Champagne

Champagne is chalk, but not at the same depth everywhere. The Montagne de Reims and the Côte des Blancs are the worn front of a plateau of younger Tertiary sand, clay and marl laid on the Cretaceous chalk. Vines grow on the scarp where that cap has been stripped back; the cold, wet clay on top is left to forest. On the Côte des Blancs the chalk is almost at the surface, with Belemnite chalk under a few centimetres of soil at Oger. On the Montagne it lies under clay and sand washed down from above. In the Ardre valley at Chaumuzy it is far down under the Tertiary clays and marls, out of the roots' reach. What chalk gives the vine, by the appellation's own rules, is water: it drains the winter rain and hands it back in a dry summer by capillary rise.

The grapes follow the ground. Chardonnay holds the chalk of the Côte des Blancs: Demière-Ansiot's nineteen parcels in Oger, José Dhondt's 1949 vines at the foot of the slope in Les Crayères, and Vazart-Coquart in Chouilly at the north end, where the topsoil is a little deeper. Meunier buds late, so it misses more of the spring frost; it takes the clay of the cool Ardre, where the Salmons have planted 85 per cent of their ten hectares to it. The Montagne faces both ways. Huré Frères farm Ludes on the north side, with 10 to 15 cm of fine clay on chalk at La Grosse Pierre; over the forest, Camille Savès farm Bouzy on the south side, on chalk with seams of alluvium. François Huré puts it in a sentence: Bouzy is one of the first places in Champagne to ripen, and Ludes one of the last.

Tap any two to compare them and cut a slice between them. Lieux-dits are placed from the French cadastre. The Oger and Chouilly village wines are pinned to the village, and Richard Cheurlin, about 100 km south at Celles-sur-Ource in the Côte des Bar, is left for a plate of his own.