Champagne’s bumper crop puts a smile on everyone’s face

ine weather and smiles all round are bringing warmth to harvesting across the vineyards of Champagne as picking got into full swing at the beginning of September. The 2022 vintage is both ripe and sun-kissed, producing generous yields across-the-board and providing a good counterpoint to the small 2021 crop, badly affected by weather conditions that led to the spread of fungal diseases. “In 2021, if someone had asked me what a perfect year would look like, I would have imagined 2022”, says Damien Champy, general secretary of the Champagne winegrowers’ organisation SGV. As a winegrower in the Sézannais area and chairman of the Le Brun de Neuville co-operative winery, Champy points out that Champagne has once again gone from a challenging year to a generous vintage, just like in 2018 and 2019.

One of the unique features of this year’s vintage is that the skins are thick and fairly hard to press. With a longer settling time, the pre-fermentation stages have forced producers to slow down the pace of harvesting to allow the presses time to process the volumes. “It's not a problem: I'd rather there were no crates available than not have enough grapes, as in 2021”, points out Vincent Jourdan, chairman of the Federation of Champagne Wine Co-operatives. Farming vines at the base of the Montagne de Reims, the chairman of the Sermiers winery reports that his co-operative actually underestimated the harvest: “It will be 20 to 30% higher than forecast”, due primarily to the 15 mm of rain on Thursday 18 August. “It's not water, it's gold!” Volumes are not the only nice surprise – feedback on the quality of the must is also positive.