Champagne Week 2017 – a dark star

Champagne has strange traffic patterns. At harvest time roads swell with tractors taking champagne houses’ bought-in grapes to pressoirs and they vie with tankers taking fresh-pressed juice to Big Champagne, the giant house brands whose labels we know so well, and the bigger co-operatives that make so much champagne for Europe’s supermarkets. The backstreets of Reims and Épernay can get a little tricky. But not all Champagne’s grapes go to factory-scale...