Champagne Annual Report: Freshness and Energy Come to the Table

Dom Perignon seems to be constantly posting Instagrams about famous chefs drinking their latest vintage in kitchens. Krug publishes annual guides to the best cooking ingredients, with this year’s focusing on lemons. Lanson is actively searching for chef ambassadors in Asia to promote their food-friendly cuvees. And Veuve Clicquot has been hosting burger pairings in more than a dozen restaurants in New York City this summer.

Is Champagne and food really here to stay? And are Champagne's days of being taken solely as an aperitif truly over?

“Before, Champagne was considered as just an aperitif,” Florent Nys, Billecart-Salmon’s chef de cave, said when I visited their cellars in Ay in early July. “Now for some houses, it’s considered as a still wine for lunch or to have in the cellar for 10, 20 or 30 years.”

A number of Champagne makers told JamesSuckling.com during a weeklong trip to the region that global warming has changed the nature of so many wines that they are slightly higher in alcohol, fuller in body, and less dosaged, so they automatically go better with food. Some went as far as to say that their companies or groups have focused more on food and Champagne pairings as a way to expand their market from just celebrations and pre- or after-dinner drinkers.

“I think this was a trend before global warming due to practices of lower yields with some houses, but I think climate change also helps to produce this type of wine because you have upper maturity [of fruit]. And despite upper maturity you have low pH,” Nys said. He believes that the region can also retain freshness even with consistently riper fruit “because you have the chalk in the soil, the pHs don't increase a lot in Champagne.” PH is a measure of the intensity of acidity, and low pH means intense acidity.

Pursuing the topic of drinkability, we spoke to Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, the head winemaker of Louis Roederer, at a dinner with our team. He believes that what Champagne brings to the wine world is freshness and, perhaps counterintuitively, he attributes the purity and freshness of wines from Champagne to the region’s longstanding contrasting climatic influences, continental and oceanic.

“We were used to climate variation before climate change came along; we know the battle of climates here,” Lecaillon said. “That’s why we have pinot noir and chardonnay and why we have reserve wines. We create macro-climate blends. Blending is a perfect tool to mitigate climate change.

“We already have the tools,” he said. “We have two fermentations; we have the bubbles and the dosage to play with, the pressure, the malolactic, the time on lees. And like vintage port, we have reductive winemaking, and we bottle early to keep the freshness of the vintage.”

Louis Roederer’s Cristal is testament to the freshness, energy and ageability of top Champagne as well as its ability to pair well with food. We tasted a vertical of Cristal from the not-yet-released 2015 back to 2004, alongside the 2002 Vinotheque (our other perfect-scoring wine) and 2002 Rosé Vinotheque with a multi-course dinner, and we were wowed with the combinations. The wines showed undeniable freshness and energy, and it was incredible to see their very slow, gradual evolution from laser-sharp tension to salty minerality after a few years, to more complex white chocolate creaminess after 15 years. It’s what Lecaillon calls “the signature of chalk” with age. And all the Champagnes were wonderful foils to so many dishes – even meat.

Editor James Suckling, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott and I visited more producers than ever this year to find out why the coldest, most northerly vineyards of France seem uniquely placed not only to adapt to increasingly extreme weather conditions, but to take advantage of warmer seasons. We tasted over 540 wines and spoke in person to more than 20 houses and grower-producers. Some are changing direction more quickly than others, but they independently agreed on the shift toward producing gastronomic wines. Even styles like blanc de blancs are competing with still wines at the table.

Of course, they have a lot of great vintages to work with, particularly the legendary 2008, terrific 2012 and excellent 2013, as well as a number of other outstanding quality years in their cellars and nonvintage blends.

2019, though, may be taking it to “the next level,” said Rudolphe Peters, the winemaker for Champagne Pierre Peters. “It was better than 2008,” he said. “It is the concentrate of the 2008. I had to go back to my grandfather’s vintages. It looks like 1959 but a friend said it was like 1947. But this is the new classic vintage. It is like the new icon.”

He added that “2017 was great for Cote de Blancs,” but that there were botrytis issues with black grapes in other parts of Champagne.

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BLENDING THE BEST

With multi-vintage blending all the more important for Champagne, it’s not surprising that several nonvintage wines can be found at the top of our ratings.

The Laurent-Perrier Champagne Grand Siècle Grande Cuvée N.26 NV is one of just two wines we gave perfect scores to this year. Like previous editions of Grand Siecle, N.26 comprises three stellar vintages: the majority from 2012, a quarter from 2008 and 10 percent from 2007. The aim is to create the “perfect” vintage – and they did. It’s a blend of chardonnay and pinot noir from eight grand crus across the region, and it’s electric on the palate yet subtle at the same time, with a savory freshness and monumental energy.

And Krug Champagne wowed James with their Grande Cuvée 171ème Edition NV when he tasted it with Olivier Krug. It’s a masterpiece of several wines – from 2015 back to 2000 – and shows impressive tightness and tension. It’s salty and zesty, too, yet rich and complex.

Look out for other stunning nonvintage wines like the Pierre Péters Champagne Les Mesnil-Sur-Oger L'Etonnant Monsieur Victor Edition TB.16 Blanc de Blancs NV and Fleur de Miraval Champagne Exclusivement Rosé 3 NV, plus more mature blends like the Pierre Péters Champagne Grand Cru Mesnil-sur-Oger Reserve Oublée NV, which has reserve wines going back to 1988, and the Charles Heidsieck Champagne Cuvée Champagne Charlie Cellared in 2017 NV, a cuvee of 80 percent of mature reserve wines blended with 20 percent of 2016 base wine.

Alongside the many nonvintage wines we tasted, we also found excellent vintage diversity, with newly released vintage wines spanning from just under four years from harvest to later-released wines, even library releases, subject to the time spent on the lees and post-disgorgement.

One of our top 10 Champagnes this year is the Bollinger Champagne R.D. Extra-Brut 2008. It’s a step up from the R.D. (“recently disgorged”) 2007 and is perhaps the best R.D. Champagne we have tasted. Aged on the lees under cork rather than crown cap for 13 years and six months, it’s extreme, energetic and full-bodied, with rich, dried and grilled fruit combined with spicy, bitter and salty components. It remains tangy and sharp.

“2008 is a very classical vintage in Champagne; it’s like what we had in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Denis Bunner, the winemaker for Champagne Bollinger.

An equally impressive 2008 is the single-site chardonnay from Le Mesnil-Sur-Oger – the Pierre Péters Champagne Grand Cru Les Chetillons Oenotheque Blans de Blancs Brut 2008. It’s tight and mineral, with beautifully integrated phenolics, aged 13 years on the lees.

For both multi-vintage and vintage wines, there are many tools for Champagne producers to play with. Piper Heidsieck, for example, is among the houses that have been increasing the proportion of reserve wines in the last few years (to 35 percent from around 15 percent) to balance their nonvintage wines – for instance by using reserve wine from fresher vintages to complement a riper base vintage, and vice versa. They also let a proportion of the wine go through malolactic fermentation.

“The reality is we block more and more malolactic because you can have a lack of acidity,” said chef de cave Emilien Boutillat, naming 2018, 2020 and 2022 as recent vintages that benefit from retaining freshness. “Today, we want to adjust according to vintage and terroir.”

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Their lower dosage and blocked malolactic also applies to late-disgorged wines, like the Piper Heidsieck Champagne Hors-Série Millésimé Extra Brut 1982, which is part of a new "Hors-Série" collection, disgorged last year and now on the market. It’s a blend of 60 percent pinot noir and 40 percent chardonnay, with completely blocked malolactic, displaying fantastic freshness and energy with aromas of yellow flowers and fruit alongside ginger spice.

In contrast, at Champagne Taittinger, wines for all cuvees go through full malolactic, and dosage has broadly remained at the same level.

“Other companies think about the dosage after the wine; we have the opposite,” President Vitalie Taittinger said. “It’s important to build the wine thinking about the dosage first. We know our plots very well. The work starts in the vineyard and it continues in the blending.”

Cellarmaster Alexandre Ponnavoy said that even with warmer years, they will most likely continue to do full malolactic. “I think it’s more interesting to work in the vineyard and the date of harvest to keep the freshness and acidity,” he said. “The malic acid is not a neutral acid, you change the flavors. And it's difficult to determine the perfect dosage if you have a mix of wines with and without malo.”

Taittinger’s Champagne Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2013, which will be released in September, is nervy and driven, with chalky minerality and a long, tight finish. It’s another powerful rendition and will reward cellaring. Also in this report is the 2002 Comtes de Champagne. It’s not a new release, but after 10 years on lees and another decade in the bottle, it demonstrates the complexity and ageability of this prestige cuvee, from a powerful and concentrated vintage.

Even though the terroir and winemaking tools in Champagne are well placed to produce balanced and outstanding quality wines in the face of climate change, appellation laws have been modified to allow the region to adapt. As of this year, a new variety called Voltis B, which is strongly resistant to both types of mildew, can be planted at up to five percent of vines, alongside the seven existing main grape varieties. Minimum planting densities also have been lowered, although it will take time to renew vineyards.

“Climate change will be the defining feature of the future,” said Alice Tetienne, the cellar master at Champagne Henriot who has brought about qualitative changes to focus on organic and precision viticulture in the last few years, despite changes in ownership.

“We should be more present in the vineyard and more precise in treatment,” Tetienne said. “The development of vines is more heterogenous now. We don’t know what to expect. Now there are more extremes, like picking chardonnay in the Cotes des Blancs before pinot noir in Ay in 2022. In terms of quality, it’s important to be more precise in viticulture and picking the grapes.”

While acknowledging Champagne’s tradition of blending and its usefulness in mitigating climate change, I asked Lecaillon, the Louis Roederer winemaker, about the trend of bottling single-site, or lieu-dit, Champagne.

“I think it’s coming for people to talk more about lieu-dits in the Grand Cru [villages],” Lecaillon said, naming the Bonotte area in Ay as an example and calling it the “Musigny of Champagne.”

“These terroirs are so exceptional that you can maintain single-terroir bottles,” he said, referring specifically to chalky, mid-slope vineyards. “We are going back to the historic terroirs because they are resilient.”

Louis Roederer is also developing new plots to make lieu-dit bottlings of their still wine, Camille. Their bottlings of red and white Coteaux Champenois remain very limited for now (they plan to increase production) and are highly sought after – check out the latest releases from 2020 in the notes below.

James also had a sneak preview of a still red from Dom Perignon that he said reminded him of a cross of great Burgundy from the 1990s and top Alsace pinot of today.

In fact, one of our top 10 wines is produced from a vineyard on a limestone hill in Ay planted to pinot noir. The Bollinger Champagne Aÿ La Côte aux Enfants 2013 has extraordinary tension and focus, with structure from fine tannins, chalky minerality and subtle bitterness at the end. It impressed us just as much as their R.D. Extra-Brut 2008.

We only tasted nine still wines from the region this year and hope to taste more in the future. At the top end were Bollinger’s Aÿ Rouge La Côte aux Enfants 2019, Louis Roederer’s white and red Camille Hommage 2020, and Marguet’s Ambonnay Chardonnay 2020. These are fascinatingly cool, relatively low-alcohol and mineral expressions of pinot noir and chardonnay that can give grand cru Burgundy a run for its money.

But is the future of Champagne a return to still wines as it was in the past? It’s too early to say for us. One thing for sure is that still wines and classic Champagnes from the region will be seen much more at the table in the future and they seem destined to capture a bigger segment of the wine market.

– Claire Nesbitt, Associate Editor, with James Suckling, Editor/Chairman

Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.