“I’m sure you don’t have one earthworm in that soil. It’s a tiny vineyard,” I said. “What would it cost to farm here organically?”

Audebert repeated what seemed to be the corporate mantra (like Moët, Krug is owned by luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH): Farming more naturally in Champagne was impossible. As we talked about some of his peers and elders (like the owners of Jacquesson and Leclerc Briant) who have bet their vineyards on organic farming techniques, he became increasingly excited. Perhaps young Audebert might be jonesing to join these renegades and become a winemaker on the cutting edge of the Champagne new wave himself?

Not everyone views the new mono-cru offerings as a blessing. Robert Bohr, wine director of one of New York’s most inventive champagne lists at Cru, said, “Mono-cru champagnes have a tough battle to fight, and I don’t think it’s worth fighting. Mono-cru might be a marketing technique to get people talking about champagne… [but] these nuances are just too subtle for most champagne drinkers.” I tend to agree: These bubblies are postdoctoral drinking, champagnes for the wine intellectual, a geology and terroir lesson in a bottle. And it strikes me that champagne, the ultimate celebratory party tipple, is not a wine that most people want to think about in that way.

Through my Champagne journey, I heard of a Swedish writer who had preceded me at the vineyards. Just before the 2004 harvest began, when the weather had finally turned into summer and the whiteness of the soil seemed like chalk lines on the blackboard of the hilly vineyards, I finally caught up with author Richard Juhlin. (His book 4000 Champagnes was released last October.) Was it just me or was he also nonplussed by mass-market ventures that didn’t honour the small-batch artisanal origins of mono-cru? “When Moët released their mono-cru wines, it meant that the big houses couldn’t complain about [mono-crus] anymore; it was a trend they couldn’t ignore,” he explained. “But tasting them, I realized that they all tasted more like [blended] Moët than terroir.”

Indeed, after talking to the big champagne houses, I came away convinced that the blending tradition was firmly rooted – though with some work it might, like the packed chalky soils of Champagne itself, loosen up. And I kept thinking about Pierre Larmandier speaking with so much passion about the expression of the soil: Whether making a blend or a mono-cru, he makes a wine first, a unique expression of the terroir from which it has sprung. Without that, a wine holds no interest for him. That is the real champagne revolution. Unless I can taste the winemakers’ love for the soil – and the soul in their winemaking – most mono-crus will taste curious, but strangely flat to me. [ ]

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