Books peter liem's champagne the art of eating magazine

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Books: Peter Liem's Champagne | The Art of Eating Magazine

AUTUMN 2017

Books Re-Imagining Champagne

By David Schildknecht

Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroirs of the Iconic Region by Peter Liem with Kate Leahy, 319 pages, Ten Speed Press,

hardcover (boxed with reproductions of the Champagne maps of Louis Larmat’s 1944 Atlas de la France vinicole), $80 (2017).

Since 2008, The Art of Eating has run a feature with the trenchant and provocative title “Why This Bottle, Really?” There is little need to greet Peter Liem’s Champagne by asking, “Why this book, really?” let alone “Why now?” The radical reimagining of Champagne that began among American wine professionals in the late 20th century has percolated deep into the ranks of the world’s oenophiles and altered the way and extent to which Champagne is talked about. The focal point is now grower-bottlers, whose representation in the US, in number and volume, has grown nearly tenfold since 1997. That was the year in which importer Terry Theise, already well-known for pioneering proselytization on behalf of German Riesling growers, issued his “Premier Offering [of] Estate-Bottled Champagne.” Twenty years on, it is high time for a book that with scant hyperbole styles itself “The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroirs of the Iconic Region.”

That threefold emphasis should not be taken for granted. The first thing that had to happen for a revolution to occur in how wine lovers appreciate Champagne was to free it from being perceived as a celebratory beverage constituted by luxury brands and do it the courtesy of treating it as a wine. The no-less-crucial focus on Champagne growers followed a pattern well-established by the 1990s, thanks to American importers and writers, of viewing wine as an agricultural endeavor and estate bottlers as standard setters. “Like the best Burgundies, quantities are small [but] quality is eye-opening. Single-grower French Champagnes are a revelation — and a revolution,” read a 1998 Wine Spectator column. Its author, Matt Kramer, had six years earlier coined “somewhereness” to elucidate the notion of terroir, which soon became the common currency of wine lovers worldwide and which Liem has taken as a leitmotif.

“Champagne, as a fine wine, should be subject to the same scrutiny and the same set of questions as any other,” he writes. “What gives your wine its identity? Why does your wine taste the way it does? How do you tend your vines?

How do you vinify your wine, and what are you adding to it? What is your wine intended to express?”

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Few if any wine writers are better positioned than he to ask producers these questions in expectation of honest, insightful answers. Liem began regularly visiting Champagne the year after Theise first produced his catalog, and moved there in 2006 to immerse himself in its viticultural life, earning the respect of its leading growers and négociants. “These are elemental questions” that “haven’t necessarily been part of the dialogue when talking about Champagne,” he points out, and “the fact that they are now is not only meaningful to the wine buyer but also motivating for the Champagne appellation as a whole.” Indeed, more than just witnessing a critical rethinking in Champagne of soil, vine, and wine, Liem has played a significant role in bringing it about.

At the outset, he makes two important points about terroir. First, to emphasize blending from diverse locations is

neither to deny nor disrespect the sensory profile specific to a given place. On the contrary, the blender’s art, which still plays a preeminent role in Champagne, represents at its best an attempt to generate delicious synergies among base wines characterized by their places of origin. The 410 parcel-specific micro-vinifications at Louis Roederer are adduced by Liem as key to the high quality of Champagne from that house. Tasting such base wines over two decades has enabled him to obtain a distinct impression of the vinous character of hundreds of vineyards. Second, the notion of terroir need not be applied solely at the level of individual vineyards. Talk of village or communal terroir makes perfect sense. In fact, terroir at this level has historically guided the purchasing of Champagne négociants and for that reason formed the basis of an official classification, called the Échelle des Crus, which lasted for 99 years and remains an influential reference point seven years after it was formally abolished.

Champagne is organized into three similar-sized sections (astonishingly free of typographical errors or other imperfections), lavishly illustrated with striking photographs by Andrea Gentl and Martin Hyers (among which, regrettably, only the outright portraits are captioned). Part One offers an admirably concise, adeptly organized, and deliciously readable synopsis of the history of Champagne, its iconic méthode of production, and the rapidly evolving symbiosis between the region’s foremost producers and the soils they farm. Along the way, readers are supplied, often by means of sidebars, boxes, and mini essays, not only with the terminology, factual basics, and helpful practical hints that one would expect of any guide to a region and its wines, but also with fascinating explorations of matters that Champagne growers themselves are intensively reassessing — the multitude of vessels for vinification and aging, yeast selection, blending options, optimum pressure and residual sugar, bottle closures, responses to climate change. Only Liem’s sidebar treating clones and vine selection left me thinking the relevant issues could have been made clearer. You don’t have to venture many pages into the book to realize that he is accomplishing something remarkable, because both readers approaching wine as devotees of the culinary arts and those who style themselves as wine- or even Champagne-geeks are going to come away with a wealth of refreshing insights, without feeling either overburdened or condescended to.

Liem’s treatment of Champagne’s historical evolution — replete with well-targeted timelines — is impressively researched from primary sources and offers a welcome inkling of how this region’s wines might have tasted at various junctures and how they became predominantly sparkling. Given his emphasis on terroir and the conceptual distance we seem to have traveled from the very recent era when “Champagne” was treated internationally as a synonym for “sparkling wine,” it’s worth pointing out (as Liem does) not just that the very notion of Champagne as a region coalesced only in the 17th century from a far-flung collection of well-reputed villages, but also (as he omits to emphasize) that when a Europe-wide fashion emerged in the 19th century for French vins mousseux (sparkling wines), connoisseurs continued to emphasize their villages of origin, including those of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. The

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long list of wine recommendations by service (course) in Jean Brunet’s 1836 Dictionnaire de Cuisine, endorsed with at most minor emendations by three generations of culinary authorities, proposed for the troisième service: “Volnay mousseux, Nuits mousseux, Romanée mousseux, Aï mousseux, Aï non mousseux, Champagne rosé, [and] Sillery” (implying that the two last-named were also nonsparkling). And when, in his 1890 Les Secrets de la cuisine d’Amateur, Marie de Saint-Juan carried over Brunet’s list with the additions of “Mesnil-Oger” and “Epernay,” he placed them all under the heading “Bourgogne”! The disappearance as a prestigious genre of both sparkling Burgundy and village-specific Champagne dates only from the early 20th century.

Part Two of Liem’s book, “The Place,” offers his detailed sector-by-sector, village-by-village account of Champagne, incorporating additional historical detail, while placing primary emphasis on the specifics of soil and microclimate with the opportunities and challenges that these present to wine growers (in short, the terroir factor). Liem repeatedly allows those growers to explain their sites and soils in their own words — and it’s highly doubtful that any observer of Champagne over the past dozen years has been more assiduously collecting and organizing the observations of growers. It is a measure of how recently Champagne has been scrutinized in this way that Liem’s demarcation of sectors or sub-regions itself represents a creative achievement. Even the traditional tripartite division of Champagne’s core (into Montagne de Reims, Côte des Blancs, and Vallée de la Marne), as Liem effectively argues, does injustice to the climatic and geological facts on the ground, so he replaces it with five subregions. Each chapter in this section incorporates a fine map delineating the communal boundaries of, in all, 309 wine-growing villages.

Accompanying Liem’s account of each sub-region is a list by village, grower, and label name of “recommended

single-cru and single-vineyard wines,” ranging from a handful in the case of certain small sectors to more than a hundred. Like the incredibly detailed maps of Louis Larmat’s 1944 Atlas de la France Vinicole: Les Vins de Champagne, which are separately boxed to accompany Champagne (seemingly the first such high-quality reproductions in half a century of any of Larmat’s near-legendary regional map portfolios), Liem’s list of vineyardspecific wines is apt to have limited usefulness, simply because such bottlings are typically scarce and expensive even

by Champagne standards. Most have only recently been inaugurated — Liem’s detailed timeline for site-specific Champagne records only a dozen such bottlings prior to 1990 — though if current trends continue, in another decade there will be a vast array. It would have been even more useful for Liem to have listed multi-site blends representative of individual villages — wines that are more readily available and affordable — especially given the cogent case he makes for respecting the notion of communal terroir and the persistent influence of the Échelle classification.

Readers who carefully peruse Part Three will, however, be able to glean their own list of paradigmatic villagespecific bottlings from Liem’s detailed profiles of just over 100 producers and their wines, an account accompanied by many insightful sidebars succinctly treating important topics, such as nonsparkling Champagne and organic Champagne growing. The producers Liem profiles are those he particularly implicates in Champagne’s recent “transformation,” more specifically those “I consider to have contributed to illuminating issues of terroir and advancing contemporary themes discussed in Parts One and Two.” Oenophiles interested in profiles of producers that are not treated here, including many well-known Champagne houses, can subscribe to and consult ChampagneGuide.net, a guide to the region and its producers that Liem inaugurated in 2009. (That valuable online resource, however, is no substitute for the concise, synoptic, systematic account offered in his book.)

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Anyone who has blind-tasted with Liem will be aware of his preternatural ability to identify Champagnes by grower, village, site, or soil. And readers will quickly recognize his gift for capturing the character of a wine in metaphor, even when, as he avers of Anselme Selosse’s Les Carelles, “it’s a wine of contractions: … voluptuous yet intensely chalky; rich in body yet light on its feet; subtly detailed while being overwhelmingly expansive.” Given those talents and the importance Liem places on terroir, he invites some disappointment. It’s no secret that the mechanisms by which site, soil, and geological underpinnings impinge on wine’s scents, flavors, and textures are illunderstood and ill-explored. No few geologists, soil scientists, and plant physiologists express skepticism that there even exist significant links between the taste of wine and the chemical constituents of underlying rocks. “Terroir” is a notoriously fungible word whose use frequently exposes conceptual muddle. It would be too much to ask of Liem that he adduce specific scientific hypotheses, but it would have been valuable had he offered greater insight into those features of flavor that tip him off as to where a wine grew.

Liem’s tasting notes often convincingly convey the notion that soil structure or vine exposure influences a wine’s

body, texture, acidity, or, metaphorically speaking, its sense of tension. But rarely are connections drawn between underlying geological features and specific aromas or flavors; and what few passages in Liem’s text could be construed as relevant clues tend to both beg the question at hand and raise new ones. “Champagne’s chalk contributes to the brisk, saline character of Champagne’s wines” not only asks readers to take it on the author’s authority that there is such a causal connection, it elicits the challenge that Champagnes grown on sand or marl (or, for that matter, Mosel Riesling grown on slate) can also be decidedly brisk and saline. Indeed, on another occasion Liem writes of the Massif de Saint-Thierry that the “sandy soils here impart … a prominently saline minerality.” The descriptor “chalky” is also used liberally throughout Liem’s notes, and readers are left to assume that a chalky taste is inexplicably a function of chalky soil. His assertion that “flint gives [certain] wines a characteristically smoky minerality” is no less suspicious for being commonplace, especially given that the time-honored use of “flinty” as a wine descriptor refers not to the smell or taste of a particular form of microcrystalline quartz per se, but rather to its employment as pierre à fusil and the smell engendered when it hammers the strike plate of a flintlock musket.

When Liem writes of one wine that its “most striking characteristic … is how much the character of the sandy soils and stony marl overwhelms the character of the grape,” the reader seeks in vain for an account of just what sorts of scents or flavors Liem finds so overwhelming.

Not coincidentally, on the rare occasions when Liem’s text resorts to jargon, it is precisely where wine descriptions touch on matters of seeming geological significance. Following contemporary fashion, “minerality” is used with apparent equivocation. “Mineral-driven” sometimes appears where it might merely signify a wine whose sensory profile is best captured by use of mineral descriptors — “saline,” “chalky,” “smoky,” etc. But on other occasions, as well as when Liem employs “soil-driven” and “soil-inflected,” we must conclude that he intends “mineral-driven” to allude to some ill-defined causal connection. (Surely he doesn’t mean to suggest that soil or mineral content is responsible solely for such sensory characteristics of wine as we choose to capture with mineral vocabulary and never for floral, fruity, vegetal, or carnal characteristics?) And what are readers to make of “dark mineral-driven flavors,” much less of “spicy minerality” or “waxy minerality”? (All three appear in different places as characteristic of wines from Verzenay.)

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A welcome aspect of Liem’s extensive talk of “terroir” is his avoidance of the historically prevalent, often obnoxious fixation with ranking. Even in treating the distinction between “premier cru” and “grand cru,” he doesn’t pass any value judgment, explaining that these categories reflect the prices that négociants were willing to pay for grapes, and that they curiously and with seeming inappropriateness apply in Champagne not to vineyards but to entire communes, heterogeneous though their soils and exposures might sometimes be. In fact, the ratings of each village enshrined in the Échelle des Crus are based on exceedingly granular official assessments into three quality classes, but beyond the fact that these aren’t readily accessible, there are good reasons to downplay them as Liem does. Only the best-known sectors of Champagne are covered; both the criteria for ranking and how those criteria are themselves ranked and applied are debatable; as the climate changes, so do the advantages of site; and the measure of quality that matters ultimately is that of the individual wines a grower achieves in collaboration with his or her terroir.

The Coteaux du Morin, one of Champagne’s little-known sub-regions, is, as Liem writes, “only a short drive

southwest from the southern tip of the Côte des Blancs,” Champagne’s prestigious Chardonnay epicenter, but “it feels like arriving in a completely different part of France.” Thus far, only one Coteaux du Morin producer, Ulysses Collin, has achieved prominence, and he became a wine grower only in 2004 after taking control of a few family parcels. Yet within a decade his multifaceted, strikingly site-specific cuvées were celebrated and coveted. Collin could claim as much of the credit for this success as he wished without risking contradiction, there being yet no basis for comparison. But here is what he told Liem: “Some people treat the Coteaux du Morin and the Sézanne as lesser terroirs. But a terroir is a terroir — it’s up to a grower to express it and to adapt his vinification to it. That’s where the qualitative difference really lies.”

It’s a tribute to Liem’s superb new effort that his approach is entirely consistent with Collin’s conviction, with its optimistic implication that superb Champagnes will continue to emerge from parts of the region that have long been obscure. The vast Côte des Bar, nearly 100 miles distant from Reims and comprising almost a quarter of Champagne’s total vine surface, only began attracting international attention two decades ago; yet today its top dozen growers are among the region’s most talked-about and their wines command prices on a par with those of the Montagne de Reims or Côte des Blancs.

“There is still a lot of good music to be written in the key of C,” Arnold Schönberg once surprised his students by saying. Champagne may have long seemed to wine aficionados as prosaic and un-hip as C-major did to those mentees in twelve tone composition. But there is a lot of exciting wine yet to be grown there. Liem’s Champagne will equip you (no corkscrew needed) to explore this least-known among the world’s best-known wine-growing regions as well as one of the most vibrant, innovative, and exciting.●

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