The fun ends with champagne, because that's where it really begins.

For Bismarck, the Franco-German hereditary enmity ended abruptly with his beloved Heidsieck, which Emperor Wilhelm II also felt when, for reasons of love of his homeland, he had a German sparkling wine served to him - and the prince answered coolly: "Your Majesty, I am extremely sorry that but patriotism ends short of my stomach.” For Churchill, the Anglo-French rivalry at his indispensable pole Roger turned into an entente cordiale in a flash, and because he was so loyal to the house of Épernay, their top offspring is still called “Sir Winston Churchill “.

And when Tsar Alexander complained to his purveyor to the court Roederer from Reims that he had to drink the same champagne as the common nobility,

Jakob Strobel and Serra

deputy head of the feature section.

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Those are just three proofs that champagne is the greatest success story of all time in the world of culinary marketing.

All of humanity loves champagne and has made it the most global of all alcoholic soft drinks.

For 300 years it has been drunk in the desert and in the jungle, in palaces and brothels, in triumphs and defeats, as Napoleon confessed, and when Stanley tracked down Mr. Livingstone in Ujiji, the first thing they brewed was champagne.

This career was not granted to any other sparkling wine, and for hardly any other the world pays as much as for Deutschlands Große Gewächse, sometimes ten times more.

The champagne is fine, but a trio from the Palatinate also want to have fun and not leave France's national drink the field of fame without a fight.

Three years ago, Mathieu Kauffmann, Steffen Christmann and his daughter Sophie founded the Christmann & Kauffmann sparkling wine estate in Gimmeldingen, and their ambition is as bold as it is enticing: they want to press sparkling wine in the quality of champagne, but they don't want to copy it, they want to copy themselves emancipated from him - which means they are treading a slightly different path than the great Volker Raumland, the doyen of German sparkling wine and self-confessed champagne fanatics.

The trio has the right qualifications

The conditions for this are dazzling: Kauffmann was cellar master at Bollinger for a long time, a legend among the prestige houses of Champagne, and the Christmanns have not only been top winegrowers since 1798, but also a highly respected member of the Association of German Prädikat Wineries (VDP), with Steffen Christmann as president leads.

At Bollinger, Mathieu Kauffmann has produced almost three million bottles a year, now it will be a maximum of ninety thousand, an order of magnitude that will make his lifelong dream come true: finally he can press sparkling wines according to his ideas without the smallest compromises and concessions.

The grapes for this come from thirteen hectares of the best Wingerte from the Gimmeldinger winery and VDP founding member Mugler, which Christmann & Kauffmann were able to lease thanks to a stroke of luck.

Two-thirds of the vines are located on Erste and Großer Lagen, are up to forty years old, which is why they produce ripe, highly concentrated grapes and are cultivated strictly biodynamically, so that the grapes have a lot of acid and little sugar - ideal conditions for top-quality sparkling wines.

Mathieu Kauffmann's quality fanaticism penetrates even the seemingly most insignificant details.

When harvesting, he has the grapes cut directly into small eight-kilo crates without having to use buckets or vats and then slide them straight into the wine press to minimize skin injuries.

"Cracks lead to oxidation and thus to bitter substances, which I absolutely want to avoid," says Kauffmann, who only spontaneously ferments his base wines, neither fines nor sulphurs, and lets them mature in used wooden barrels because the grapes lose their obtrusive fruit notes as a result.

The basic sparkling wines are stored on the yeast for three years, and the top qualities from seven outstanding individual locations should be at least five years.

"On the day when our sparkling wine is no longer compared to champagne, we will have reached our goal," says Steffen Christmann, and the decisive lever for this is the most German of all grapes: Riesling, from which two thirds of the sparkling wines are made from a single variety.

This is a heresy beyond compare, because among winegrowers it is a kind of divine command that no sparkling wines can be pressed from this grape variety at the level of prestige champagnes.

"Everyone thinks that this only works with Burgundians, but not me," says Mathieu Kauffmann, putting on his Alsatian impish smile and then saying quite unabashedly that he is happier with the first vintages than he dared to hope.

They are individualistic oddballs of sparkling wines with an idiosyncratic mixture of austerity, complexity and concentration, firm instead of melting, spicy instead of fruity, much more of a herb garden than a fruit basket.

Cuvée 101, the Riesling from the first vintage, manages to be as complex and finesse as a great champagne and yet has nothing to do with it.

It is a Riesling with body and soul, a sparkling wine with a heart of wine, so self-confident that it can do without an exalted perlage.

And the Cuvée 102, the second vintage Riesling,

makes its way even more uncompromisingly into an undiscovered world, into a sister universe of champagne.

This could be the start of a very big, very long fun.

Sparkling wine Christmann & Kauffmann, Peter-Koch-Strasse 43, 67435 Neustadt, Tel.: 0 63 21/ 6 60 39, www.christmann-kauffmann.de.