Champagne tastes good. It tastes even better dry. It tastes even better when extra dry. Can this trend still be reversed? And do extra-dry champagnes achieve a key objective of the champagne houses?
When the world has a cold, the Champagne houses have the flu. This was particularly evident in 2020, when Covid and the Covid measures (the sense of which can - indeed must - only be discussed after the worldwide emergence of the more harmless Omikron variant) brought the desire for the occasion wine champagne to a standstill. Don't worry: the large and medium-sized companies have enough money on the side to get through a few years of crisis (and the loss of the Russian market). Equally safe are champagne houses that pursue their own, always recognizable signature that turns consumers into regular customers.
2023, the first actual year without a pandemic, caused more corks to pop again. But the global situation itself is making the managers of the champagne houses a little uneasy. This is because a major project that they attempted to launch ten years ago has not proved successful either: the plan to transform champagne from an occasion wine into an everyday wine, a wine that can also accompany a meal well. The planned 20 percent of champagne drinkers who don't need an occasion to shoot a cork against the wall: this 20 percent remains a distant goal today - except perhaps in France itself. And the Extra Bruts have done little to change this.
The industry has done a lot of things right with its great promise of luxury - hundreds of millions of bottles are bottled worldwide every year, every single one of which, even the ones at discount stores, deliver or simulate something special. This includes the trend towards very dry to ultra-dry champagnes, which absolutely fulfill the promise of stimulating the senses and beguiling the palate. Semi-dry and sweet champagnes were already canceled 30 years ago. Is this a good development?
No! For although semi-dry and sweet champagne is increasingly a wine style only for older Britons, older Americans and experimental Asians, the wine press method does not deserve to be completely abandoned any time soon and perhaps only be offered by small winegrowing champagne houses. Or from sparkling wine producers who have to indulge in populism far more for existential reasons alone.
But the fact is: the disruptive revolution of dry and ultra-dry wines, which has left no stone unturned in the wine world 40 years after it began, can neither be stopped nor changed. Is this a good development?
Yes! Today, more than ever, it is clear that Extra Brut brings out an element in Champagnes that was often criminally ignored in the past: the wine itself, from which Champagne is made (after the wine itself has been made). Today, more attention is paid to it, the so-called base wine, than in previous decades. It often seems as if the most important task of the cellar masters of the Greater Region is to cultivate the vineyards, enhance the crus and press the base wines - and not to finish the champagnes with the dosage.
This paradigm shift towards more oenology in the vineyard and cellar and a move away from the composition and effect of the dosage has resulted in champagnes of the highest quality. Good champagnes have never been of higher quality than they are today, precisely because they are no longer the taste of the dosage (almost) alone, as was usually the case for 150 years. And more than ever, the market is being enriched by champagnes that want to do without any dosage at all and actually do very well without dosage. Are these so-called zero-dosage champagnes a good development?
Yes! With one caveat: these zero-dosage champagnes, which unfortunately are still mostly reserved for radical wine enthusiasts. Those who adhere to the Jacobinism of radical natural wines are a welcome addition to the range, but to rewrite this range as the future, as the wine press sometimes furiously desires, is once again the mistake of wanting to follow an ideology without hesitation and impose this ideology on the consumer, who tastes differently and wants to taste differently than the minority would like to impose on him. Dosage, but different? With pleasure. Zero dosage? Please only as a supplement. And for those who want it just like yesterday, like before the monk Dom Perignon, there are the so-called pet-nat sparkling wines, which can actually score points on the market with a young clientele looking for the archaic in viticulture.
And this dry wave has also had another effect on the wet palate: the rise of Blanc de Blanc champagnes made exclusively from Chardonnay, which, when pressed extra brut, lead to the driest experience of extra-dry champagnes. Never before in the history of Champagne and its houses has Chardonnay received so much (and justified) attention. And never before have there been such great champagnes made from Chardonnay. This is what will stay longer and for a long time.
