Photo: Fusion of a vesicle with a cell membrane: “sausages” show SNARE receptor proteins (right) and viral proteins that imitate their function (left).
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three American scientists for their “investigation of the mechanisms regulating vesicular transport.” Randy Schekman, James Rothman and Thomas Südof in their works explained how various substances move inside cells in membrane vesicles: which genes work for this, how vesicles merge at the molecular level and how this process is regulated in neurons, where it is especially important that the merger only happened at the right time and in the right place.
A eukaryotic cell, that is, a cell containing a nucleus, is very large from a biochemical point of view. Although it can usually only be seen through a microscope (eggs and orange fibers don’t count), even the smallest eukaryotic cell is hundreds and thousands of times larger than a bacterial cell. No matter how complex a bacterium is, it is ultimately not far removed from a test tube with a (very complex) solution, but eukaryotic cells are very different from anatomical microbes in this sense. They are always divided into many sections that perform different functions and often contain completely different, incompatible substances.
This means that eukaryotes, unlike bacteria, at some point in their evolution faced the problem of intracellular logistics. Before nuclear organisms arose, this problem did not exist: what was synthesized in one part of the bacterial cell immediately diffused into another part of it. If any substance needed to be released into the environment, it was usually synthesized on the membrane, while simultaneously being pulled out like a thread through the eye of a needle.
However, for a large and complex eukaryotic cell, even if it is a completely independent organism, it is impossible to do without an intracellular transport system. And even more so, such a system is necessary for multicellular organisms, some of whose cells specialize in the production of various substances: hormones, digestive enzymes or neurotransmitters. That is why eukaryotes, along with the nucleus and mitochondria, have another fundamental innovation - a developed system of transport of substances in membrane vesicles.
Randy Shakman: From Bubbles to Genes
It should be noted right away that the current Nobel Prize was awarded not for the discovery of vesicular transport as such, but for elucidating the mechanism of its operation. The fact that some substances can be transported inside cells in container bubbles became clear almost as soon as the electron microscope became widespread - such bubbles were clearly visible in the photographs. One of the “logistical nodes” where they are formed, the Golgi apparatus, was discovered by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi at the end of the 19th century, even before the invention of the electron microscope. The second main “cellular hub,” the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), was discovered somewhat later by Albert Claude, for which the scientist, along with two colleagues, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974. And finally, the fact that it is membrane vesicles with neurotransmitters that transmit signals from one neuron to another at synapses was established by Katz, von Euler and Axelrod, thanks to which they also became Nobel laureates in 1970.
However, what exactly controls membrane vesicles, due to which they are transported to the necessary parts of the cell, and how they merge with the cell membrane, remained unclear until the late seventies of the last century, when Randy Schekman, an employee at the University of Berkeley, addressed this issue.
Schekman's scientific advisor at the university was Arthur Kornberg, a Nobel laureate and famous biochemist (and also the father of Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg, who now heads the Skolkovo scientific council together with Zhores Alferov).
Despite the biochemical school, in order to understand vesicular transport, Shekman turned not to the biochemical, but to the genetic method of research. He decided to use the simplest eukaryotic model organism and began to produce yeast mutants that exhibit certain defects in vesicular transport.
In a series of works carried out jointly with Peter Novik (he is listed as the first author of Schekman’s key articles), the scientist discovered 23 genes in yeast, the work of which is necessary for the normal secretion of glycoproteins. When the mutant yeast was transferred to a high-temperature thermostat (where the mutations began to exert their effects), the cells stopped dividing. Under an electron microscope, thousands of small bubbles could be seen along the edges of such cells, which could not merge with the membrane and throw their contents out. The genes damaged in these mutants are named sec1,sec2,sec3 and so on. They became a kind of library that subsequent scientists relied on when they began to look for related genes in higher eukaryotes. However, it was not Shekman who managed to figure out how the proteins encoded by these genes work at the molecular level, but his independently working colleague, James Rothman.
James Rothman: Squirrel Lightning
James Rothman, who was only two years younger than Schekman and was working on intracellular transport at Stanford around the same time, had a fundamentally different approach to research. Firstly, he did not work on yeast, but on mammalian cell cultures. More precisely, not even on the cells themselves, but on their extracts. Secondly, he was not engaged in the search for mutants, but in classical biochemical work - the isolation of proteins. In a sense, one could say that Rothman began to “dig the tunnel from the other end,” and, fortunately, in 1992, these two areas of research came together in one joint work.
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Rothman's main model was the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), one of whose proteins is glycosylated during maturation, that is, modified by various sugars. As this protein, after being synthesized on the ER membrane, moves along the cell's transport "conveyor", it first gains and then loses some sugars. These sugars turned out to be very convenient markers for Rothman, thanks to which it was possible to track at what stage the transport stopped when adding certain cell extracts.
Working with this biochemical system, Rothman isolated first one (NSF) and then many proteins whose work was necessary for the fusion and fission of membrane vesicles. And at this point, the work of Shekman and Rothman, genetic and biochemical approaches, converged: it turned out that one of the proteins isolated from cell extracts (SNAP) is a close relative of the one whose sequence is encoded by the gene sec17 from yeast. The discovery was published in the first joint work of the current Nobel laureates, who until that moment had worked completely independently of each other. Among other things, this coincidence implied that the vesicular transport system in yeast and mammals operates through the same general mechanisms.
Further biochemical experiments by Rothman made it possible to establish the composition of a whole complex of proteins that are involved in the fusion of molecular vesicles. To search for these molecules, the scientist no longer used extracts of cell cultures (they usually contain quite little material), but preparations of bovine brains, because it is in the nervous tissue that there are a lot of synapses, where vesicles with neurotransmitters must merge at the command of electrical excitation.
Rothman's work led to the formation of the so-called SNARE hypothesis - a model that explains why vesicles merge with cell membranes exactly in those places where they are needed. According to this model, fusion is regulated by two groups of receptors: t-(target)-SNARE (syntaxins) and v-(vesicle)-SNARE (synaptobrevins), that is, molecules located on the membrane and on vesicles, respectively. Certain v-SNARE receptors are able to interact with t-SNARE receptors only of a strictly corresponding type (and at least 35 varieties are known), so the fusion takes place specifically, although its mechanism remains generally the same.
The key point of fusion is the interweaving of proteins located on different membranes into peculiar braids of four alpha helices (in the English-language literature they are usually called “zippers”). This interweaving provides the energy necessary for the fusion of lipid layers, which normally repel each other quite strongly due to the negative charge of the phosphates.
Thomas Südof: Calcium regulation
After the molecular mechanism of membrane vesicle fusion was elucidated, the question of the temporal regulation of this process remained. Indeed, in nerve cells, vesicles with a neurotransmitter must be released into the synaptic cleft if and only if the cell is excited. Electrical depolarization of the neuron always accompanies the entry of calcium ions into the cells, and they turned out to be key for the entire process.
Thomas Südof, a biochemist from Göttingen, who carried out his main work in the USA, at the University of Texas, managed to establish the details of calcium regulation. He discovered that in addition to SNARE receptors, several other proteins play an important role in synapses during the fusion of membrane vesicles, the key of which were complexin and synaptotagmin.
Working on so-called knockout mice - animals in which one of the genes is artificially switched off - Südof showed that the removal of complexin leads to a strong decrease in the activity of all synapses without exception. Direct binding of calcium ions is carried out by another protein, synaptotagmin. In addition, Südof and his colleagues found a third protein that corresponded to that same mutant sec-1, which Shakman first came across in his research in the late 70s.
Image: Danko Dimchev Georgiev, M.D.
Interestingly, during these experiments, Südof even managed to obtain a line of knockout mice in which, due to the absence of one of the proteins in the entire nervous system, not a single (!) synapse worked. The most surprising thing was that such rodents formed an almost normal brain, the neurons of which still die, but very late - only after its full maturation. Thus, along with clarifying the details of the regulation of vesicular transport, it was possible to establish that the work of synapses is necessary for the brain in order to maintain its existence, but is not required until it has not yet matured.
About fashion for science
Last year's Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to John Gardon and Shinya Yamanaka for their discovery of a reprogramming mechanism that makes it possible to obtain stem cells from virtually any mature cell. The work of these two scientists turned out to be very different in time - Gardon conducted key experiments in the 70s, and Yamanaka received the first reprogrammed stem cells in 2004. To say that this latest discovery was highly anticipated is an understatement: it finally made it possible to work with stem cells without the use of embryos and, more importantly, taught biologists to produce stem cells that are genetically identical to the donor material. Today, such cells are already being widely used to obtain artificial organs. From them, as scientists recently showed, even brain-like organelles are formed, and the produced in situ, such cells have complete totipotency - they are even capable of forming embryos inside the body.
Vesicular transport, compared to cellular reprogramming, seems to be a much less fashionable topic. Perhaps this alternation of fashionable and not-so-fashionable topics is a deliberate policy of the Nobel Committee, or perhaps simply the result of an accident. In any case, Stockholm experts still remain unpredictable: none of the topics that were promised a prize in medicine this year won. But among them there was such an important topic as epigenetic methylation - it was this that many in the molecular biology community “bet on.”
The Nobel Committee, as we see, does not always follow fashion. And this is good: over the long term, the value of a discovery is determined not by its immediate applicability, but by its fundamentality, that is, by how deep processes it can explain.
If someone really wants to give the current award a fashionable flair, then doing this is as easy as shelling pears. Do you remember such a cosmetic procedure as Botox, an injection of botulinum toxin? So, botulinum toxin cuts precisely those proteins discovered by Rothman (namely SNAP-25) in the SNARE receptor complex at the site of vesicle fusion, which leads to the shutdown of this synapse.
The most important and most famous quality of champagne wines is the bubbles, which, when bursting, form a small fragrant firework over the glass. Researchers from the birthplace of champagne - from the University of Reims (Champagne, France) - carried out a precise mass spectrometric analysis of the substances included in the aerosol that appears above the surface of the sparkling drink. According to the results of the analysis, this aerosol is many times enriched (compared to the liquid phase) with hundreds of aromatic substances that determine the smell of wine, largely thanks to which champagne has gained its reputation as a noble drink.
Surprisingly tasty, sparkling and spicy!
I'm all about something Norwegian! I'm all in something Spanish!
I'm inspired by impulse! And I take up the pen!
The sound of airplanes! Run cars!
Wind whistle of express trains! The wing of the boats!
Someone's been kissed here! Someone was beaten there!
Pineapples in champagne are the pulse of the evenings!
In a group of nervous girls, in a sharp society of ladies
I will transform the tragedy of life into a dream farce...
Pineapples in champagne! Pineapples in champagne!
From Moscow to Nagasaki! From New York to Mars!
It must be said that the conceptual predecessor of this research was also work on splashes, but not of champagne, but of sea water. It has long been established that sea air (compared to the water column) is many times enriched with organic molecules of marine origin. The mechanism of this phenomenon is quite simple: all these compounds are surfactants, - that is, substances with surface activity - and, due to their amphiphilic chemical nature, are adsorbed on the surface of bubbles emerging in sea waves. Floating to the surface, the bubbles burst and, breaking up into myriads of microscopic drops, form aerosol, enriched with these organic molecules.
The situation with champagne is approximately the same. If we desacralize this drink and are guided only by the principles of scientific knowledge, this wine (and other sparkling wines) can be represented as a multicomponent aqueous-alcohol solution, supersaturated with carbon dioxide (CO 2), formed in parallel with alcohol during the fermentation process. However, the most important thing here is not this, but the content of hundreds of surface-active compounds, “inherited” from grape raw materials or microorganisms that carry out the entire process. (By the way, a typical bottle of champagne (0.75 l) contains about 5 l of CO 2, which, taking into account the typical size of the bubble (0.5 mm), totals a surface area of about 80 m 2.)
Every second, the playing wine sprays out whole clouds of microscopic droplets that appear after the next floating gas bubble in the glass bursts. In order not to rely solely on one’s own organs of vision, this fascinating process has been studied in sufficient detail using high-speed macrophotography and laser tomography (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. The process of aerosol formation over the surface of a glass of champagne. A - A series of photographs with a time interval of ≈1 ms, illustrating the final stage of the existence of an individual bubble (line: 1 mm). B - By merging with each other and bursting, champagne bubbles actually lift the top layer of liquid into the air (in the form of an aerosol). Myriads of microscopic droplets, sprayed in large numbers every second, scatter several centimeters above the surface. IN - An aerosol of champagne over the surface of a glass, as it looks using laser tomography techniques.
To study the composition of the aerosol, a glass slide was placed on a glass of champagne for 10 minutes, samples of the settled liquid from which were subjected to mass spectrometric analysis. A comparison of the mass spectra of the aerosol and the liquid phase in the mass-to-charge ratio range (m/z) 150−1000 revealed thousands of “common” compounds, as well as more than a hundred molecules, the content of which in the aerosol was several orders of magnitude higher than in the liquid.
To identify these molecules, the scientists searched metabolic databases interfaced with mass spectrometry data, identifying grape metabolites as potential candidates ( Vitis vinifera) and yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae), which are directly related to the biochemistry of wine. Among the 163 compounds enriched in the aerosol, 32 are believed to be grape related and 13 are thought to be related to yeast.
Among the “recognized” molecules in champagne splashes are saturated and unsaturated fatty acids with chain lengths C 13 –C 24, a group of norisoprenoids (terpenes) that determine both the general “outline” of the smell of wine and the aromas specific to the grape varieties Shiraz, Chardonnay, Melon, nutmeg, riesling, and other substances, as a rule, have a characteristic odor.
Gérard Liger-Belard, who led the team of French and German scientists who did this work, commented on his increased interest in what is happening in a glass of champagne: “Thanks to these amazing processes, one glass contains both food for the mind and pleasure for the senses.”.
Literature
- G. Liger-Belair, C. Cilindre, R. D. Gougeon, M. Lucio, I. Gebefugi, et. al.. (2009). Unraveling different chemical fingerprints between a champagne wine and its aerosols. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 , 16545-16549;
- Colin D O "Dowd, Gerrit de Leeuw. (2007). Marine aerosol production: a review of the current knowledge. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 365 , 1753-1774;
- Liger-Belair G., Lemaresquier H., Robillard B., Duteurtre B., Jeandet P. (2001). The secrets of fizz in champagne wines: A phenomenological study. Am. J. Enol. Vitic. 52 , 88–92;
- Gerard Liger-Belair, Guillaume Polidori, Philippe Jeandet. (2009). ChemInform Abstract: Recent Advances in the Science of Champagne Bubbles. ChemInform. 40 .
We women are ready to do a lot to achieve an ideal figure. Sometimes, all possible efforts do not help to make the waist narrow and the hips slender. Then we dream of a wonderful way that will help remove excess exactly where it is needed and make the figure chiseled and light. There is such a wonderful way - cavitation. And here, as in the story of the birth of the beautiful Aphrodite from foam, it will not happen without magical bubbles.
Cavitation is a method of combating local fat deposits. If you need to solve the problem of excess weight, when there is systemic deposition of fat, then first of all, comprehensive measures are needed that will help speed up the metabolism and start the process of burning fat. You will have to change your diet, increase physical activity, and maybe even change your lifestyle. And only after this, when the total weight has decreased, but dissatisfaction with problem areas remains, the cavitation method comes to the rescue.
“The nature of the impact differs between ultrasonic and EWATage cavitation,” says Svetlana Nekrasova, a physiotherapist and chief physician at the Estetik Medical Center. The essence of ultrasound is that a wave of a strictly defined length (from 34 to 73 MHz) penetrates the tissue and causes fat cells to sway - a kind of micromassage. As a result of this rocking, microbubbles are formed inside the cell. Their appearance in adipose tissue is the effect of cavitation.”
After the cavitation procedure, you need to eat right and follow the doctor’s instructions, then the effect of volume loss can reach four centimeters per week.
Then the following happens: the bubbles fill the cell from the inside, expand it, forming cracks in the membrane. Through them, the contents leave the cell, and then the body. After the procedure, dietary nutrition, lymphatic drainage and a special drinking regime are recommended.
Evatation cavitation is even more intense than ultrasonic cavitation. It is based on extracorporeal shock wave therapy, that is, a mechanical effect on tissue. To describe this method, a comparison can be made with how a thrown stone causes ripples on water. Likewise, a series of shock waves causes destabilization of the adipose tissue. As a result, bubbles also appear and the contents of the cell change in consistency. In its normal state, the fat cell is quite dense, and cavitation makes it labile and ready for excretion. It is wrong to expect a noticeable result immediately after the procedure: excess fat should be removed gradually, then this is a more natural, physiological process.
Both procedures are tolerated comfortably: with ultrasonic cavitation you feel warmth, with evacuation cavitation you feel a light tapping. The doctor decides which method is more suitable in each specific case - the choice depends on the quantity and quality of adipose tissue and other individual characteristics.
“I would like to note,” continues Svetlana Vladimirovna, “that evacuation-cavitation is a development of our center. The manufacturer of shock wave equipment did not intend for its use to reduce body fat. But selecting the required nozzle, calculating the power and frequency of exposure allowed us to achieve excellent results in this area of application. The results were recognized by the equipment manufacturer, and now we are ready to share our experience internationally, since there is great interest in the development of this area in modern cosmetology.”
One day, three musketeers: Remuage, Desgorge, Assemblage and Dozazh, who joined them, collided with the cardinal’s guards in a Parisian tavern...
Although no, it’s better to start this story with something else. From time immemorial, winemakers in the Champagne region have been considered lost people. Their job was truly thankless. Grapes grew reluctantly in the northern (for France, of course) climate; a decent harvest was not obtained every year. But even if the summer was successful, the early cold did not allow the wine to ferment in barrels. This caused all sorts of troubles. The drink became cloudy and acquired the habit of exploding in cellars and even in the hands of customers. But worst of all was the constant problem with carbon dioxide bubbles. For hundreds of years, the best minds in Champagne have been puzzling over how to get rid of them, but to no avail. The ridicule of southern neighbors (especially the eternal competitors of the Burgundians), the suspicions of guests “what is that fizzing in my glass, are they planning to poison me?” and the lot of eternal losers - it seemed that there was nothing else left for the champagnes...
In 1668, a young monk, Pierre Perignon, arrived at Hautevillers Abbey on the Marne River. He knew how to count well in his head and did not know how to lie at all, so the abbot entrusted him with managing the holy of holies of the monastery - the pantry with food supplies. And at the same time he instructed me to start producing wine.
Perignon turned out to be an extremely persistent and corrosive person. He spent several years thoroughly studying local winemaking. And I realized that the problem with Champagne was not the grapes, but that they had not learned to work with them correctly.
One never likes pedantic bosses, and working under Perignon was a real punishment. With his exactingness, he brought the brother monks to white heat. But Pierre did not pay attention to this and continued to experiment methodically. And in the end I came to nothing less than new principles of viticulture. For example, that the vine should be pruned and bent to the ground, ensuring that only a few but high-quality berries grow on it, picking them carefully and exclusively in the morning, pressing the juice carefully, preventing the peel from getting into the wort. And so on.
So, step by step, Perignon turned the disadvantages of Champagne wines into advantages. Doesn't the crop grow every year? It doesn’t matter, you can mix cuvée (grape must) from different years in the right proportions to get a blend with the required characteristics. Does wine explode? It is necessary to control the process of secondary fermentation using bottles made of especially strong thick glass, which are plugged with a massive oak bark stopper.
The result of all these tricks was a white wine of amazing taste and purity, the fame of which went far beyond the borders of Champagne. The abbey flourished. However, Dom Perignon considered his main task unsolved until the end of his life. Even in his best wine, bubbles still remained, which extremely upset the master.
But while the experimental monk was poring over in his cellars, an amazing thing happened. Somehow, unnoticed, it turned out that more and more connoisseurs began to perceive sparkling wine not as defective and low-grade, but on the contrary - as a new original drink. It all started with the British. To them, champagne probably reminded them of their favorite foamy beer. And at the beginning of the 18th century, the French royal court was already amusing themselves with bubbles in glasses. And Perignon’s followers began to puzzle over how to put more bubbles into the bottle. Wine researcher Abbé Godino wrote: “France is crazy about sparkling wines, so many winemakers, not knowing the secret of its preparation, use all possible methods, trying to make wines sparkling. Some of them even add pigeon droppings to their wine.”
The real secret of making sparkling wine was known, of course, only in Champagne. Here they have learned to enhance the natural effect by adding sugar and yeast to wine. This restarted the fermentation process, as a result of which honest bubbles were delivered to the buyer, without the slightest participation of pigeons or other birds.
By the middle of the 18th century, champagne had already firmly established its reputation as a prestigious and expensive drink, without which the dessert table would look dull and provincial. But it’s unlikely that any of us would have liked the wine of that time - it was extremely sweet, and also cloudy. Winemakers did not skimp on sugar back then. Firstly, the public liked it, and secondly, it perfectly masked any flaws in the wine.
As for transparency, its secret was lost after Perignon's death. It was rediscovered only a hundred years later, in the cellars of the famous Veuve Clicquot. It was there that the art of remuage was born. Experts have experimentally established that if already ripe champagne is placed in racks at an angle of 45 degrees and the bottles are carefully turned in a special way every day, then after a while all the sediment will collect at the cork, and the wine will become transparent.
Then all that remains is to remove the sediment without pouring out the precious wine. To do this, the necks were first frozen, and then the bottle was opened upside down. The sediment with the ice plug was ejected by the pressure of carbon dioxide, the bottle was immediately turned over and topped up with expedition liqueur (a mixture of the original wine and cane sugar). This whole cunning procedure is called disgorgement.
The same Veuve Clicquot quickly realized that by adding liqueur (by the way, this part of the technical process is called dosage) you can regulate the sweetness of champagne. The fact is that in her time tastes in European countries had already begun to differ. The sweetest champagne was loved in Russia, and sugar was poured in abundance into bottles that went to the east - up to 300 grams per liter. The French and Germans had enough of half of this amount, the Americans even less, and the prim British drank the driest champagne. As a result, it happened that the Russians, having ordered their favorite Clicquot in London, were so discouraged by its taste that they immediately began to suspect the natives of replacing the noble drink with some kind of mongrel sourness. Sometimes immediately after this, English waiters acquired a new experience of introducing their temporal bones to the strongest glass from which champagne bottles were made.
However, despite all the sacrifices, the French continued to experiment, and in the end they completely got rid of sugar in wine. Such champagne was initially received with hostility even in its homeland and received the disparaging nickname “brut” - rude. But over time, it became the most popular.
Actually, this information is enough to be known among your friends as a connoisseur of champagne wines, when, as the chimes strike, the next cork flies into the ceiling. It can be even simpler - in the most accessible form, the technical process of champagne production is depicted on this sign from the very village of Hautevillers, where Dom Perignon once worked hard:
As we can see, there is nothing complicated: the grapes are grown, harvested, the juice is sent first to ferment in barrels, then to mature into bottles. Then they drink champagne, preferably with their feet dangling down from some poetic cliff.
In general, that's all. Those who have enough of this can, with a clear conscience, go to the end of the post to solve the quiz. I invite curious readers to dig a little deeper. Thirty meters.
To be more precise, 33 meters. It is at this depth below the city of Reims that the cellars of the famous Pommery champagne house are located. In 1860, the widow of a wool merchant, Louise Pommery, bought the ancient Roman-era chalk mines to turn them into a storage facility for twenty million bottles of champagne.
Mmmm, there are so many delicious things here:
and well seasoned:
In one of the most secluded corners of the 18-kilometer catacombs, the oldest and priceless bottle of natural brut from the 1874 grape harvest is kept.
A little clarification needs to be made here. Champagne, on which the year is indicated, is a unique thing in itself. Almost all modern champagne, according to the behests of Perignon’s grandfather, is blended, that is, it is made from wine materials from different years. The climate in Champagne has not improved much over the past three hundred years, so mixing grapes from several seasons, vineyards and varieties is the only way to achieve a recognizable brand design. Creating the right blends is called assemblage and is the pinnacle of winemaking skill. But at the same time, blended champagne is valued much lower than millennial champagne. Millesimes or vintages are wines created from the harvest of one particularly successful year. As a rule, they make up no more than 5% of the production volume, and they have a corresponding price tag.
Pommery's cellars are some of the deepest and most extensive, but Champagne has even greater labyrinths. Under the main office of Moët & Chandon in the city of Epernay there are almost thirty kilometers of tunnels, halls and galleries.
It is better to travel here by some kind of transport.
And this is one of the rare places where visitors actually read the evacuation plan before entering. And some even redraw. There’s no other way - you’ll miss the right turn and your holiday in France may, um, drag on a little.
There have been no fires here, but flooding is not uncommon. Water is constantly pumped out of some tunnels, but you still have to slosh through puddles
One of the passages, by the way, leads directly to the local city hall. However, as they say, municipal employees have long given up trying to get inside. In general, the idea of digging a shaft into the cellars strikes some bright mind from time to time. There were even successful mines. However, such thieves cause little loss. It was much more difficult for winemakers during World War II, when the cellars were used as hospitals and bomb shelters. What happens if several soldiers are left unattended in a room with bottles probably doesn’t need to be explained. Although the owners tried to hide the most valuable things in secret places, a lot of the unique champagne was drunk.
But another war brought continuous benefits to the champagne houses. During the unique foreign campaign of the Russian army in France in 1814, the hussars devastated the reserves of Clicquot and Moët. However, for the winemakers, this binge was not a ruin, but a brilliant promotion. As a result, within a few years Russia became the largest consumer of sparkling wines.
This barrel, by the way, still remembers the times when Cossacks wandered around the basement and watered their horses with the famous comet wine. But now she, like everyone like her, remained in the Moët cellars only for beauty. Only a few Champagne houses continue to use oak. Replaced it with stainless steel. After gentle pressing, the grape juice goes into vats, where fermentation takes place for several weeks. The result is a so-called “still” or base wine, from which the necessary blend is made. Well, or if the chief winemaker decides that the year is quite interesting, then he can aim for a millesim.
At the next stage, the future wine is bottled, adding batch liqueur with sugar and yeast, which will turn the wort into champagne. Secondary fermentation continues for several weeks. After it, the yeast precipitates and the longest and most important process begins - the maturation of wine. According to the rules, bottles “on the lees” must be aged for at least a year, and for vintage champagne at least three years. In fact, self-respecting manufacturers significantly increase this period. For example, at Moët, ordinary wine matures for two years, and vintage wine matures for at least eight years. Judging by the layer of dust on these shelves, vintage is just ripening here.
June 12th, 2013
One day, three musketeers: Remuage, Desgorge, Assemblage and Dozazh, who joined them, collided with the cardinal’s guards in a Parisian tavern...
Although no, it’s better to start this story with something else. From time immemorial, winemakers in the Champagne region have been considered lost people. Their job was truly thankless. Grapes grew reluctantly in the northern (for France, of course) climate; a decent harvest was not obtained every year. But even if the summer was successful, the early cold did not allow the wine to ferment in barrels. This caused all sorts of troubles. The drink became cloudy and acquired the habit of exploding in cellars and even in the hands of customers. But worst of all was the constant problem with carbon dioxide bubbles. For hundreds of years, the best minds in Champagne have been puzzling over how to get rid of them, but to no avail. The ridicule of southern neighbors (especially the eternal competitors of the Burgundians), the suspicions of guests “what is that fizzing in my glass, are they planning to poison me?” and the lot of eternal losers - it seemed that there was nothing else left for the champagnes...
In 1668, a young monk, Pierre Perignon, arrived at Hautevillers Abbey on the Marne River. He knew how to count well in his head and did not know how to lie at all, so the abbot entrusted him with managing the holy of holies of the monastery - the pantry with food supplies. And at the same time he instructed me to start producing wine.
Perignon turned out to be an extremely persistent and corrosive person. He spent several years thoroughly studying local winemaking. And I realized that the problem with Champagne was not the grapes, but that they had not learned to work with them correctly.
One never likes pedantic bosses, and working under Perignon was a real punishment. With his exactingness, he brought the brother monks to white heat. But Pierre did not pay attention to this and continued to experiment methodically. And in the end I came to nothing less than new principles of viticulture. For example, that the vine should be pruned and bent to the ground, ensuring that only a few but high-quality berries grow on it, picking them carefully and exclusively in the morning, pressing the juice carefully, preventing the peel from getting into the wort. And so on.
So, step by step, Perignon turned the disadvantages of Champagne wines into advantages. Doesn't the crop grow every year? It doesn’t matter, you can mix cuvée (grape must) from different years in the right proportions to get a blend with the required characteristics. Does wine explode? It is necessary to control the process of secondary fermentation using bottles made of especially strong thick glass, which are plugged with a massive oak bark stopper.
The result of all these tricks was a white wine of amazing taste and purity, the fame of which went far beyond the borders of Champagne. The abbey flourished. However, Dom Perignon considered his main task unsolved until the end of his life. Even in his best wine, bubbles still remained, which extremely upset the master.
But while the experimental monk was poring over in his cellars, an amazing thing happened. Somehow, unnoticed, it turned out that more and more connoisseurs began to perceive sparkling wine not as defective and low-grade, but on the contrary - as a new original drink. It all started with the British. To them, champagne probably reminded them of their favorite foamy beer. And at the beginning of the 18th century, the French royal court was already amusing themselves with bubbles in glasses. And Perignon’s followers began to puzzle over how to put more bubbles into the bottle. Wine researcher Abbé Godino wrote: “France is crazy about sparkling wines, so many winemakers, not knowing the secret of its preparation, use all possible methods, trying to make wines sparkling. Some of them even add pigeon droppings to their wine.”
The real secret of making sparkling wine was known, of course, only in Champagne. Here they have learned to enhance the natural effect by adding sugar and yeast to wine. This restarted the fermentation process, as a result of which honest bubbles were delivered to the buyer, without the slightest participation of pigeons or other birds.
By the middle of the 18th century, champagne had already firmly established its reputation as a prestigious and expensive drink, without which the dessert table would look dull and provincial. But it’s unlikely that any of us would have liked the wine of that time - it was extremely sweet, and also cloudy. Winemakers did not skimp on sugar back then. Firstly, the public liked it, and secondly, it perfectly masked any flaws in the wine.
As for transparency, its secret was lost after Perignon's death. It was rediscovered only a hundred years later, in the cellars of the famous Veuve Clicquot. It was there that the art of remuage was born. Experts have experimentally established that if already ripe champagne is placed in racks at an angle of 45 degrees and the bottles are carefully turned in a special way every day, then after a while all the sediment will collect at the cork, and the wine will become transparent.
Then all that remains is to remove the sediment without pouring out the precious wine. To do this, the necks were first frozen, and then the bottle was opened upside down. The sediment with the ice plug was ejected by the pressure of carbon dioxide, the bottle was immediately turned over and topped up with expedition liqueur (a mixture of the original wine and cane sugar). This whole cunning procedure is called disgorgement.
The same Veuve Clicquot quickly realized that by adding liqueur (by the way, this part of the technical process is called dosage) you can regulate the sweetness of champagne. The fact is that in her time tastes in European countries had already begun to differ. The sweetest champagne was loved in Russia, and sugar was poured in abundance into bottles that went to the east - up to 300 grams per liter. The French and Germans had enough of half of this amount, the Americans even less, and the prim British drank the driest champagne. As a result, it happened that the Russians, having ordered their favorite Clicquot in London, were so discouraged by its taste that they immediately began to suspect the natives of replacing the noble drink with some kind of mongrel sourness. Sometimes immediately after this, English waiters acquired a new experience of introducing their temporal bones to the strongest glass from which champagne bottles were made.
However, despite all the sacrifices, the French continued to experiment, and in the end they completely got rid of sugar in wine. Such champagne was initially received with hostility even in its homeland and received the disparaging nickname “brut” - rude. But over time, it became the most popular.
Actually, this information is enough to be known among your friends as a connoisseur of champagne wines, when, as the chimes strike, the next cork flies into the ceiling. It can be even simpler - in the most accessible form, the technical process of champagne production is depicted on this sign from the very village of Hautevillers, where Dom Perignon once worked hard:
As we can see, there is nothing complicated: the grapes are grown, harvested, the juice is sent first to ferment in barrels, then to mature into bottles. Then they drink champagne, preferably with their feet dangling down from some poetic cliff.
In general, that's all. Those who have enough of this can, with a clear conscience, go to the end of the post to solve the quiz. I invite curious readers to dig a little deeper. Thirty meters.
To be more precise, 33 meters. It is at this depth below the city of Reims that the cellars of the famous Pommery champagne house are located. In 1860, the widow of a wool merchant, Louise Pommery, bought the ancient Roman-era chalk mines to turn them into a storage facility for twenty million bottles of champagne.
Mmmm, there are so many delicious things here:
and well seasoned:
In one of the most secluded corners of the 18-kilometer catacombs, the oldest and priceless bottle of natural brut from the 1874 grape harvest is kept.
A little clarification needs to be made here. Champagne, on which the year is indicated, is a unique thing in itself. Almost all modern champagne, according to the behests of Perignon’s grandfather, is blended, that is, it is made from wine materials from different years. The climate in Champagne has not improved much over the past three hundred years, so mixing grapes from several seasons, vineyards and varieties is the only way to achieve a recognizable brand design. Creating the right blends is called assemblage and is the pinnacle of winemaking skill. But at the same time, blended champagne is valued much lower than millennial champagne. Millesimes or vintages are wines created from the harvest of one particularly successful year. As a rule, they make up no more than 5% of the production volume, and they have a corresponding price tag.
Pommery's cellars are some of the deepest and most extensive, but Champagne has even greater labyrinths. Under the main office of Moët & Chandon in the city of Epernay there are almost thirty kilometers of tunnels, halls and galleries.
It is better to travel here by some kind of transport.
And this is one of the rare places where visitors actually read the evacuation plan before entering. And some even redraw. There’s no other way - you’ll miss the right turn and your holiday in France may, um, drag on a little.
There have been no fires here, but flooding is not uncommon. Water is constantly pumped out of some tunnels, but you still have to slosh through puddles
One of the passages, by the way, leads directly to the local city hall. However, as they say, municipal employees have long given up trying to get inside. In general, the idea of digging a shaft into the cellars strikes some bright mind from time to time. There were even successful mines. However, such thieves cause little loss. It was much more difficult for winemakers during World War II, when the cellars were used as hospitals and bomb shelters. What happens if several soldiers are left unattended in a room with bottles probably doesn’t need to be explained. Although the owners tried to hide the most valuable things in secret places, a lot of the unique champagne was drunk.
But another war brought continuous benefits to the champagne houses. During the unique foreign campaign of the Russian army in France in 1814, the hussars devastated the reserves of Clicquot and Moët. However, for the winemakers, this binge was not a ruin, but a brilliant promotion. As a result, within a few years Russia became the largest consumer of sparkling wines.
This barrel, by the way, still remembers the times when Cossacks wandered around the basement and watered their horses with the famous comet wine. But now she, like everyone like her, remained in the Moët cellars only for beauty. Only a few Champagne houses continue to use oak. Replaced it with stainless steel. After gentle pressing, the grape juice goes into vats, where fermentation takes place for several weeks. The result is a so-called “still” or base wine, from which the necessary blend is made. Well, or if the chief winemaker decides that the year is quite interesting, then he can aim for a millesim.
At the next stage, the future wine is bottled, adding batch liqueur with sugar and yeast, which will turn the wort into champagne. Secondary fermentation continues for several weeks. After it, the yeast precipitates and the longest and most important process begins - the maturation of wine. According to the rules, bottles “on the lees” must be aged for at least a year, and for vintage champagne at least three years. In fact, self-respecting manufacturers significantly increase this period. For example, at Moët, ordinary wine matures for two years, and vintage wine matures for at least eight years. Judging by the layer of dust on these shelves, vintage is just ripening here.
