Here is the biggest shock I have learned about the Champagne region… yields are downright HUGE. I mean we are talking the kinds of yields reserved for $10 Chardonnay wine from Monterey. I am wondering if these number are really right?
According to wine writer Tom Stevenson, the entire region averaged 21,700 kilos of fruit per hectare in 2004. That is a massive 9 tons per acre. Holy smokes! That means they are hanging at minimum, two clusters per shoot. And the LOWEST kilos per hectare the last 15 years was 18,800 kilos per hectare in 2001, which is still… 7+ tons per acre.
I ran the number for Vilmart, which grows 100% all its own fruit. Assuming their own numbers are correct, they produce 8300 cases per year off 28 acres, which they farm themselves. Assuming they use only the first 120 gallons per ton, which they claim, and is required by the region… that equals 74,700 liters to produce 8300 cases. Assuming they actually get 150 gallons per ton in total, which is the average for all grapes everywhere (they just don’t use it all,) their grapes have 93,375 potential liters. Running the numbers out, this figures out to… 5.87 tons per acre.
8300 cases of 28 acres is a downright huge yield, no matter what the planting density.
I find this fascinating. My guess is that since they are picking at 19-20 brix, the dilution by having such large yields for flavor is simply not a factor. Obviously, if they were making still wine, the result would be dreadful.
But it makes me wonder… what would happen to flavor is they cut yields in half???
Do you think that the wines would be better with lower yields in Champagne? Or would all the extra energy per cluster just send the brix up, earlier?
Could the primary advantage of older Chablis vineyards be simply the FORCED reduction in yields due to the lower natural production of old vines? What if Chablis just cut its yields? Would quality improve?
Roy,
It depends on what “quality” means. I think Champagne could be more full bodied (think Krug) at lower yields but in general it is desirable for Champagne to have a more neutral varietal character.
Similarly, I am not sure we are all looking for a bigger Chablis and white wine grapes are much less sensitive to high yields.
Careful, 2004 was the highest yielding vintage that I know of (and one of the highest ever). 2004 was an basically a double vintage yield due to the vines being so stressed and damaged in 2003. While Champagne yields are higher than Burgundy and often are in the 10-14,000 kg/ha range, 2004 was not the norm. In fact in 2004, I had some growers tell me that they yielded close to 40,000 kg/ha. Just remember that you can only use the yield declared by the CIVC so even if you grow 20,000 kg/ha, you have to sort and pick to only use the declared amount which may be 12 kg/ha. In other words, even if you yielded that much fruit in 2014, you couldn’t use it all and hopefully used selection to improve what you used.
Also, low yields don’t necessarily equal better Champagne. Lots of folks have tried it and with the two fermentations, things don’t always work so well. You can’t equate it to a still wine.
* Edited per discussion below as I was leaving off the 1,000s in the yield numbers.
Less about about tons per acre and more about pounds per vine. I know little about how much fruit the varieties in Champagne naturally set though. Vine density is always a major function of yield and something to take into consideration. Some would be surprised how much fruit some prestigious Napa producers are pulling per acre.
I can’t recall where I got this data, but my understanding is that Moet makes more than 1 million cases of DP in the years it’s made. Pretty hefty numbers for a “luxury cuvee”.
Here is the bad news… even if legally they can’t use it all, quality drops above certain yields. Ask any Burgundian. You may not use it all, but too much yield dilutes the quality of everything, including what you use.
From my POV, larger per acre yields, up to a point, means reaching brix target later. Which means ripening fruit in cooler temps. Under these conditions, we get better ripeness at the low brix. Particularly with the PN, large, juicy grapes with poor/low color in the skins are what we want. Sounds strange I know.
It is kg/ha. Champagne yields are normally calculated by grape weights at picking per hectare.
Roy,
Yes, the quality drops as the yield excessively rises, but it isn’t quite as simple as saying high yield bad, low yield good. 2004 is a beautiful vintage for Chardonnay in the Cote des Blancs and the yields were massive. The grapes/wines were still far better overall than most far lower yielding years. I’m not saying that super high yields are good, but numbers are just numbers; they alone don’t equal good wine.
Yields are also calculated as an average so you have a mix of low and high yielding vines. In some cases higher yielding vines have the similar quality at low and high yields so you shoot high. Where the wines are clearly better at lower yields, you shoot low or that is what the vines give you.
Champagne is very different from Burgundy and what works yield-wise in Burgundy and other areas does not necessarily work well in Champagne. You want a different character in a still wine that is going to become Champagne than what you want for a still wine that is going to stay a still wine.
Make Champagne yields similar to Burgundy and you will decrease the quality of a lot of (probably most) Champagne.
John Danza,
DP is not 1 million cases. It isn’t even 500,000 cases. At most, it reaches 5,000,000 bottles or a little over 400,000 cases and that is probably a maximum (right now).
I think this is near the mark. Here in Cali where sparkling guys try not to pick in July, a bigger crop helps with hang time. We pick quite a bit of sparkling stuff and Chard can run 6-8 tons/acre and Pinot can be the same.
Whoops, sorry. I was thinking in 1,000s and writing in 1’s. I meant 40,000 kg/ha not 40 kg/ha. Thanks for pointing this out. I often engage in conversations about how many 1,000s of kg/ha so you end up saying 10, 12, 16, etc… I just wasn’t thinking when writing. My bad and apologies.
I think this could be a good start to a thread that details how quality is not absolutely correlated to vine yield. But vine balance is the real question, always, and crop levels in Champagne probably flirt with the extremity of that. But remember that sparkling wine is picked more by pH then by sugar, and the sugar needed is quite a bit lower then most regions producing still wine- 2.9- 3.0 pH and 17 to 19 brix by the commonly used American sugar equivalent. Being a cool region Chard and Pinot probably don’t respirate acidity at the same rate of most new world sites. Also, Champagne, as a region was facing global shortage and high demand.
That said, it is also worth noting that yields in Champagne, even on “Grand Cru” sites are pretty remarkably high and are not regulated like other high quality regions in France. This, along with responsible farming, is the greatest driving impulse behind why the wines of Selosse and his pantheon of disciples- Alexandre Chartogne, Olivier Collin, Cedric Bouchard, Jerome Prevost, etc. are so important. They take a Burgundian approach to lieux-dit or parcel, vine age, and yield and are making great wines that happen to sparkle. And this is not say that there are not others- Lahaye, Vilmart, Georges Laval and many other spring to mind. My guess is that they, like other top producers, value vine health and balance in the context of vintage much like the best producers in all regions across the world do.
And Dom Perignon is the wonder of the winemaking world. That the quality can be so high for a wine of such production- if even “only” 300,000 cases (aka, somewhere around 5900 tons of fruit if one goes on the supposition that only vin claire is used (around 110 gallons per ton) is staggering.
Most still aren’t anywhere near the yields of similar quality Burgundies. In a year when many producers are going to see 11-12,000 kg/ha, you might see the names you mention be at 8-10,000 kg/ha. Some also report yields based on what they pick and not what they grew so that can also confuse things. I’m not saying that low yields don’t matter and you make a good point on demand, but I’ve had talks with a number of winemakers who pull up top quality low yielding vineyards because the quality was the same at 10,000 kg/ha as it is below that number so at some point, it makes sense to uproot and start over.
Roederer has done a lot of experiments with yield and the main conclusion is that excessive is not good in either direction and eventually as you try to approach a typical top Burgundy yield, you reach a point where quality doesn’t improve or starts to decrease.
Yield does matter, but I think that there are far more gains to be made in Champagne (from quality producers) by paying attention to pressing and how much you keep in the true cuvee vs. tailles and other parts that might still be considered cuvee. For a long time, pretty much everyone with an automated machine pressed using the same program selection from the CIVC. Now that folks are varying things, it is more interesting. Of course, the old style manual Coquards are still working well too.
Hey Brad- I totally agree on almost all of this, and I think the correlation between low yield and quality is dramatically overplayed (I would argue that we get better quality from some Syrah vineyards we crop at 4 tpa then wineries in the same blocks who crop at 2 tpa). Also, when making sparkling wine the conversation is not about color, alcohol, etc. it has its own set of factors that dictate quality- acidity, more then sugar, is key. Press cuts (and type of press) are definitely important, but then again we have found that they are often informed by skin thickness, phenolic content, etc. which are dictated by farming decisions, cropping levels, vine age, and the stylistic proclivities of a certain site.
The only thing I tend to get scared about with the yield argument is when producers claim the quality is the same at higher levels then lower. I think that could very well be the case but I have also witnessed that claim being made by many people in California looking for an excuse to pull out an old vineyard because it is not cropping like it once did- even when a winemaker that they might not want to listen to, thinks the exact opposite.
We have never gotten that high, but our season is a tad cooler and often shorter on both ends. Plus, most grapes are not farmed on very fertile soils. I’d like to see 4.5-6 tons per acre here for our brut.
Along the same lines, some of our best white wines have been made in years with big crops. An example is Arneis at 5-6 tons per acre. Depending on the canopy, it can allow for more maturity at lower brix.
Good point on the older vineyards and yield. Most of my comments were based on the vineyards yielding similar qualities at let’s say 35 years of age and a 10,000 kg/ha yield and at 55 years of age and a 6,000 kg/ha yield. Once they are uprooted and replanted, things obviously change. The hope is that they come back as good or better. As a whole, Champagne doesn’t really have that many really old vineyards so many of the current vineyards being replanted were "born in the 60s and 70s and went through a lot of crap so that also comes into play with the “let’s start over” decision. You also have the case where even the top vineyards in Champagne that see separate parcel bottling are also used in blends so you have business reasons take hold.
As for the pressing - skin thickness, phenolics, etc… absolutely come into play - site and vintage/growing season have a great affect on this, but when you can’t/don’t adjust your pressing for this, it can be bad. What I was shocked to recently learn is that until recently most folks just pressed withe a program from the CIVC that was never optimized for any of this - it was a just a program that worked well for an average, typical harvest. A lot of potentially great wines have been blunted and somewhat ruined by things like this. Pinot heavy wines from 1996 are a great example. Even today, most producers work with a program that optimizes for nothing.