Mapping Champagne - by Tom Hewson
Louis Larmat’s celebrated maps of Champagne were published in 1944. That’s an interesting year.
Champagne had been through almost four decades of unrest; riots, World War One, disruption to exports, currency collapse, the Great Depression, and World War Two. André Simon makes the volatility of the inter-war period crystal-clear when he points out that abundant vintages such as 1934 caused a headache in the cellars. Nobody could sell them, or indeed pay for the grapes:
“There can be too much wine in bad times, as the ‘thirties certainly were.”
André Simon, The History Of Champagne
Harvest 1934 - too many grapes (photo courtesy of Union des Maisons de Champagne)
The next decade was not much kinder. 1942-44 were fraught years in Champagne, the administration of the region caught uncomfortably between growers, houses, the Vichy regime and the German ‘levies’ on the wines in the cellars. A number of figures originally involved in brokering this uneasy peace (including representatives from Moët et Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, growers’ associations and shippers) were sent to concentration camps once the tide started turning and the Germans suspected Champagne’s appetite for collaboration was waning - or indeed switching to resistance. When British parachutes were discovered in the cellars of Piper-Heidsieck, the house was requisitioned entirely.
By the time the Germans retreated in 1944 the vineyard had finally outrun the phylloxera louse and trade routes were (theoretically) opening up once again. The new Comité National des Appellations d'Origine des Vins et Eaux de Vie (another mouthful that morphed into today’s I.N.A.O., the referee and rulebook of all France’s wine appellations), had been wanting to flex its muscles for years. What better way to prove the superiority of France’s authorised vineyards than an Atlas?
Cue the slightly mysterious figure of Louis Larmat (who you can read more about here). Larmat’s hand-drawn maps of Champagne, originally part of this Atlas project, re-emerged in the public eye with their inclusion in Peter Liem’s 2017 book Champagne.
A lot, though, has changed since the 1940s. There are whole communes now (such as Bisseuil, or indeed the entire Sézannais and Coteaux du Petit Morin), which were not widely planted in Larmat’s time. “They are fantastic. beautiful maps”, cartographer Steve De Long explains. “But the accuracy is not really there. We've taken the maps and overlaid them with different projections, and everything's sort of…off.”
It is also a little difficult to get a sense of the lay of the land from Larmat, thanks to the old-fashioned way of defining contours. “It was the last time he used hachure - after Champagne it was all done with [more modern] contour lines”, De Long continues. The beauty of the maps, in other words, dulls a little when you try and get down into the detail.
Comparing Le Mesnil-sur-Oger in Curtis and De Long’s map (left) with Larmat and the hachure method (right)
You can forgive Larmat for a little fluidity with the lines, sitting there as he was with pen and paper, shaping the landscape by eye. Curtis and De Long, however, were able to tool up with with modern satellite imagery, ground-level imagery, altitude and contour data and a wealth of other online information. Sounds easy, then?
You can see where the vines are this way - but you can’t tell what they are called. That, problematically, is most of the point.
In France, vineyards in the classic regions have lieu-dits, or given names, as Curtis, author of Vintage Champagne 1899-2019, explains; “Pretty much all of France has lieu-dits - it's a thing that's existed since Napoleonic time so that they could collect taxes”. The term lieu-dit seems to be understood as a ‘special’ name given to a ‘special’ plot, but the truth is that you have to call a vineyard something, no matter how good it is. Lieu-dits don’t usually belong to one grower. In fact, any one lieu-dit can be worked by a large cast of growers selling grapes, growers making their own champagne or indeed houses. They’re the names we’re increasingly seeing on single plot champagnes, too.
After Curtis and De Long map a village, they have to check with the growers on the ground that everything is in the right place. There could be a few (sensitive) noses out of joint if mistakes are made. It's not easy, though: “I’ve been trying to find someone in the Vitryat who can do this, but I’ve come up blank”, Curtis says with a little frustration (the Vitryat is a quiet part of Champagne near Châlons-en-Champagne where much of the Chardonnay gets sold to houses, so there aren’t many grower-producers to consult). The project has taken plenty of legwork from its authors, then, this process of verification almost as arduous as the laying out of the maps in the first place.
Steve De Long (l) and Charles Curtis MW
One of the joys of looking at maps of Burgundy, Barolo or Piedmont is seeing not only where the famous villages are, but identifying the famous vineyards within them. Champagne has its system of Grand and Premier Crus, but as I wrote about in this piece for Sip!, they’re based around entire villages, not individual sites. Entire villages can have very good - and decidedly average - plots, so the entire system could easily be accused of being conveniently imprecise.
“It is a lot of BS right now because you can get terrible, terrible wines from Grand Crus!”, points out De Long with a welcome dash of honesty. “There's no appetite to change it”. Curtis is wary of taking an adjudicating role, though. “I would never say in the narrative ‘this section of vineyard doesn't warrant Grand Cru status’, or something like that. I think if people read between the lines they will know that there's a variation in quality within villages. But the interesting thing that I've learned over the course of doing this is that it's not always the sites that you think it's going to be that are the best”.
Indeed Curtis describes a ‘WTF’ moment in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. the Grand Cru village in the heart of the Côte des Blancs. The village’s most famous lieu-dit, Chétillon, is an almost totally-unremarkable, fairly flat-looking site dissected by the D9 at D10 roads below (you can spot it in the map examples above). It’s easy to assume the pretty, undulating hillside plots (and indeed the fabled Burgundian ‘mid-slopes’) are going to be the most famous plots, but the new maps promise to show us how some of Champagne’s top sites really lie in the landscape.
Champagne grower Hélène Beaugrand in on the South-facing slopes of Montgueux
So far the region-wide map and the Côte des Blancs are complete and on sale. They come accompanied with a ‘Field Guide’ to each village’s terroir, illuminating the sort of soil and microclimate information impossible to convey on the maps themselves. The Montagne de Reims is next, completed in a similar level of detail. The rest will follow, including new detail in the Sézanne and Petit Morin that was never mapped by Larmat.
Montgueux, the fascinating hilltop island of Chardonnay near Troyes in the South, sees some serious attention too, not least because this part of Champagne is a focal point for the region's expansion plans (if they ever materialise). I sense it’s somewhere close to Curtis’s heart: “It turns out that there are 11 villages approved for expansion around Montgueux. So I'm just charging ahead like a bull in a china shop to posit the name ‘Coteaux de Troyes’!”, he says. It has a ring to it, no doubt.
The homage to Larmat is clear in the autumnal colouring and clean, clear typefaces of De Long and Curtis’ maps. Champagne will never be Burgundy. But with more and more single parcel wines arriving on our shelves, the ability to place them (and, with the help of a field guide, understand the sites they come from) is a welcome reinforcement to Champagne’s new terroir agenda.
Buy the regional map in the UK at Wineware LTD
De Long Wine Maps (USA) including all digital maps and field guides
In Champagne: at Grands Champagnes in Reims
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