Champagne holds its breath until the Saints de Glace (Ice Saints) are safely past (11, 12, 13 May), dreading a spring freeze that might destroy the future harvest’s fruitful buds.
Desuckering removes the non-fruitful buds (suckers or gourmands). Any unwanted growth is removed to optimise sugar concentration and encourage good sap flow.
The Champagne month by month
Harvesting in Champagne is an entirely manual process, selecting whole, undamaged clusters that must remain that way right up to the point of pressing. This is essential to avoid staining the musts, bearing in mind that 70% of Champagne wines are made from black grapes.
The actual start of picking varies with each producer but cannot commence before the date fixed by the Comité Champagne on the basis of reference values established for each vine parcel and grape variety, using the hundreds of thousands of samples collected by the"Réseau Matu"(Ripening Observation Network).
In 1858 widow Louise Pommery stepped into her dead husband’s shoes and came up with two brilliant ideas. The first was the construction of the neo-gothic, Elizabethan-style estate that is now the company Head Office. The second was the launch of the first Brut Champagne – hitherto all Champagne wines were sweet. The House is now part of the Vranken-Pommery Monopole group.
The Champagne Houses
