Over the past week I've been shooting a series of videos with Didier Gimonnet of Champagne Pierre Gimonnet & Fils in the village of Cuis

The videos will be on-line for you to see very soon but in the meantime take a look at this picture.

Seems a pretty ordinary picture of vineyards, right? That's true ,but when you know the story behind it it becomes a lot more interesting

To understand this let's go back to 1927 when the boundaries of the Champagne region were established. That was the time for anyone who wanted to register their land in order to grow vines, harvest grapes and make champagne, had to register the land so it went on the official records.

If you decided not to register your land, or if you simply forget about it, it was too late to do anything about it and in fact the area registered all those years ago has remained largely unchanged ever since.

So what made people decide to register their land or put another way, "Why did some plots of land get registered when other plots, apparently just as suited to grow vines, never got registered and still can;t be use for vineyards to this day?

Well, it seems as thought he process was a bit hit and miss to say the least amnd that brings us back to the picture

This is the village of Cuis. You'll see that there are vines in the foreground but over in the distance there are a few vines but lots more land that doesn't have any vines of it. Why not when there are vineyards right next to it?

This is an even more intriguing question when you know that the slopes in the foreground are north-facing - not ideal for growing grapes and that's one reason why grapes from Cuis have the highest acidity level of any village in the entire Côte des Blancs - and the slopes in the distance are south facing which is ideal for growing good quality, fully-ripe grapes.

The clue is in the fact that the church and the village are also in the foreground, so all of the villagers lived near the north-facing slopes. It was relatively easy for them to take their horses into the nearby vineyards to tend their vines.

On the other hand it took a lot longer and was much more of an effort to take the horses over to the fields in the distance. So when the time came for the mayor of the village to register for the Champagne appellation it was mainly the closest plots that were included, and that's was it.

Nothing to do with the quality of the land, just a matter of practicality and convenience and to make things even more bizarre, even that excuse no longer applies because tractors have long since replaced horses to do the work in the vineyards.

If you're thinking that it's no use looking for logic and common sense in the system, I would agree with you, but then perhaps that's makes Champagne all the more fascinating?