You see, Champagne is a region in the northern part of France and there the weather isn’t reliable enough, or warm enough, to produce a great harvest every year and champagne makers quickly realised that if they made champagne using the grapes harvested in one single year they’d get some very up and down results: one year great, the next year awful – no consistency at all and what does a wine drinker want? Yes, consistent reliable quality every year, in every bottle.
So what did the champagne makers do?
Well they figured out that if they put aside some wine from good years and keep it in reserve, they can bring it out in subsequent years, when the harvest is not so good, and by blending the older wine with the more recent wine they can always get the same consistently high quality.
So that’s what they do; they blend together wines from several different years’ harvest and because they do this they can’t possibly put one single date on the label and they can’t say that the champagne is from one particular vintage.
To get ’round this they came up with the term non-vintage ( nv for short ) to describe what’s in the bottle.
This way you don’t need to worry about the date, the champagne will always taste pretty much the same from one year to the next. So when you find a brand that you like, you can stock with it year-in, year-out knowing that the quality will not alter. Unless of course you want to try other brands, or even vintage champagne.
Yep, you do get vintage champagne too and this is made using the grapes from just one year’s harvest, but that’s a topic for another time.
