Spinning threads

It's all one Europe

Our image of Champagne is almost as worn-out a cliché as that of Belgium. Printed thousands of times in our image memory, imprinted over and over again, from an early age. Champagne is champagne, that's it. Accordingly, on the last day of our trip, we took a superficial look at a part of Champagne that has much more to offer than just areas where wine is grown. For it is possible to dive into the history of Champagne just as much as into the sea of vines that wave over the flat hills into the broad valleys full of limestone and chalk sediments. Exciting stories await beneath the surface, and there is always the danger that you will not emerge from them. 

Of course, the very title of this report is wrong. It is Sunday, it is our last day and we have left Wallonia and the northern foothills of the tightly undulating Ardennes behind us. We are in our beautiful hotel in Reims enjoying our sumptuous, varied breakfast and planning our day. We are not travelling through Wallonia today, we are travelling through the countryside that has given its name to France's most important luxury export next to fashion: Champagne.

This hopefully reasonably short report (unfortunately, I couldn't live up to my own expectations, I admit it) is about chalk, half-orphans, siblings of Scottish hammers, Wars of the Roses and kings, Mrs Marvel Jr and a child who was born with 12 fingers. It's about various lighthouses and their architects, their children, black arrows and windmills. It's not about Don Quixote. No. Yes. Indeed. But it is about an English diplomat, bottles, shipbuilding (yes!) and champagne, but only in passing, because I prefer to drink crémant.

Champs

The chalky landscape

In the first part we travelled to Brussels, in the second part we went via the Lion's Hill near Waterloo and the industrial city of Charleroi to our sleeping place right next to the Abbaye d'Aulne. In the third part, we drove from the Abbaye d'Aulne via Chimay into the northern foothills of the French Ardennes and found ourselves in the late afternoon at the foot of the majestic cathedral of Reims.

Champs - it's an old French word borrowed from the Latin campus - and related to the Italian word for campaign that appeared in France during the Renaissance. It is a toponym, a proper name for terrain objects belonging to the earth's surface, in this case for an open, chalky landscape, usually a plain or plateau. (Interesting, when I think of chalky landscape I think of something very ephemeral, easily wiped away. Chalking, that's what you say about oil-based exterior paint). The Latin language uses the rare word Campanenses to describe people who live in the plains.

We travelling Germans also know this expression from the Champs Élysées, shortened for the Avenue des Champs Élysées, the Elysian fields striving towards the Arc de Triomphe d'Étoile (See also:Liberty, Equality, Fraternity).

The large arable fields were and still are the namesake of this landscape and historic province of France. In 1065, a year before the victory of the French Normans at Hastings, it emerged from a Palatine county. While Troyes is the historical capital of Champagne, Reims has long outstripped the city further south in importance. Also because French kings were crowned in Reims from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. In addition, Reims is a place where the Franco-German relations that were so important after the Second World War are still cultivated today. (One reason why you can read this blog in three languages).

Today, Champagne is divided into the municipalities and departments of Yvonne, Seine-et-Marne, Aube, Marne, Ardennes, Meuse, Haut-Marne and Cote-D'Or. Reims is located on the northern edge of the Champagne region and we spent the whole of Sunday in the Marne department.

Champagne circuit

Route du Champagne - Montagne de Reims

From Reims we set off in the direction of Gueux, we wanted to get an impression of the places in the Champagne region that stand for one of France's most successful export products, the champagne. We travelled the Champagne Route, the northern part, which is a very beautiful 70 km from the Massif de Saint-Thierry over the Vallée de l'Ardre to the valley of the Marne and our destination Épernay.

„the bubbling champagne that quickly revives poor languishing lovers.”
- a London bard around 1676. (Quelle: Champagne)

The French have the Bishop of Châlons-en-Champagne William of Champeaux to thank for Champagne, among other things. Together with Petrus Abaelardus (Pierre Abaillard), an important representative of early scholasticism, he was involved in the so-called Universalist controversy in the 11th century. (It was about the eternal question of philosophers, in short, whether something universal really exists, or whether universal concepts are not in fact human inventions. After all, we also have William of Ockham and the fame of Ockham's razor to thank for this dispute of thought). William of Champeaux "granted the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Pierre-aux-Monts in Châlons a deed of ownership of all the monastery's land ("grande charte champenoise"), which included vineyards in today's wine-growing region, including Hautvillers, Cumières, Aÿ and Oger. This document is considered the founding act of the Champagne wine region." (Source: Champagne).

Already during the reign of Henry IV (1553 - 1610), the name Vin de Champagne, which did not have the best sound among the great wines of France due to the poor soils, became established in the capital Paris. (To explain: Pinot Noir does not thrive so well on poor, chalky soils, whereas Chardonnay does).

The wine was bottled - around 1660 - before the end of the first fermentation, and anyone who has ever made elderberry sparkling wine knows what happened - the bottles exploded. It was the English who bought the wine from the Champenois, who added a kind of dosage of brown cane sugar to the wine in the spring and thus invented Champagne. See quote from the Bard above.

The French owed the invention of the resistant wine bottles with recessed bottoms and a ring-like reinforcement to the equally inventors across the Channel, in this case the English diplomat Sir Kenelm Digby. Digby was a privateer, founding member of the Royal Society, inventor and posthumous cookbook author. In 1615, Sir Robert Mansell, an admiral and member of parliament, who was corrupt beyond all measure, decreed that the glass industry in England could no longer burn wood, which was needed for shipbuilding. As a result of the industrialisation of the British glass industry by switching to coal as a heating material, Digby's improvement increased the melting temperature of the melts, other ingredients were used, stronger glass and more stable bottles became possible.

The Royal Navy's shipbuilding as the driving force behind the switch to bottle fermentation in Champagne. For it was only with the stable British bottles that it was possible to cultivate the light, airy grey white wines of Champagne that were so sought after at the Paris society.

Dom Pérignon

The Dom Pérignon brand is said to have belonged to the House of Moët since the French Revolution. The family acquired the empty Hautvillers Abbey with its surrounding vineyards, where Dom Pérignon (1638-1715), a cellar master at the Benedictine abbey, is said to have done so much to improve champagne. He invented the cuvée, the blending of wine from different grapes; the lacing of the cork with string is also said to go back to him. (Source: Wikipedia)

"For example, you never drink a '53 Dom Pérignon if it has a temperature above eight degrees. That would be just like listening to the Beatles without ear muffs!" - James Bond to Dr. No in the 1964 film Goldfinger

Basically, the history of champagne is a romantic story, yes, but it is also about a lot of money, champagne is big business. Today Dom Pérignon belongs to the parent company Moët Hennessy - as part of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, which is owned solely by French billionaire Bernard Arnaud. According to https://www.vinaria.at/ , the parent company has an annual turnover of 2.2 billion euros and owns 1600 ha of vineyards. Since the designation of origin is limited to the vineyards in Champagne, vineyards are rare and correspondingly expensive. According to meininger.de, prices range from 485,000 to 1.8 million euros. Multiply by 1600.

We drive through the villages along the Montagne der Reims. We notice that there are many champagne houses, also many small ones, which produce layer-related champagne in small quantities, but besides the champagne there is nothing. No cafés, few to no restaurants, little that is attractive. At least the roses along the way stand out.

Rosa gallica officinalis

The House of Lancaster and the Rose von Provins

Roses are still plentiful in Champagne, today for different reasons than more than 500 years ago. Now, especially the noble roses, like the one in the picture, are a good disease indicator for the vines that stretch up the hill behind them in long narrow rows. In front of the vines, the roses get sick and the winegrowers can take supportive measures for the vines. Yet even in the 13th century, roses represented a product that was valuable for other reasons. More on this in a moment.

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"
Act 5, Scene 4 / King Richard III , by William Shakespeare, c.1593.

There is an interesting connection of Champagne to the House of Lancaster in the English Royal Court. And thus to the original version of Game of Thrones, to the War of the Roses between the two hostile noble houses of York and Lancaster.

This connection is the Rosa Gallica officinalis, also known as the Apothecary Rose, Vinegar Rose, Crimson Rose or the Rose of Lancaster. It is the county flower of Lancashire and the official rose of the House of Lancaster.

The valuable Rosa Gallica found its way from Persia to Central Europe and France, where its value was appreciated then as it still is in parts of Iran today. The Greeks and Romans already cultivated this simple rose species. (more here: Interesting facts about roses) It owes its fame and success to its fragrance and the rose oil, rose water and rose vinegar made from the thousands and thousands of petals. The petals were also popular with apothecaries as a tea. And as early as the 13th and 14th centuries, the Champagne region cultivated and promoted trade in the products of this rose. Rose cushions, pillows filled with Rosa Gallica petals, were weighed in gold. It was through marriage that the aforementioned connection to England came about:

Blanche d'Artois (1248-1302), half-orphan since the age of 2, Queen of the Kingdom of Navarre, the beautiful daughter of the late Matilda of Brabant and Count Robert I of Artois, widow of Prince Henry of Navarre-Champagne for two years and now regent herself, the same with the pale distinguished countenance married Edmund of Lancaster, called Edmund Crouchback, in 1276. This brother of King Edward I, such called Edward Longlegs or Hammer of Scots, decides to have the Rose of Provins in his coat of arms, which the second House of Lancaster will adopt in 1485 as the emblem of its victory over the House of York at the end of the War of the Two Roses, the Lancaster Rose. Source: Champagne (province)

The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses were the battles between the two rival English noble houses of York and Lancaster, which flared up again and again over a period of 30 years, with interruptions from 1455 to 1485. Both houses bore roses in their coats of arms, the House of York a white rose, the House of Lancaster a red rose, and the house owed this to the above-mentioned marriage to Champagne.

As descendants of the House of Plantagenet, both families traced their lineage back to King Edward III. In skirmishes and battles, in an ongoing war with bloody and deadly outcomes for the lords and kings involved - Richard III, the last king of the House of Plantagenet, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth - the House of Lancaster triumphed over that of York, and Henry Tudor was subsequently crowned King Henry VII in London on 30 October 1485.

Shakespeare

After all, the events were so significant that they inspired William Shakespeare to write 8 works directly or indirectly related to the Wars of the Roses, including, among others, Richard III and Henry V. It should not go unmentioned, for various reasons yet to be depicted here in the future, that the son of a lighthouse architect was also inspired by the events to write a novel, it was THE Scottish writer of the Victorian age: Robert Louis Stevenson. The author of Treasure Island, the horror novella about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the travelogue Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), wrote the novel "The Black Arrow" about the War of the Roses in 1883, in the original English "The Black Arrow, A Tale of the Two Roses". In 1985, John Hough, who had already filmed Stevenson's Treasure Island with Orson Welles, adapted the material with Oliver Reed and Donald Pleasance in leading roles.

Back to Champagne.

Don Quixote

Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.

Our Champagne route leads up and down the slopes of the Montagne de Reims in truly sedan-like sweeps. In front of us the crest of Mont-Bœuf and my Sancho Panza, my driver still seems to be shouting at me: "No, not far, always straight ahead, (...), past the windmills", (source: Astérix in Spanien) that the cloak of the Spanish fighter legend Don Quixote falls off me unawares.

But in fact we are driving towards the mill of Verzenay, and for a brief moment I really did feel like the Spanish knight. The mill is located on a hilltop in front of the hills, the Mont-Bœuf. The Tinot-Vincent couple built it at the beginning of the 19th century to grind grain. It ran for almost 75 years, but unfortunately ceased to operate in 1903. It is the last survivor of its kind from the 19th century.

The new owner bought the mill for 9,000 guilders, but had to add another 1,000 guilders, because it was agreed that each of the heirs of the seller would receive 1,000 guilders - and then another one was born unexpectedly. In 1923, the mill and the land became the property of the house of Heidsieck & C° Monopole. In 1949, the mill was restored to its original condition, and changed hands again by the heirs of the founders of this house - Henri Louis Walbaum and Auguste Heidsieck. In 1972, the property passed to the Champagne house Mumm, which to this day maintains an exceptional site with a sweeping view of the Champagne region. On the slopes of Mont-Bœuf and around the Grand Cru site of Verzenay, it is precisely the more northerly slopes that do not receive as much sunlight that are favoured, because in too much sun the grapes lose their acidic character and become heavy and dull in taste. Here, Pinot noir, which tolerates the rather heavy soils on the slopes well, dominates, while Chardonnay dominates in the plains in front of Verzenay. As it writes https://www.champagne-characters.com/ "The viticultural hallmark of Verzenay, already alluded to above, is clearly its status as a reliable purveyor of fine, elegantly fresh and never expansive Pinot Noir."

Don Quixote, the windmills and, of course, the slightly abbreviated quote from Astérix in Spain from 1969 inevitably lead to a very great son of Champagne.

A comic legend

Captain Marvel Junior and 12 fingers from Champagne

We left the land of comic legends not even a day ago and now, without a second thought, we are back in the land of another comic legend. With millions of copies of his works printed all over the world, he is certainly an artist known to everyone; it is the draughtsman and author Alberto Aleandro Uderzo from Fismes, better known as Albert Uderzo, who was born in 1927 as the son of Italian immigrants with 12 fingers on both hands. He was to have an astonishing career in drawing. Completely unknown to me, he drew some episodes of Capitaine Marvel Jr. in 1950 (source: the archive has the drawings), invented together with René Goscinny in 1954/1957 the young reporter Luc Junior and his dog, who became the model for another famous character: Tintin et Milou and Tintin respectively. The collaboration with his colleague culminated from 1959 to 1977 in the invention of the character Asterix, which everyone should be familiar with. The comic series about the little Gaul, his friend Obelix and the inhabitants of the indomitable Gallic village now has a total worldwide circulation of 370 million volumes. (Source: http://www.kinonews.de). And of course the companions around the cute, tree-loving dog were once in Spain. And that's how the meeting with Don Quixote came about.

The soil

Acidity and Champagne chalk

Champagne is the popular export product of the Champagne region, and it really is immensely successful. The combination of the special soils, which among other things influence the entire cuvée of each Champagne house in a very special way, ensure that France dominates global sparkling wine production.

Moët Hennessy alone, with its brands Veuve Clicquot, Moët & Chandon and Dom Pérignon, sells over 60 million bottles of champagne a year.

Yet Dom Pérignon is not the largest house in Champagne. With its brands Vranken, Demoiselle, Charles Lafitte 183, Pommery and Heidsieck & Co. Monopole, Vranken-Pommery Monopole, as the second largest Champagne group, is one of the largest wine and Champagne producers in Europe.

According to Vinum.de, the total turnover of champagne in 2021 has once again increased by 10% compared to 2019 to 5.5 billion euros with 315 million bottles sold.

No wonder that cork caps or bottle caps and bottle cap collecting albums are hawked at every flea market in the area.

But let's not fool ourselves. Viticulture is as much a monoculture as the cultivation of maize, potatoes or soya. Its cultivation is only possible through greater cultural recognition in society. Of course organic viticulture is possible - and of course wine is grown in Champagne, not champagne, especially the grapes Pinot Noir (Pinot Noir), Pinot Blanc (Pinot Blanc) and Chardonnay account for 99.7% of the area. But organic viticulture is the exception rather than the rule, and even with organic cultivation, the vineyards, although pretty and neat, row upon row of vines, remain monocultures. The organic wine portal assumes that about 20 kg of pesticides are applied per hectare of vineyard. To understand: 8000 kg to 10,000 kg of grapes may be harvested per hectare, depending on the year. In France, efforts are being made to reduce the use of pesticides considerably. That would be a good thing.

Another product on which the fine taste of Champagne is based, buried under a thin crust of vegetation, has also been a sought-after export article since time immemorial. It is the chalk into which the vines root up to 30 metres deep.

Chalk

Champagne chalk

It is also thanks to the chalk that the Champagne houses have huge cellars and tunnels, driven into the chalk for kilometres underground under Reims and many other places in Champagne, evenly tempered to shake the yeast into the neck of the bottle on the shaking plates day after day according to the Méthode Champenoise, every day a tiny turn, just a touch more of a tilt.

Chalk is the sediment of billions of small creatures, chemically it is calcite or calcium carbonate, formed from the shells of fossil organisms over 60 million years ago, sunk to the bottom of ancient seas. The rock is porous, which is why it is very easy to grind. Chalk has been a cultural companion of man for a very long time, whether for writing, for painting as a less toxic alternative to white lead, as an anti-inflammatory substance for treating wounds, as a cleaning substance, for polishing metal and of course for painting in the home, chalk has been popular throughout the ages. The hue of champagne chalk is warm, not at all as garish as that of titanium white, a modern pigment of the 20th century.

The pigment chalk is also a classic component of gesso, a primer used by the old masters of painting to ground their canvases covered with Belgian linen.

Pigment experts distinguish Champagne chalk from Rügen chalk, which is known as mud chalk, and Belgian chalk, which is particularly soft. Marble is also basically a form of calcium carbonate, but with a completely different structure, hardness and processing quality. (Source: https://www.kremer-pigmente.com)

Back to Champagne. One last time.

Over the hills

A lighthouse

Admittedly, I like vineyards, their uniformed, grid-like, lined structuredness, I like the way the vine hatchings spread out over the slopes, wander down them and back up the slopes, forming patterns. A landscape like a medieval copperplate engraving, hatched, parallelised, uniformed.

Over 30 lighthouses in Scotland and around it were designed by Robert Louis Stevenson's father, Thomas Stevenson (1818 - 1887), in his lifetime. In 1818, the year the windmill was erected at Mont-Bœuf he came into the world, and what would he have wondered to behold a lighthouse so far from the sea, amid the sea of fields, lofty above the waving vines and panicles of wheat and rye.

Leaving Verzenay, we see it right in front of us, a lighthouse rising from Mount Rizan, a real attraction with a car park, an access jetty, a champagne bar and a very beautiful park next to the lighthouse. You can stay here for hours in a light wind, enjoying the beautiful view. Only no ship is heading towards us, no ray shines out into no darkness, everything is just light, serenity and bliss.

Yet the history of the tower is prosaically told, for it was an advertising measure erected at the beginning of the 20th century for the champagne house Joseph Goulet, the name written vertically on the tower. The French have a strange way with monuments, little respect for their peculiar and telling history. In 1999, the writing disappeared, the tower was neutralised and lost so much of its charm. It is still beautiful here.

Finis

Narration condenses. Remembering prolongs.

Our journey ended in Épernay, a town of which there is not much to tell. But we found a very nice viewpoint to the east of the city and had a picnic. Then it's time to head home.

Our time together is over. I let the days, the places, the feelings, smells and sounds pass me by, make me aware of them. On the way back, as if in a crack in time, I see a painting lying on the ground, get out and walk towards it. Pounded red, fanned, lush, boldly vertically painted green. Contrast. Maximum. Renoir would have painted this field, or another French painter, perhaps Monet, had he had his garden here and not in Giverny. The world is structured like a sky by van Gogh, the horizon chalked in the light blue of the light like a watercolour by Cézanne, my favourite painter. At the same time, the poppies, Andy Warhol would have liked it, all red, all soft, kick me right in the face. Red. Life. Green. Hope.

It was one of the longest and most beautiful journeys of my life. And it only lasted four days.

That remains. Thank you L.