COLUMN ONE - Champagne Isn’t Feeling So Bubbly - Suddenly, everyone is drinking the stuff. But in France’s famous wine region, success has brought grape shortages and fears life will never be the same.

MESNIL-SUR-OGER, France — 

The world is in a sorry state. There is not enough Champagne to go around.

As a result, the land around this hillside village in the heart of French Champagne country is so valuable for growing grapes that few people can afford a plot to build a new house. Children of the townspeople move away to the wheat- and corn-growing valleys, where the land is 100 times cheaper, to start their families.

The Chardonnay grapes grown here fetch more than $2 a pound in the fields. In a good year like this one, a single acre of land will produce grapes worth $20,000. No wonder many villagers have given up their private gardens to plant grape vines.

Prominent local growers like the mayor, Andre Jacquart, even gaze at the tiny village cemetery with covetous eyes. An outrageous idea, perhaps, but why not plant some vines between the tombstones?

“We have the most valuable cemetery in the world,” Jacquart quipped recently during a meeting with other growers at city hall. Hardly anyone laughed.

“Poor Champagne!” Roger Duval, president of the Union of Champagne Houses, told his colleagues at a Sept. 1 meeting in Epernay, “she will never be as rich as this year, and never so close to crashing on the rocks.”

People are looking everywhere for ways to solve the troubling grape shortage in Champagne country. In the midst of its greatest boom, many Champenois are worried about the future of their famous region, located 90 miles east of Paris in a rough triangle formed by the cities of Reims, Epernay and Chalons-sur-Marne.

The unprecedented prosperity of Mesnil-sur-Oger and other similar towns in the Champagne region is the result of an expanding French and international market for Champagne as well as for other sparkling wines. Demand for Champagne has increased by more than 75% since 1982, 20% in the past two years alone.

This year, Champagne producers are expected to sell a record 255 million bottles of their bubbly wine, 60% in France and 40% on the world market. Meanwhile, traditionally weak markets such as Japan have recently opened up. The Japanese, flush with a powerful currency, have doubled the size of their orders in the past six months.

The grape shortage is not the only looming problem: A 30-year contract between the region’s 15,000 growers and the 100 largest producers, the so-called Champagne Houses, that has governed the Champagne trade through its headiest years, is set to expire in December.

In light of recent structural changes in the industry, including the purchase of several Champagne houses by multinational corporations and the recent rise of powerful growers’ cooperatives, some fear a new contract will not be reached, thus sinking Champagne back into the anarchic free-market conditions that existed before World War II.

“I think it is equal to the problem we faced in 1895 when we had the attack of the phylloxera,” said Claude Taittinger, director of a large family-owned Champagne house that bears his name. Phylloxera was an infestation that arrived in the Champagne region at the turn of the century and destroyed nearly all the vines.

This time there is no plague, simply the increased demand; but that has put the region near the limit of its ability to produce grapes. The land designated for Champagne vineyards is restricted under a 1927 law and by the Institut National des Appellations, the organization which, though a mix of historical research and science, determines where grapes can be grown for the different name-wines of France. These appellation controlee restrictions, created to protect the French wine industry from imitators, are what gives such great value to the land around villages like Mesnil-sur-Oger, where even the cemetery is approved territory.

Currently, there are approximately 69,000 acres of vineyards growing Champagne grapes. Experts estimate that possibly 5,000 more acres could be cultivated and still conform to the legal restrictions. However, this would only increase the yield of the region to 270 million bottles, not enough to keep pace with an annual growth in demand of nearly 10%.

The expanding demand has put enormous pressure on the tightly controlled region. Many small growers who traditionally sold to the big Champagne houses with familiar names--Moet & Chandon, Mumm and Laurent Perrier, for example--have chosen instead to bottle their own grapes or sell them to large cooperatives that offer a higher price. Dozens of new middle-sized Champagne brands have entered the market through large cooperatives, which ferment grapes in huge 100,000-gallon tanks instead of the oak casts of the traditional Champagne houses. Some of these brands are sold in French supermarkets for as little as $7 a bottle.

The largest cooperative in the region, the Centre Viticole Champenois of Chouilly, was created from scratch in 1971 but already accounts for 5% of all the Champagne sold in the world. Because of his growing influence over the Champagne grape supply, Centre Viticole Director General Jean-Pierre Daraut has been accused of creating a “Champagne OPEC” with himself as the “Emir of Champagne.”

“In the old days,” said Daraut, in an interview in the office of his sprawling new Champagne complex on a hill overlooking Epernay, “Champagne was a product of high luxury. Now it is a product of great comfort, accessible to more people. Champagne has been democratized.”

As a result of this democratization, big luxury houses such as Moet & Chandon, have not been able to buy enough grapes to meet their orders. In a move that shocked the Champagne Establishment, once the nearly private playground of 20 prominent families, one of Moet’s high quality brands, Mercier, recently signed an agreement with Daraut’s cooperative to produce Champagne “assembled” in the cooperative’s gleaming stainless steel tanks.

Except at a handful of family companies with large vineyards of their own, the traditional method of producing Champagne is a thing of the past. At the Centre Viticole in the city of Chouilly, the oak casks in which the grapes first ferment are gone; so is the practice of aging the wine in bottles on wooden racks where the sediment is collected by “turning” each bottle every day with a skillful flick of the wrist by aproned men. Instead, there is the cold steel and giant robot-controlled trays that mechanically rotate and tip the bottles.

Because of the grape shortage, many companies have been forced to dip into their reserves to meet orders. The 1989 vintage is expected to be the second “deficit” year in a row for Champagne, in which the harvest has not been enough to meet orders.

Christian Bizot, president of the prestigious Bollinger Champagne house in Ay, an important Champagne town across the Marne River from Epernay, blames the supply crisis in the region to a combination of greed and overselling.

“There is a crisis because there is a shortage,” he said during a recent interview. “The shortage was created by overselling and sometimes selling far too cheaply.”

In part, he blames the overselling on the entry into the market of multinational corporations such as Seagram, a Canadian giant that owns the Mumm, Perrier-Jouet and Heidsieck Monopole luxury brands. They have introduced sophisticated marketing strategies to increase demand without paying attention to the limited supply, he says.

Like Claude Taittinger and other grandes marques Champagne producers, Bizot fears the image of Champagne has been “banalized” by the proliferation of cheaper labels sold in supermarkets.

“It took a long time to build the fascinating image of Champagne,” said Taittinger, “the concept of Champagne as a symbol of success. I, for one, think Champagne should be expensive. I think we should remain a symbol for luxury. I would prefer we sell 200 million bottles at a luxury price than 400 million at a lower price.”

The supply crisis in Champagne comes at a critical time in the region’s history, just as growers and major producers are negotiating a new contract to replace the 1959 agreement that guaranteed the prestigious Champagne houses a certain percentage of all the grapes grown in Champagne region, at prices regulated between the two groups.

Although some Champagne houses own as much as 80% of the vineyards they need to stay supplied with grapes, the majority are dependent on hundreds of small growers who may own only two or three acres of land. Without a contract, Champagne houses face the prospect of being outbid for their precious grape supply.

That explains why there was an emergency meeting of sorts the other day at the city hall in Mesnil-sur-Oger in the Cote de Blancs area south of Epernay.

Mayor Jacquart and five other growers in the town assembled around a large table covered with a green felt tablecloth, sipped a chilled Blanc de Blancs Champagne made by one of the men in the group, to discuss the contract with Axel Du Reau, a representative of the trade association, the Comite Interprofessionel du Vin de Champagne, that administers the contract.

“The long-term prosperity of the Champagne region is at stake,” Du Reau warned. “There is too much to lose to go back to a free market.”

Bizot, the elegant president of the Bollinger Champagne house, agreed later in a separate interview.

“We can’t let an area like Champagne, which is a limited area, just go wild. That would be very risky.”

BACKGROUND

What is Champagne? Purists say it must come from the French region of the same name. In fact, the word champagne comes from the Latin campania , or plain. The methode champenoise , which produces the bubbles, requires that the wine be fermented in the same bottle from which it is later served. In theory, any wine can be so treated. But not all such wine is Champagne.