Champagne Salon in muddy wellies – just how it should be…

The ridiculously glitzy ‘celebratory’ status enjoyed by certain champagne brands pre-crunch made it easy to forget that champagne is in fact a hugely delicate living substance, created and wholly dependent on, ostensibly, ‘farmers.’ A wintery trip down to the prestigious Champagne village of Le Mesnil sur Oger to visit our two Houses, Delamotte and Salon (positioned right next door to each other) was the perfect way to put things back into perspective: Quiet and unassuming, this sleepy town is far from glitzy and after a perishing cold winter, looked as if there had been a mass exodus. Perhaps the complete absence of life was a result of the Mesnil folk still being deep in hibernation…or maybe this is a permanent state of affairs?
Either way, our tour of the neighboring sister Houses Salon and Delamotte was fascinating. Relatively speaking, Delamotte is more commercial in size than Salon, which has a bottling line the size of a small babyfoot table! (Both are a mere tadpoles compared to the toad-esque grandes marques.) The Champagne House was bought and nurtured by the eccentric M. Eugène-Aimé Salon as a hobby and the building – despite a later over-indulged branding exercise which included the gutters, weather vain etc – still very much maintains the air of a private home. Eugène-Aimé, who died in 1943, was chardonnay obsessed, seeking out the best parcels of the grape to create the ultimate Blanc de Blancs Champagne. It was all originally for his own consumption. His focus on chardonnay remains the key to the Salon and Delamotte range today.
We were given us a fascinating tour of the cellars which included a quick lesson in disgorging (See Luke on left) “It is a quick, two-action motion” said Jean-Baptiste (export Director) confidently, as he demonstrated the ancient technique in which you remove the cap and the lees from the top of the bottle whilst retaining as much as possible of the precious liquid inside. Needless to say, it is a highly skilled practice which is not easy to acquire in an instant – like, I suspect, the art of the hand-riddling which is still practiced by the 60 year old ‘riddler’ on all the Salon wines.
Tasting the disgorged wines was fascinating. They have not had the benefit of a ‘spoonful of sugar’ (or dosage) which is added when the wines are corked, ready for sale. The difference between the completed wines and the recently disgorged non-dosé wines (ie with no added sugar) is marked; some argue that it is a truer, more natural style. This, we agreed, may have been the case with the just-disgorged 1996 Delamotte Blanc de Blancs, which was utterly delicious. However, in general, while comparing them, it seemed that the added dosage acted like a gentle hand on a beautiful string puppet, pulling taut each of its delicate strings to make it dance.
We also tasted the 2009 base wines for Delamotte, taken from surrounding areas – a very interesting exercise. These are all grand cru chardonnay. Elegance from Avize, lovely soft texture and fruit from Oger (the wines are meursault-esque by way of comparison) and a very apparent punchi-ness from Cramant. Exact blending proportions for these wines are down to one person only, but, needless to say, each one adds its own, important, element of style. Tasting the Delamotte Blanc de Blancs 1999 (dosé and non dosé) went a long way to demonstrating this – two utterly delicious and very impressive glasses of wine.
The tour ended in muddy wellies in one of the few Salon vineyards. We watched the highly-skilled pruners hard at work with their lethal looking sécateurs and listened to a detailed account of just how labour-intensive the vineyards are in Champagne due to their susceptibility to disease; at Salon, they put in up to 500 man hours per hectare versus an average of  300-350 in Burgundy. This was a sure way to re-ignite an understanding of what really is important in Champagne and grow a true appreciation of the extreme hard work, skill and knowledge that goes into every bubble.