on champagne…the “real” stuff
By
Bad news. Despite the fact that the governing board of the Union des Maisons de Champagne (UMC) voted unanimously in 2003 to end the practice of sur latte transactions beginning on January 1, 2004, the practice continues unabated.
Sur latte transactions are wholesale purchases of Champagne that is already bottled, ready to disgorge and label. In plain English, it means that members of the UMC, which includes G. H. Mumm, Moët et Chandon, and Veuve Clicquot, continue to sell Champagne under their own famous labels, that was made and bottled in other wineries. Many, both inside and outside of the Champagne region have long regarded sur latte transactions as nothing short of legalized fraud.
As Tom Stevenson reported in Wine Report 2005, one of the UMC members told him that “the houses agreed for the regulation to be promoted, but as long as it is not enforced, they’re free to do as they please. It’s like cheating on your fiancée before marriage: it is not adultery, just indecent.”
So the practice continues, along with the (only slightly less indecent) practice of wholesale au clair purchases of still base wine by the same négociant houses, from the same cooperatives and growers. No visitor to the Champagne region could fail to notice the tanker-trucks, emblazoned with “Liquide Alimentaire,” that clog the N51 between Reims and épernay, loaded with wine sucked from tanks of Pinot Meunier that the growers might be embarrassed to bottle and market themselves.
If nothing else, both practices violate the implicit contract that consumers are led to believe is in force: that wine is the product of the vineyards and the people whose name appears on its label.
That’s not to claim that every famous négociant house is dishonest, or that all of their wines are counterfeits. There are honorable exceptions that never buy wine sur latte or au clair, and I really do like some of their wines. In fact, I once attended an exclusive cigar tasting (I don’t smoke) at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, not to meet the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, who (inexplicably) was pitching the event for Davidoff, but because they were pouring Krug 1982 (!) at the pre-”tasting” reception.
Nevertheless, it’s sobering that 95% of all the Champagne sold in America comes from the Grandes Marques, as the large négociant houses style themselves, and that a full 55% comes from a single company: LVMH, which owns Moët et Chandon and Veuve Cicquot. Champagne made and bottled by one of the two thousand small estates that actually grows all of its own grapes is practically invisible in the U.S.
Based on most of the widely available wines, you’d never know that Champagne (the place) is very much like Burgundy. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grow in both regions, in equally varied microclimates and soils, which result in many distinctive, individual wines, each of which identifies a unique place.
But terroir in Champagne is almost always sacrificed for the sake of large quantities of “consistent” (lowest common denominator) wine.
That’s why the négociant houses routinely blend, for example, Chardonnay from the Côtes de Sézanne, with Pinot Noir from Champignol-lez-Mondeville. Were that the practice in Burgundy, we’d have blends of Gevrey-Chambertin with Pouilly-Fuissé and Chablis, assembled together to produce consistent “house-style” Bourgognes.
But when you buy a bottle of small-farm estate-bottled Champagne, you’re paying for good grapes from a wine-meaningful place, and good winemaking, not for a four-color ad in Architectural Digest, or the biweekly floral update of the Veuve Clicquot window at a snooty Midtown liquor store. You get what you pay for.