The Winemaker's Wife(77)
“I’m all right,” she said. “I apologize.”
“Grandma Edith, do you need to leave?” Liv whispered. “We can go outside, or—”
“No!” Grandma Edith’s rebuke was sharp, and she glanced at Julien before softening. “No. I need to hear this.” She pointed to René. “Vous pouvez continuer, young man.”
“Merci, d’accord,” René replied before turning back to the group. “So, Michel Chauveau took over the house after that. Now, I will continue my story in the cellars, if you will follow me.”
René turned and began to walk away, and Liv moved again to Grandma Edith’s side to support her as they followed him. The older woman was shaking, and Liv exchanged concerned glances with Julien. “Are you sure you’re all right, Grandma Edith?” she asked.
“Stop treating me like a child,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly fine.”
René led the group to a door against the back wall of the main room. “Just before the Nazis came to Champagne during World War II, Michel Chauveau had the foresight to conceal this entrance with an enormous armoire. That way, Monsieur Chauveau was able to come and go unobserved if he needed to, simply by moving the furniture. Today we have widened the entrance to make it more accessible. The stairs are still a bit tricky, though, so if anyone needs assistance . . .” His gaze drifted to Grandma Edith.
“I am perfectly comfortable on my own, thank you very much,” she said icily.
René shrugged and led the group down a set of winding stone steps into what looked like a vast network of halls underneath the earth. As they descended, the air grew colder. “Because these cellars are dug into the chalk beneath the earth, the temperature down here is very constant. Here in these caves, regardless of the season, they are a steady ten degrees Celsius, which is about fifty degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans. They were installed over the course of three decades during the second half of the nineteenth century, because the owner at the time, Pierre Chauveau, was obsessed with the success of the larger champagne houses in the nearby city of Reims. Many of those houses stored their wines in underground crayères, which is a French term for chalk quarries. These quarries had been constructed by the Romans beginning around AD 300, but not for winemaking; they only wanted to take the chalk from the earth to use it for buildings, which left Reims with many, many cold tunnels beneath the earth. In Ville-Dommange, there were no such crayères, so Pierre Chauveau—fixated on competing with the larger houses—endeavored to make his own. Thankfully, he died before he could completely bankrupt the family, and his son, Charles Chauveau, who took over upon his father’s death in 1902, was able to salvage the champagne house and begin making it into something extraordinary.”
All around, unlabeled bottles rested on their sides on giant wooden scaffolding, and in one of the caves, barrels sat in neat, silent stacks. “Unlike some of the larger houses, most of our work is still done by hand, including the riddling of our bottles,” René said as they walked. “Three or four months before the wine is to be released, there is a worker, a master riddler, who comes down here to turn the bottles, just an eighth of a turn each day, to dislodge the sediment that has collected as the wine ages. Here, on the bottles tilted downward, you can see the yeast cells and particles collecting in the neck. Soon these bottles will all be positioned fully neck down, and then comes disgorgement, when the bottles will be immersed in a very cold solution to freeze the sediment, opened by a machine, the sediment popped out, and the remainder filled with a mixture called dosage, a blend of sugar and reserve wine. This is the stage that determines how sweet the champagne will be. At Chauveau, we tend toward wines that are less sweet, so the flavor really shines through. Most of our portfolio is brut or extra brut, which means that it contains less than twelve grams per liter of residual sugar, or less than a half teaspoon per five-ounce glass.”
René led them deeper into the ancient tunnels, which were illuminated by overhead lights and lamps at five-yard intervals, and Liv found herself thinking about the secrets these chalk walls must hold. The scent of the air reminded her of the basement of the house she’d lived in with her mother just outside Boston when she was twelve; it smelled like stone, dirt, and cold.
Finally, at the end of a twisting hall, René took a sharp right into a small cave that was completely empty. He waited for the group to filter in. Grandma Edith was the last to round the corner, and as she did, she inhaled sharply.
“What is it?” Liv whispered, and Grandma Edith shook her head, but Liv could see that the color had drained from her face.
“This is a very interesting place,” René said, putting a hand on one of the stone walls. “It looks like just an ordinary cave, right? But during the war, this cave contained a small room that was hidden behind a brick wall, built by Michel Chauveau.”
“What’d he use it for?” asked the tourist in the leggings as her husband pulled out his iPhone and began snapping pictures.
René’s eyes twinkled. “Résistance.”
“I thought this was supposed to be an English tour,” the woman grumbled. “What’s that mean?”
René cleared his throat. “Resistance,” he said, making the word sound as American as possible, and the tourist nodded, apparently satisfied. “In other words, he was one of the résistants—ordinary people fighting against the Nazis—who operated here in the Champagne region. Now we don’t know anything definitively, but it is said that not only did Michel Chauveau hide munitions here, he hid refugees.”