Champagne Going Green

With the holiday party season moving ahead at full throttle, selected Champagne producers in France are doing their part to ensure that the Champagne we pop in celebration of the good times is just a little bit greener (environmentally friendly).

In response to a 2003 study that found that the Champagne industry emits 220,500 tons of carbon dioxide every year in the process of transporting their product around the world, the region’s trade organization, Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), is recommending that producers switch over to a newer, sleeker bottle. The goal is to achieve a 25% reduction in the carbon footprint by 2020 and 75% by 2050. Production and shipping accounts for nearly a third of Champagne’s carbon emissions, with the husky (nearly 2 pounds of glass) bottle the biggest offender.

The new bottle is only marginally slimmer than the traditional bottle and about 2.3 ounces lighter. Not much of a change you say? One must remember that two (2) factors significantly influenced the decision to alter the Champagne bottle – safety and tradition.

The design of the slimmer bottle required a significant re-engineering in order to handle the pressure of Champagne (nearly 3 atmospheres – or 90 PSI ) for more than four years - from bottling all the way to the consumer’s hands. Think of it as 3 times the pressure of the air in your car’s tires. Although the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon is often (incorrectly) thought of as the inventor of Champagne, he was the one who first thickened the glass (in the mid-1600s) to contain what was often referred to as “the devil’s wine” because its vessels exploded so often.

Champagne houses go to great lengths to cultivate an image of luxury through packaging and pricing - and will gladly explain to you that other sparkling wines are inferior because they simply are not Champagne. With tradition being a major factor, producers are very reluctant to alter, even in the slightest, the manner in which their product is seen or presented to the consumer. Therefore, the new bottle had to be molded so that consumers would barely detect the difference in the bottle’s classic shape. In order to optimize the efficiency, the new bottle also had to fit all of the existing machinery at all of the Champagne houses.

But this small reduction in weight (from a slightly narrower profile in the shoulder of the bottle) reduced the carbon emissions associated with bottle production alone by 7%. The slimmer shape allows approximately 2,400 more bottles (200 cases) to be transported in the standard truckload, therefore putting fewer trucks on the road. The estimate is that this will result in a reduction of nearly 9,000 tons (18 million pounds) of carbon emitted annually - the equivalent of taking 4,000 small cars off the road.

Depending on the Champagne house you favor, you may already own some of the new bottle style and did not realize it. Vranken-Pommery Monopole, which, in addition to Champagne Vranken and Champagne Pommery, also owns Heidsieck, Company Monopole, Cuvée Diamant, Demoiselle, and Champagne Charles Lafitte, switched to the new bottle in 2003, and introduced it to the retail markets in 2007. Expect to see slimmer bottles from Veuve Cliquot and Moet-Chandon in 2013-2014.

The cost of the bottle is marginally less (dropping from 43 cents per bottle to about 41), but not enough to alter the pricing to the consumer. It will remain to be seen, however, if the savings resulting from the reduction in transportation costs will be offered to the Champagne lovers around the world.

Dom Perignon introduces ...

Champagne house Dom Perignon launched its Dom Perignon Brut 2002 and Dom Perignon Oenotheque Brut 1996 in a live webcast on July 12th from decanter.com's headquarters in London.  The launch event was a tasting which also included the Dom Perignon Rose 2000 and the Dom Perignon Oenotheque Rose 1990.  The tasting panel was led by Richard Geoffroy, Dom Perignon's Chef de Cave, and included Decanter contributors Sarah Kemp and Margaret Rand.  The session was moderated by John Abbot of Decanter.

The format for the webcast was interesting.  The tasting panel and guests were ensconced in a room on the 12th floor of the Decanter building (the only floor with a view, according to John Abbot) while a worldwide audience tapped into the tasting via a text-only stream or a text-and-video stream.  Attendees signed in using Twitter, Facebook, or openID accounts and, once signed in, had the potential to pose questions to the panelists (Most of the questions were directed at Richard and many of them were broad Dom Perignon questions rather than being specifically about the wines being tasted.).

The first wine tasted was the Vintage 2002.  This particular vintage was released 8 years after harvest while, traditionally, Dom vintages are released 6 to 7 years after harvest.  Richard saw no significance in this fact.  Sarah Kemp was first to comment on the wine and declared it a "very Burgundian champagne" with a "full, rich, Montrachet style" and having "extremely expressive notes of hazelnut and brioche." Margaret Rand saw the wine as "immensely rich and concentrated" but noted that it wore its weight lightly.  It was "very, very elegant and linear, supple and terrifically long."  Richard Geoffroy focused on the overall mouthfeel, a direct result, he stated, of the blending.  Such a mouthfeel could not have been achieved with a single grape variety.

This vintage was disgorged 15 months ago and will pair well with seafood, in general, and specifically, with crab.

The second wine tasted was the Oenotheque 1996.  Margaret Rand stated that 1996 was a year of enormous acidity which usually yielded great wines but on the lean side.  She felt that the Oenotheque 1996 would be "young and tight" because of its recent disgorgement and found that to be the case.  She found the wine to have "powerful toasty notes and huge weight" and an "enormous finish."  This was a complex, mineral wine.  Richard saw the wine as "packed with serious flavors" to include, smoke, minerality, toast, and iodine.

This vintage was disgorged 2 years ago and pairs well with caviar or very intensely flavored flat oysters.

In responding to a question on the difference between the Vintage 1996 and Oenotheque 1996, Richard stated that the primary difference was mouthfeel.  The Oenotheque had a creamy expansion and a glide to the finish while the Vintage was a more classical champagne.  It was more linear and then tailed into something marginally dried out.

Richard also re-emphasized the Dom Perignon philosophy that the wine be a perfect balance of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.  This does not necessarily imply a 50/50 mix; it is driven by taste and will vary somewhere between 40% and 60% for each varietal.  The more classical vintages are on the Chardonnay side, according to Richard, because it is not as intense as the Pinot Noir.

The panel continued on to taste the other wines but that does not fall under Dom Perignon introduces ...