Elixir of celebrations and sporting triumphs — think of the obligatory bottle-shaking and foam-spewing of Formula One victory parties and World Series game seven — Champagne is the most ruthlessly branded of all wines, promoted as the drink of happiness or, as Napoleon famously noted, the potion of consolation in defeat. Champagne is instantly recognizable in every corner of the planet. The Chinese love it. Americans pay millions for it. Weddings, anniversaries, boat launches, and New Year's Eve are unthinkable without it.
It's remarkable that a single viticultural area in an unremarkable corner of northeast France (notable only for the World War I battlefields of the Marne) should have turned itself into the monopolizing center of such a monumental brand. The makers of Champagne pour out hundreds of millions of liters of bubbly each year under nearly 5,000 different names, but the 15 big houses account for about 70 percent of total production, and their brand names — or marques — are household ones: Mumm, Veuve Clicquot, Dom Pérignon, Bollinger, Moët & Chandon, Pol Roger. Oddly, there is just one AOC for this large region of 34,000 hectares. (Burgundy's Côte d'Or, by contrast, has 110 separate appellations for 8,450 hectares.) This means that terroiris de-emphasized and mass production encouraged—a curious inversion of everything we understand about the making of great wine. But a thirsty world needs a lot of Champagne, and few of its consumers can tell one from another.
The ironies here are obvious. The big houses of Champagne have defended their brand identification with extraordinary tenacity: Ever since the Madrid Agreement of 1891, only a bubbly from this region can legally call itself Champagne. Yet the drink is largely anonymous and bland, without much character. Champagne may be instantly recognizable as a brand, but the wines themselves are rarely distinctive. Sugary and nose-bitingly fizzy, most so-called top Champagnes taste like glorified soda pop.
As you drive through Champagne, north from Vertus toward Épernay, you become aware that the big houses are, in fact, only a tiny fraction of the total number of Champagne producers. In dozy hamlets like Oger, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Cramant, and Cuis, you pass hundreds of operations with names you have likely never heard of: Gaston Chiquet, Pierre Peters, Marc Hebrart, Milan, Gimonnet Pierre. About 3,000 small producers churn out the remaining 30 percent of Champagne, and many wine lovers are increasingly claiming they embody the real soul of the Champagne AOC. Perhaps its future, too.
In Vertus itself, an affluent village of clipped trees and somnambulant lanes ringed by Champagne warehouses, one of the small producers that has made a name for itself in the United States is Guy Larmandier. Guy himself is now dead, but the winery is still run by his widow, Colette, and her son François. The Larmandiers hold 7.8 hectares of vineyards, including 3.4 in Cramant, a few miles to the north and near to those of Moët & Chandon. But if you were to taste a Larmandier side by side with a Moët, the difference would be astonishing. Where the Moët would taste green and thin, the Larmandier would offer up a rich, biscuity depth and a crisp acid. As I tasted their Cramant Grand Cru ($54, madrose.com), Colette was reluctant to criticize the big houses. But when I admired the racy qualities of their small-batch Champagne — only around 70,000 bottles are produced every year, compared with untold millions from Moët — she seemed to understand exactly what a Moët or a Mumm lacks by comparison: depth.
