The 2024 Champagne harvest

A mixed bag further reiterating the regions chalenges

Pascal Doquet in one of his beautiful vineyards

The weeks since I last wrote here, have been, in sync with the harvest, filled with a variety of challenging events and curveballs, that among other things, forced me off this platform. Let me explain, when harvest got underway, I was preparing to move thirteen years of my life to a significantly smaller house, so it became a mad rush to see as many people as possible – something which was very much needed in this complicated year - in between packing boxes and teaching English. And my access to Substack was further hampered in the middle of this all, by the fact that I managed to kill my computer with coffee. When I bought a new laptop, Apple decided that it was wiser to send my new computer from the US – I had asked for a QWERTY keyboard - rather than find one closer to home. This meant it arrived smack bang in the middle of my move and disappeared in one of the many boxes and it took a while to find it again. Besides all of that, the coffee rendered my old hard drive beyond repair, which meant I lost the articles I had written before the move as well as a good chunk of my book. Needless to say, the last four weeks have been a nerve-wrecking comedy of errors, in which I also was at the receiving end of terse Terres et Vins ( T & V) messages.

Therefore, before I get to the harvest, I would like to come back on my previous post, which seemed to have struck a raw nerve with several T & V producers. It appears they have taken issue with the following sentence “awarding this year’s prize to the Sacré Burger/Bistro team implies that the eighteen Terres et Vins producers tacitly condone chauvinistic bullying and sexism” . While I stay firm in my assertion that KNOWINGLY attributing the T & V prize to these two sexist bullies has been an act of making allowance for this undesirable behavior which moreover devallued the prize for all other recipients, I have come to understand that most T &V producers were unaware about the misrepresentation of the Aurore Casanova brand on the Sacré wine lists and restaurant window, and the sexist bullying associated with it. And now that they know, they strongly disapprove of this fact because they do not condone sexism or bullying. It seems that the people who did know – that coincidentally appear to be the same who proposed Sacré Bistro/Burger for the prize - had opted, for whatever reasons, to withhold this information from the other T & V members in their proposal. While this shows that most of the T & V members (including all of those who gave me the prize sIx years ago)  are not sexists, it also shows that bullying - and in this case awarding bullies - is even more ingrained in the Champenois underbelly than I originally assumed. Do not take my word for it; instead go and read the comments made by the two bullies on my previous post – they speak volumes.

Now that I set the record straight on T & V, let’s get back to the harvest, which I described as the extension of this years complicated growing season in the piece I wrote for Wine-Searcher at the beginning of September. For this article I spoke to Sébastien Dubuisson, Sustainability and Quality Director at the Comité Champagne (CIVC), who nailed the 2024 harvest essence in his one-word definition of it being heterogeneous.  There were so many factors determining the harvest quality and quantity that it would be near impossible for anyone to give a general overview. Dubuisson’s prediction that the harvest held great potential for those who waited to reach optimum ripeness – which he put around 10 degrees potential alcohol for Meunier and 10.5 degrees potential alcohol for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir - was also on the money.

However, from what I observed at harvest, only a minority of growers and producers strived to reach this potential. Too often growers raced to get the grapes pressed as soon as it was authorized, regardless of whether the required minimum alcohol degree of 9% potential alcohol had been reached in the vineyard or not. Hence the variation of taste profiles in the must varied greatly, going from very lackluster but acidic juice, which could be mistaken for lime juice, to truly great musts with excellent sugar-acidity ratio and a plethora of elegant flavors.

One of the challenges Dubuisson had pointed out was the big gap in ripeness – sometimes about 2 degrees potential alcohol – between the black grape varieties and Chardonnay at the start of harvest. As crops were overall smaller in these black grape varieties, this meant that growers with the three grape varieties either would have to stop a few days to let the Chardonnay catch up in ripeness or pick unripe. Too many growers, unfortunately, opted for the latter.

Interestingly however, this gap in ripeness worked well for larger producers and many of the houses employed less pickers and took their time to pick the vineyards in function of their ripeness. Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Chef de Cave at Champagne Roederer, explained how the house was displacing the picking teams between the Vallée de la Marne vineyards and those of the Montagne the Reims, and later on in the Cote des Blancs. In other years these vineyards are generally picked by separate teams. The house’s technical director Johann Merle added that having less picking staff and more house staff to manage the pickers, helped them to further focus on quality. A large chunk of Roederer’s vineyards are farmed organically, which in  this wet year, where downy mildew thrived, implies smaller yields. However, Merle asserted that yields were higher than in 2021 – another big downy mildew year – because of the lessons learned at that time. He explained that this year the team had been more reactive in treating after the rain which meant losses where curbed and in many places the house was close to the commercial appellation set at 10,000 kg/ha this year. Nevertheless, most of Roederer’s vineyards are situated in Grand Cru villages and as Lécaillon told me in 2021, historically Grand Cru implied that vineyards would yield grapes there every year, because meteorological conditions tended to be more clement. And indeed, it seems that all growers in Grand Cru villages weathered a lot less storms than those in other parts of Champagne.

If clemency from bad weather was a defining factor for Grand Cru status, I may have finally worked out why there are no Grand Cru villages in the Aube or further afield in the Vallée de la Marne. Those areas were once again pounded by bad weather, and