Vine Path Blog 12/19: So Long 2019! Grower Champagne for the Holidays

Disgorgement!

December’s collection of wines all about showing appreciation to all you great people who’ve joined us on this journey through the world of wine.  This month, in the spirit of the holiday season and celebration, we’re offering up three different bottles of Champagne from three pre-eminent grower-producers who are helping chart the course for the future of wine in Champagne. 

Thierry Triolet showing off the soil in his vineyard

First up is Thierry Triolet, a tiny Champagne house in village of Bethon in the Cotes de Sezanne 20 miles southwest of Epernay.  The Triolet’s 10 hectares of vineyards are planted across this geological band, which is an extension of the famed Cotes de Blanc, and is home to some of the regions most distinctive Chardonnay plantings.  These south facing parcels create bracing wines with racy acidity and pristeen freshness. What’s exciting about the Grande Reserve, our feature from the Triolet’s this month, is that it’s a blend of 95% Chardonnay, 5% Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, aged for a minimum of 3 years sur lie, and is made up of a heavy portion of reserve wine.   For clarity’s sake here, let’s get a little nerdy about Champagne.

The wines of this fabled sparkling wine region are almost always produced from a blend of multiple vintages and are usually made up of a blend of the three major grapes of Champagne, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier.  The reason being was the historically difficult unpredictable vintages the Champenois would regularly suffer. Champagne is an extremely northerly region, the most northerly in France as a matter of fact, and is therefore a pretty chilly place where grapes can struggle the ripen.  The solution was to take wine from these under ripe vintages and blend them together with wine from the riper, warmer vintages in order to achieve balance and complexity. This means that Champagne producers regularly keep wine from many vintages in the cellar, sometimes dating back decades and decades.  The more reserve wine in the blend, the more toasty, nutty, concentrated, and intense the wines tend to be.  

Old-timers in Champagne rotating the bottles to unsettle the yeast during maturation

There’s also something to be said about the special way in which the Champenois produce their famous bubbles.  For their technique, the blended wine is bottled with a tiny bit of a yeast/wine slurry and corked. The fresh yeast reacts with the remaining sugars in the bottle and begins another fermentation which produces CO2 as a byproduct but because the bottle is corked the CO2 can’t escape and the wine slowly gets sparkly.  Eventually the yeasts die and the fermentation stops but that doesn’t mean that the yeasts roll is over. The dead yeasts in the bottle go through autolysis, which is the same reaction that puts the crust on your bread, and contributes major flavors to the wine. For pretty much all the great bottles of Champagne throughout history, a lengthy time conditioning on the yeast is what makes it great.  Most Champagne is only conditioned until the proper pressure in the bottle is developed. For Triolet’s Grande Reserve to go through this process for 3 years is a little extreme but we love this wine all the better for it.  

Jose Michel teaching a lesson

Next up is the famous house of Jose Michel, one of the kings of Pinot Meunier.  One of the leading environmentalists in the region, Jose Michel is venerated among grower-producers in Champagne.  Since 1955 he’s been producing wines from the Cotes D’Epernay, one of the best places to grow Pinot Meunier in the whole region.  Historically Pinot Meunier has been looked down upon as the less grape of the Champagne. It’s basically here to just provide freshness, so they say.  Too bad for them, since there are some truly notable exceptions, including Jose Michel’s Brut Non-Vintage. The wine is usually a blend of 70% Pinot Meunier and 30% Chardonnay and is aged for 2 years sur lie before it’s released.  Champagne that focuses of Pinot Munier are often some of my favorites and they are certainly some of the most exciting examples around today. Pinot Meunier gives bright, fruity, red apple qualities and herbal aromatics as well as powerful, refreshing acidity.  This wine as more preserved freshness and crispy acidity than the Triolet making it a perfect aperitif wine before dinner or during a party.

Isabelle and Benoist Perseval in their cellar

My favorite wine in this collection is the Perseval-Farge Brut C. de Pinot, a blend of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.  The Perseval-Farge estate is located in the town of Chamery in the northern part of the Montagne de Reims known as the Petite Montagne.  Here they farm 4 hectares of vines all planted in this Premiere Cru rated village and all grown sustainably and organically. What’s exciting about wineries like this in Champagne is their efforts to make wine in a more naturally and low interventionist way, for Champagne is often a very manipulated product.  For the Perseval-Farge domain, the best wines are produced with a light hand from healthy grapes that co-exist fully with their environment. For many of us professional drinkers, we swear you can taste the difference this kind of attitude makes. For the Brut C. de Pinot, the wine is aged for 4 years of the lees and is composed of 40% reserve wine dating back at least 5 years.  The result is a truly excellent, balanced, complete, and age-worthy Champagne that shows off the terroir of Chamery in a beautiful way.

Thank you all for spending another year with us in the club.  We hope you loved the wines and had your palates expanded and had your thirst quenched.  Enjoy these Champagnes with your family and loved ones this holiday season and we’ll be seeing each other again in the new decade!

The famous Cathedral of Reims in the heart of Champagne