food shops, where the return is greater than it would be from sales overseas. "We were shy about selling in French supermarkets and epiceries," says Mumm Executive Jean Couvreur, "but we find that it doesn't hurt our image at all."

The Avant-Garde. Supermarket availability at home has helped establish another trend: Frenchmen now drink more champagne than ever, last year bought 58.2 million bottles, or three-quarters of the output. The bigger champagne producers, however, are still leary about putting all their bottles in one basket, and they continue to cultivate the export market. Britain remains the biggest foreign buyer, with 5,181,185 bottles last year, but the U.S. is a fast-growing second, with 3,478,522 bottles. French champagne makers are unworried over competition from U.S. wines. "They are our avant-garde," says Robert Jean de Voguee, head of Moet et Chandon. "When people come to appreciate wine, they will appreciate French champagne." The French companies do resent the fact that U.S. makers are permitted to label their product champagne. In England and on the Continent, only wine from the actual Champagne district--35,000 acres on either bank of the lazy Marne River--can legally be labeled champagne.

Because of the peculiar nature of the product, France's champagne men can almost plot the world's politics and passions by the way their exports run. Unlike the Western nations, for instance, Iron Curtain nations are extra dry. Communist Russians last year ordered only 3,596 bottles, and Hungary popped the fewest corks in Europe, with 2,188 bottles. The Congolese were Africa's heartiest drinkers, with 104,976 bottles, Zambians the most austere, with only 1,344. Nowhere was the contrast more marked than in Viet Nam. South Viet Nam, with undoubted American help, drank up 63,242 bottles. North Viet Nam, however, ordered only 872, barely enough for some diplomatic receptions for visiting Frenchmen.

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