Silent hands in the ancient wine cellar
In the cooling da tunnel in Reims (France) of Maison Ruinart - the oldest Champagne house in the region - Mr. Pablo Lopez turned on a machete, lit a white candle and brought a bottle of wine lying on a wooden table close to the bottom. The candle lights splash through a thick layer of glass, revealing the small particles of sediment floating in the light yellow wine and the waves.
Lopez is a remueur - an artisan who performs remuage, the process of rotating and shaking each Champagne bottle by hand to treat the residue layer, collecting it towards the bottle neck. That seemingly small job is the decisive step in the smoothness and purity of the world-famous explosive line.
He slightly tilted the bottle, shaking it with an almost invisible movement. You have to really understand how to read wine, Lopez said, his eyes not leaving the circle at the bottom of the bottle. If I dont feel good, I will start over. No bottle was moved to the next step when I was not satisfied.
30 years in the wine industry, but he still does not dare to claim to be an expert. Each grape crop year, each batch of wine, each weather condition creates a wine with its own "personality", forcing artisans to start over as beginners.
In the Champagne region of more than 340km2, where more than 270 million bottles are produced each year, people like Lopez have become a rare thing. The whole region currently has less than a dozen remueur working in major Champagne wine producers such as Krug, Ruinart, Pol Roger or Bollinger.
Most of the remuage process is now done by a type of machine called gyro-palette: rotating hundreds of bottles at the same time, saving human resources, time and costs. But it is that convenience that puts remueur - once the heart of Champagne - at risk of disappearing.
In Bollinger's basement in Ay-Champagne village, Florent Michel still rotates tens of thousands of bottles a day for famous wine rations such as La Grande Annee or Vieilles Vignes Francaises. For Michel, each bottle is an individual. The winemaker must listen to a very small change when the fine residue layer, called leger, moves - to decide to rotate a quarter, an eighth or anighth of sixteenth in a row.
Raphael Joyon of Maison Krug likes to play classical music at work. He said that wine has its own rhythm and artisans must feel that melody. Olivier Krug - 6th generation Director of Maison Krug - compared the wine rotation movement to "a ceremony, with very unique and emotional energy".
These veteran artisans all learn the profession in a generational style - observing, imitating, then gradually feeling things that books cannot teach: The feeling of a bottle of wine, the sound of debris touching the wrists, the vibration is very small.
What is the position for the craft when machinery takes the throne?
Hand-wrecked wine rotation - recorded since 188 by Veuve Clicquot - was once a mandatory step for Champagne to achieve perfect smoothness. But everything changed when gyro-palette machines appeared on the market around the early 21st century and quickly became popular in the Champagne region.
At large manufacturers, machines have almost completely replaced human resources. The very real reason: A remueur cannot rotate 60,000 bottles per day. This job puts great pressure on the shoulders, wrists, spine - and requires prolonged concentration in cold, dark, and humid environments.
Not only large wineries, but also mid-sized wineries such as Laurent-Perrier have to switch to using machines. Its impossible to force an artisan to work at such an intensity, said wine expert Constance Delaire. They only maintain two remueur to turn around rare wine lines such as Grand Siecle Les Reserves.
Author Peter Liem of the book "Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroirs" - even affirmed: "There is almost no difference in quality between hand-turning and machine-turning".
But there is one thing that machines cannot create a story.
Although most of today's Champagne is due to rotors, manufacturers are still very proud to have the words "riddled by hand" on the label or technical document. still emphasizing this detail as a heritage, wine consultants at restaurants. Consumers love handicrafts, and Champagne still wants to keep that soul for the most special wine lines.
Some small manufacturers continue to struggle due to low output. Traditional philosopbers such as Jacques Selosse consider the process of rotating wine by hand as the core spirit. As for large wineries, they maintain their artisans - not because they need them, but because Champagne needs them.
When stepping down the steep steps leading to the land of Champagne, people can hear the sound of seeped rocks, the sound of small drops of water, and somewhere the sound of a lightly rotated wine bottle - the sound that only human hands create.
At Champagne Lallier, barber manager Dominique Demarville has asked all new employees to learn to rotate, even though they will use machines for most of their time. If you dont understand the classic method, you will lose the most important feeling: How to read wine scrap.
At Bollinger, Florent Michel is training Olivier Lannez - a long-time trainee - to follow his career. A year-long course: Observe the first bottles, mark each movement of waste with pollen, record the smallest changes as a diary. To be a remueur, the first thing is to be patient, Michel said.
When asked why she wanted to follow this profession, Lannez shared: "To keep this profession from getting lost".
Michel was calmer. He looked at the old wooden wine prices, the wine bottles were lying still as if they were wintering, then said: "If there is anything that makes the wine better quality, we will do it. For the most special bottles, rotating your arms is always the best thing.
He paused for a few moments, as if he wanted to listen to the familiar sound of his whole life, then added: "There is something special about knowing that my hands still hold a nearly forgotten profession. And that Champagne, in the most realistic way, still needs people.
