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
In good years, those wines produced in excess of the cap set for each harvest are set aside for release in the event of a future harvest shortfall. Known as the “inter-professional Champagne wine reserve”, these reserve stocks represent a particularly ingenious solution to the problem of meeting market demand in good and bad years alike, with no loss of quality.
The Mumm family are descendants of the German nobility and have been growing vines since the 18th century. In 1852, Georges Hermann Mumm, son of one of the founders, took the reins of the company and named it after himself, G H Mumm. In 1876 he also came up with the idea of decorating the bottles with the distinctive red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest civilian award. The House now belongs to the Pernod-Ricard Group.
The Champagne Houses
