WHEN YOU DRINK YOUR CHAMPAGNE FOR NEW YEAR'S…Give a toast to the remarkable geographic, geologic, cl

WHEN YOU DRINK YOUR CHAMPAGNE FOR NEW YEAR'S…Give a toast to the remarkable geographic, geologic, climatic and soil conditions without which your champagne would be … flat.Champagne, the province where the bubbly was born. The “father” of the bubbly was Dom Perignom, a monk actually, who in the 17th century put together the knowledge-base required to make a good wine with the special fermentation, special mixture of grapes, and brilliant addition of sugar to create sparkling wine. The sugar is essential for dissolving the carbonate gas in the wine, and once this gas is in it, the wine needs something special to hold the fizz inside the bottle, so he apparently also invented using a cork as a bottle stopper.The Earth of Champagne… Why is it so special?–At the 49th parallel, this is one of the most northern of the world’s major wine producing areas. This gives it an advantage of longer days in the summer when the sun is all important to the vine.–The average rainfall is about 50 cm, ooh la la, perfect!–The average temperature, even in the summer, is a tad low at 18C in July. However, only at such cooler temperatures are high acidic levels reached in a grape, and this acidity makes for a perfect sparkling wine.–The forests in the area are an essential part of the wine environment, stabilizing temperatures and soil moisture, prolonging the ripening season despite what would be “too cold”. –The geology… oh, you were expecting I’d get into the geology of the province, weren’t you?The bedrock of the wine district is chalk. Chalk is a limestone sediment made of the remains of the tiniest of oceanic microfossils, highly compressed – after all, you can write on a blackboard with it. At Champagne, the chalk was deposited in the Cretaceous, in a tropical sea closer to the equator than present day France, and apparently a lot of small squid-like creatures called belemnites also were incorporated into the deposits. With the incessant drifting of tectonic plates, the region slowly moved towards the north, then, about 30 million years ago, was uplifted to surface, fracturing the solid chalk into soil-friendly sizes, then again about 11 million years ago when the chalks were raised to form the welcoming landscape that would make the wine country. The convergence of the weather conditions with these uplifts created a two-tier chalks geology: the substrata is solid chalk, some of which provides the optimal settings for wine cellars, while the surface is made of the tectonically and erosionally broken rubble of chalk, especially those belemnite fossils, that apparently work their way up through the chalk like a splinter from your finger.These chalky soils are heaven on earth for the grapes of Champagne: their light color is said to reflect much of the too-hot sun in the summer, while retaining the heat in the winter: their ability to retain moisture in fragments such as those in the belemnite fossil rubble is essential, while being broken-up they drain excess waters easily. And their chemistry – we’ve done this before, I think: calcium carbonate plus acidic water (or wine) reacts to release carbon dioxide: Voila! The Bubbly!New Years’s Eve is not the time to debate whether the wines of Champagne really are the most superb on Earth: surely you have some favorites from California, from New Zealand, from Crete and Santorini, and there’s a bubbly from Rhodes that’s, well, truly decadent. And I hope you’ve had the opportunity to taste wines from all over the earth and discover that yes, there does seem to be a distinct “taste” that varies with the lands that produce the wine. Indeed, the extraordinary geology of wine producing areas has developed into a new specialty field over the last few decades.Wine and Champagne and “bubblies” in particular are the very flavor of the Earth that produces them.Cheers! and Happy New Year!Annie R.The photo was downloaded from: http://www.russellgehlingwines.com.au/champagne-france-c-27.html and it is available as a screen saver from: http://m.wallpapers-catalog.com/panoramic-view-of-vineyards-champagne-france-wallpapers.1600x1200.download.htmlIf you haven’t been sipping too much of that sparkling wine allready, try reading: http://suite101.com/article/the-origin-of-chalk-in-the-champagne-region-a130806#ixzz2GXtWShjYhttp://www.dartblog.com/data/2010/11/009215.phphttp://www.partnerswine.com/#!champagne-france/co30https://www.champagnegallery.com.au/champagne-science/viticulture/soil—the-magic-of-chalk/http://bit.ly/1kuxzbp -- source link

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