This man puts a sparkle in our life

Sitting in the cloistered cosiness that is Wellington's Boulcott St Bistro on a bone-chillingly wet and blustery day is something to relish. Sitting at Boulcott St opposite a chic and handsome winemaker from France whom I happen to have all to myself is the stuff dreams are made of.
But dreams are short lived as Francois Hautekeur, ex-mechanical engineer and now winemaker for the house of Veuve Cliquot Champagne, gets down to business.
He's been in New Zealand hosting tastings of various vintages of Veuve and, today, I'm getting a crash course in the base wines that are typically used to make up the famous Veuve Cliquot NV, the "yellow label" champagne commonly found on restaurant wine lists and in the better supermarkets and wine stores.
Base wines are the starting point for sparkling wine of any type. Then you can process that wine to create the bubbles however you desire, whether it be carbonation or the traditional and much more desirable bottle fermentation methods.
Veuve is definitely in the latter camp and although the yellow label is dominated by pinot noir, almost a third of the blend is chardonnay before it is rounded out with pinot meunier.
"The pinot meunier is very generous with apricots, fresh peach and ripe tropical fruits," he says, "and that aromatic generosity is what we are looking for from the pinot meunier portion of the final blend."
The pinot noir sample that we tasted next was more discreet and had more minerality on the nose than I was expecting. "You know why," Francois asked. "That's because it is so young (it was from 2009), pinot noir needs time to develop aromatic expression. But I am showing it to you to give you an indication of how pinot adds to the structure of the champagne.
"It is much more fleshy and chewy than the meunier."
The chardonnay sample is sourced from a grand cru vineyard in the Cote des Blanc, south of Epernay, and it has an incredible chalky taste and texture.
"The soils are pure chalk and that shows in the wine," he says. "It has a very long, lean, mineral-driven finish.
"I look at our champagne blend like the human body," Francois adds, leaning over his wines like a protective father. "The pinot noir would be the muscle; the chardonnay would be the backbone which gives firmness and direction to the wine. Without the backbone, the muscle would not be attached to anything and it becomes flabby. The pinot meunier is like the hairstyle, the fashion, the perfume - the things that makes the wine immediately attractive to the nose." According to the records, looking back to when Madame Cliquot was making her champagne back in the early 1800s, she used almost the exact same blend of grapes.
The fruit that goes into Veuve Cliquot is sourced from a blend of 50 crus, mainly grand and premier crus. In Champagne, "cru" means a grape growing district or "commune" (there are 324 in total). Most champagne is made in a non-vintage style, meaning that to keep consistency of style the producer will use portions of older and newer vintage wines together in the final blend; a blend which at Veuve Cliquot can be made from close to 500 individual wines.
"We also have the most beautiful collection of reserve wines in champagne," Francois adds with a flourish. "We have around 400 now to choose from when we come to make our yellow label each year." Those reserve wines are kept in 850 stainless steel tanks. Veuve Cliquot also claims to have the oldest reserve wine in champagne, a cramant (chardonnay) from 1988 which is still being used in the blending. All the reserve wines are tasted blind, twice a year to see if they will be used for yellow label or something else, or if they will be kept back for another year or two or 10 as the case may sometimes be. The oldest wine that would go into the yellow label could be up to 20 years old, according to Francois.
Francois is one of 10 winemakers in the Cliquot team and has been with them for six years. He belongs to the tasting panel led by Chef de Caves Dominique Demarville, taking an active role in the creation of the finest quality blends for all of the house's wines.
Franois is responsible for the Champagne Education Programme at Veuve Clicquot and plays a significant role in communicating Veuve Clicquot all over the world.
So how does one land a job like his? "You have to write a love letter to Madame Cliquot," he says. "Well, it was actually an advert, but in my application I wrote 'I need you, I love you, I want you, you are my obsession ...' I found out later they did not choose me for my skill, they chose me for my passion." No ... really?