If there's one cuvée every Champagne lover dreams of tasting at least once in their life, it's Salon. So imagine the chance to taste not one, but five vintages of this legendary wine, produced only 45 times since the house was founded in 1905.

And what an opportunity to enjoy these five wines alongside five more Blanc de Blancs cuvées from Champagne Delamotte, Salon's sister house.

This was the exclusive opportunity afforded some 80 lucky attendees who got tickets to this sold-out masterclass – the first one of the day at the 2026 Decanter Fine Wine Encounter New York City, held on Saturday 6 June in the beautiful surrounds of the Manhatta on the 60th floor.

Scroll down for notes and scores of the 10 Salon and Delamotte Champagnes at the DFWE NYC 2026 masterclass

Delamotte, Blanc de Blancs NV (magnum)

Delamotte, Blanc de Blancs 2018 (magnum)

Delamotte, Blanc de Blancs 2014 (magnum)

Delamotte, Blanc de Blancs 2012 (magnum)

Delamotte, Collection Blanc de Blancs 2008 (magnum)

Salon, Cuvée S, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 2015

Salon, Cuvée S, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 2013

Salon, Cuvée S, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 2012

Salon, Cuvée S, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 2007

Salon, Cuvée S, Edition 2020, Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 1997

Sister houses with distinct identities

Hosted by Cristian Rimoldi, the export director for both Delamotte and Salon, which have been part of the Laurent-Perrier group since 1988, this rare and exceptional tasting was a deep-dive into the complex and nuanced language of Chardonnay and the grands crus of the Côte des Blancs through the lens of these iconic sister houses

Through 10 remarkable and defining expressions of these outstanding terroirs, Rimoldi illustrated the commonalities between the two house’s approaches, as well as their distinct identities.

As background for the attendees, Rimoldi explained that the same technical teams are in charge of both houses, from viticulture to marketing. This allows for a nuanced understanding of the Chardonnay profile – from both owned and purchased vineyard plots – and subsequent decisions, particularly regarding the decision to release vintage cuvées.

For both houses, the wines are vinified in stainless steel tanks, but each has a different regimen regarding malolactic fermentation. It is done at Delamotte, while it is not encouraged – indeed prevented – at Salon, in order to preserve the delicate tension of the grape variety and terroir.

The dosage, made with cane sugar, is determined on a case-by-case basis, yet ranges between five grams per litre and 7.5g/L, with the exception of late disgorgements (Delamotte's Collection cuvée, and the ‘editions’ for Salon), which are brut nature, the extended bottling time providing the desired balance on the palate without the addition of sugar.

Champagne Delamotte

The first part of the tasting focused on Delamotte. One of the oldest houses in the Champagne region, founded in 1760, it specialises in Chardonnay, the grape variety at the heart of its four cuvées, where the average age of the vines is 40 years.

Champagne Delamotte also has HVE certification, which verifies its commitment to sustainable viticulture, and is moving towards organic farming trials

While it draws on the exceptional terroir of Mesnil-sur-Oger, Delamotte's philosophy, as Rimoldi told his audience, is the blending of the great crus of the Côte des Blancs. For the Blanc de Blancs NV, Avize and Oger are added to Mesnil, and for the pair of Blanc de Blancs Vintage cuvées, it is the three aforementioned crus plus Chouilly, Oiry, and Cramant.

‘We are the only house offering a blend of all six crus of the Côte,’ he emphasised. Added from 2008 onwards, Chouilly and Oiry ‘bring acidity, but also a structure similar to that of a Pinot Noir’.

The Blanc de Blancs NV is designed to be approachable, with the base vintage joined by 30% of reserve wine from the two preceding vintages, a 48-month aging period, and a more ‘inclusive’ dosage of around 7g/L.

The vintage cuvées, meanwhile, are crafted for complexity and ageing potential, and are undoubtedly the flagship of the house – albeit a discreet flagship, noted Rimoldi, often overlooked or little known by Côte des Blancs enthusiasts.

Contrasting vintage profiles

This was confirmed by comparative tastings of the 2018, 2014, and 2012 vintages. Their distinct identities were clearly identifiable – the ripeness of the 2018, the cool tension of the 2014, and the robust structure of the 2012 – especially since they were tasted in magnums. (They, like all 10 wines in the tasting, were aged under screwcap).

‘In terms of pH and ripeness, 2018 is similar to 1982,’ said Rimoldi when the topic of climate change was raised, along with its potential impact on a style as intense as Delamotte and Salon.

‘We need to take a step back and look at cycles,’ he explained. ‘We are obviously very aware of this issue. One advantage, however, is the improved health of the grapes compared to harvests that were previously very late and more complicated.

‘And we are fortunate to be on exceptional chalky terroirs with their water reserves, which are so important for the vines.’

The fact that the 2014 and 2012 were also in a period of post-disgorgement development highlighted the contrasting profiles of these vintages, both in terms of volume and aromas.

The comparison became even more interesting with the 2008 Collection. Delamotte offers late disgorgements for its Brut Vintage (dating back to 1964) as well as its Blanc de Blancs (1970, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1999, 2000, 2008).

Disgorged and then aged for barely a year, with no added dosage, the 2008 had the aromatic profile of a great Chardonnay, but with surprising power and density for a Côte des Blancs wine. A wine showing that Delamotte's vintage Blanc de Blancs is a benchmark, offering real value for money.

Champagne Salon

The second part of the tasting was devoted to the truly unique Salon Champagne. While its aesthetic – a single terroir (Le Mesnil-sur-Oger), a single vintage, a single grape variety – is no longer particularly striking today, Rimoldi reminded attendees that ‘Aimé Salon, a great lover of Burgundy, had this idea in 1905!’

Moving from the magnum format of the five Delamotte wines to the 75cl format for Salon – as well as going from the mature, brut nature 2008 Delamotte Collection to a young 2015 Salon, required particular concentration from the guests and was a true exercise for the palate.

But Rimoldi started with this latest vintage release followed by 2013, 2012, 2007, and 1997 in its 'second edition' version from 2020.

‘There is only one disgorgement when we release a vintage, and we do not indicate the date on the bottle,’ he told the masterclass.

‘However, we have decided to offer late disgorgements which we call Editions, in which case the disgorgement dates are mentioned. In terms of dosage, we are still around 5g/L to 7g/L grams, as for Delamotte, except for these late disgorgements, which are brut nature, as for Delamotte Collection.’

Making history

Only 45 vintages of Salon have been released since 1905 – 37 during the 20th century, but already eight since 2000.

Symbolic of the climatic consequences, 2015 was a sunny vintage so required less bottling time than 2014. This vintage has needed a longer time on the lees (tirage) and is still ageing ‘at a glacial pace’.

This is only the second time in Salon’s history it has made a non-chronological release. And once 2014 is out, it will also be only the second time that four consecutive Salon vintages (2012-13-14-15) will have been made, after the quadrilogy of 1946-47-48-49.Undoubtedly, the 2015 benefited from the water-retaining quality of the Mesnil chalk, mitigating the stress experienced by the vines in other Champagne areas, which can lead to vegetal bitterness on the palate.

The 2013 and 2012 vintages were remarkable examples of the Salon style, but very different profiles: 2012 with its mature, slightly more evolved structure, and 2013 with its crisp, chiselled freshness.

Salon has a reputation for closing up after a few years in the bottle and then reopening. This seems to be more the case with 2012 than 2013. The 2007, with a profile similar to the 2014, also benefited from a longer tirage period (11 years compared to the average of nine), and is now at its peak, deserving its nickname of ‘shining light’.

The masterclass concluded with a truly great 1997 (edition 2020), aged for 23 years and with no added dosage. Confirming again the importance of lees in defining texture and revealing density, the wine is surprisingly expressive.

Champagne Delamotte and Salon masterclass: 10 Blanc de Blancs cuvées

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Sunny summer days mean it’s time for seafood, but which wine to choose? Here are some golden rules – and refreshingly offbeat pairing suggestions.

How to choose a wine to pair with seafood: Advice from sommeliers

Remember the sauce

Chablis with fish, claret with meat – haven’t we come a long way since then? The seafood and wine pairings on offer from sommeliers these days range from Junmai Daiginjo sake to fino Sherry and from Georgian orange wines to bright, cherry-packed Sicilian Frappato.

There’s method in their madness, of course, with tried and tested matches adding another layer of complexity and flavour to your seafood feast, each enhancing the other – or at least that’s the theory.

There are some rules to follow, of course. There’s no point ruining a fine white Burgundy with a fat Hebridean scallop dressed with a vinegar-spiked beurre blanc when an off-dry Riesling will deliver just the right zingy balance, the sweetness riffing with the sauce.

So, there’s rule number one: match the wine with the sauce rather than the protein.

Think about acidity, weight and texture

Riffing with wine and food is something Fabio De Nicola embraces. The sommelier at Italian seafood restaurant Baccalà near London Bridge often likes to create balance through contrast.

‘For example, using high acidity to cut through richer or oily fish, or saline and mineral notes to highlight freshness and natural sweetness,’ he says, while pairing a vibrant yet creamy 2020 Verdicchio di Matelica Riserva from Casa Lucciola with a main of grilled prawns and squid with black lime and bitter greens.

Charlie Edwards agrees. Until recently the food and beverage director at Tom Brown at The Capital in London’s Knightsbridge, which was awarded its first Michelin star this year for its creative menu, Edwards believes you should always consider acidity when it comes to matching seafood and wine.

‘Acidity keeps things clean and bright,’ he says. ‘Shellfish and meatier fish often sit beautifully with wines that have a bit more body and mineral tension, like a Chardonnay from Burgundy, whereas lean white fish really shines alongside crisp, aromatic styles.

‘And look at the weight and texture of the dish,’ he adds. ‘Lighter, delicately cooked seafood tends to work best with fresh, precise wines that won’t overwhelm it, while richer dishes – whether that richness comes from the fish or the sauce – can take something with more depth.’

How has your seafood been cooked?

Another thing to consider is the cooking technique, says Marcello Colletti, sommelier at London’s swankiest new seafood restaurant opening, Lilibet’s in Mayfair.

‘If your fish is grilled, that introduces a smoky element, so think light reds such as Chilean País, Jura Poulsard or Oregon Pinot Noir. Or if the fish is pan-fried in butter, then look at rich Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc.’

Seafood with sake

And when you’re struggling to find that perfect match for your seafood dish? Consider sake, suggests Michele Orbolato head of wine and sake at London Japanese fine dining restaurant Luna Omakase.

‘Certain styles of sake contain umami, which gives them broader and more flexible pairing options with seafood,’ he says. ‘This allows sake to complement textures and flavours that can sometimes challenge wine.’

The preferred pairing for Luna’s ambrosial signature dish O-Toro tartare – bluefin tuna belly tartare, aged wasabi and caviar? A sparkling sake. ‘Masumi’s Origarami works beautifully with the dish, offering delicacy, freshness and gentle palate-cleansing qualities,’ enthuses Orbolato.

Keeping it simple

Want to keep it simple? Then stick to the well-trodden path of pairing coastal wines with seafood dishes – hello, Txakoli and the like. And if you’re stuck with what’s on offer at the local supermarket, there’s always good old Albariño – it works every time.

Five great wine and seafood pairings to try

Native oysters with vintage blanc de blanc Champagne

The richness of the Chardonnay matches the meatiness of the oyster, while the oxidative qualities of the ageing contrast with the salinity.

Fish & chips with manzanilla Sherry

You can’t beat a light, fresh manzanilla Sherry with fish and chips – served chilled, its bone-dry, salty, zesty profile cuts through the rich batter and even stands up to the vinegar

Grilled sardines with Assyrtiko

A punchy fish, especially when barbecued and doused in lemon, needs a punchy coastal wine with lots of citrussy acidity to cut through the oiliness and smoke – step forward Santorini Assyrtiko.

Turbot pil-pil with Godello

A recent discovery – high-acidity, minerally, aromatic Galician Godello easily stands up to the now-popular rich, garlicky Basque sauce.

Seafood platter with English sparkling wine

With its racy acidity and distinctive flinty minerality, English fizz shines served with towering tiers of simply cooked seafood.

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Most wine lovers would dream of having a cellar so capacious you could lose 18 bottles of Champagne in it.

Lyonnais chef, and French national treasure, Paul Bocuse, did exactly that, though.

Tucked away, forgotten in a corner of his restaurant’s cellar, were 18 bottles of Ruinart 1926, bought to celebrate the year of Bocuse’s birth.

The story of how these wines were tasted for the first time outside the maison is one marked with poignancy, though.

Not only were the wines only discovered after Bocuse’s death in 2018, but the dream to generously open some with friends of the maison belonged, originally, to Fréderic Panaïotis, the Ruinart Chef de Cave who tragically passed away in 2025.

Panaïotis and Bocuse tasted two bottles together, reporting a ‘remarkable’ wine of 'ripe fruit, apricot, candied lemon and candied orange' according to the house’s new Chef de Cave, Caroline Fiot.

An unexpected boon

Their discovery comes as a boon to the house, whose library is a little thin on older vintages, explained Fiot.

‘When Fred heard about the 1926 bottles it was big news because it is the oldest vintage stored in our cellars,’ she explained.

‘After the Second World War we only had 10,000 bottles left in the cellars because of all the wines that were taken by the German Army. Afterwards the philosophy was to sell the wines, not to keep them.’

At the time, there was no Dom Ruinart or Blanc de Blancs, arguably the most famous wines of the house today.

In fact, the concept of ‘prestige’ Champagnes did not really exist, and Ruinart’s main offering was, as was common in Champagne, restricted to a non vintage and – as discovered here – a vintage.

With little information available, Fiot was not sure exactly what the 1926 contained by way of a blend or ageing time.

Panaïotis did some laboratory analysis which showed the ripeness at harvest was an impressively ripe one, likely 'between 9.5 and 10 degrees' of potential alcohol at harvest, with the final release dosed at 17 g/l of sugar – dry for the time, but above today’s ‘Brut’ category.

A daring feat – fresh disgorgements

After the second fermentation in bottle, Champagnes rest for a number of years before being ‘disgorged’ – having the dead yeast removed.

It is a process which oxygenates and provokes ageing, both positive but ultimately potentially negative, in the wine.

Before disgorgement, though, the wine being ‘on lees’ can hold the evolution in check quite profoundly.

Save for the 1926 which was an original release, disgorged and dosed back in the 1930s, most of the wines were disgorged the very morning of the tasting.

Chef de Cave Caroline Fiot clearly senses the excitement of the moment as a small group is gathered at the maison to taste through a selection of Ruinart vintages ending with ‘6’, heading backwards from 2016 all the way to 1926.

'I am tasting these for the first time, with you!' she remarked.

The decision to pour fresh disgorgements of the older wine paid off, especially with a stunning 1956 which confounded even the most experienced Champagne tasters among us with its scarcely believable youthfulness.

By keeping these bottles undisgorged up until the moment of tasting, though, Ruinart rolled the dice – there’s no chance to add dosage, to prepare more like a ‘commercial’ release of the library wines.

We were tasting them completely naked, fresh, woken abruptly from their slumber.

Still, the technical hurdles for these wines to tackle to render drinkable, let alone enjoyable, wines for many, many decades longer than their creators would have imagined are considerable.

A moment a century in the making

A few – such as the 1966 – didn’t quite make it, victims in some cases of oxidation or degradation during the lees ageing stage.

Others, such as 1996 or 1986, were sound yet at points where the strengths of the vintages were starting to be outweighed by the weaknesses.

Anyone lucky enough to enjoy such bottles as the 1926, 1956 and 1976 will take the lows, though, to experience the highs; and this was a tasting where the most venerable bottles were the stars.

As we reached the 1926, Fiot was feeling the pressure – quite literally – as the foil was gingerly removed and the original cork gently prised out.

'Will we get a ‘pop?' she wondered.

The answer was as most expected, no. Pressure drops as Champagne ages, and this journey was simply too long.

What the wine absolutely wasn’t, though, was dead; yes, there is overt oxidation, yes plenty of sherry-type aromatics, yes the sort of flavours that, in a younger wine would evidently be considered flaws.

What there was, though, was life. Drinking pleasure. To someone lucky enough to have tasted many Champagnes of half its age rich in complexity, yet devoid of such essential drinkability, the 1926 was an unforgettable experience.

Will the current 2016 live quite as long?

As a very small release in Ruinart’s portfolio, few outside France even get to taste this cuvée.

What this tasting proved beyond doubt was that quality, and ageability, make it one worth hunting down.

Old Ruinart from 2016 to 1926

Wines are listed from youngest to oldest

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Deep in the Laurent-Perrier cellars, oenologist Constance Delaire stands in front of a row of eerily smooth, flawless tanks installed by Michel Fauconnet, the long-serving predecessor of new cellar master Olivier Vigneron.

‘There are no seams in the steel,’ she says, the tanks glowing like perfect mirrors in the dim light. ‘Michel was so afraid of oxidation that he had them made this way.’

Vigneron strolls in, looking like a man on a mission. ‘Sorry to miss the start, but I have been in the United States for three weeks and the wines require my attention.’

I remember this interaction eight months later, as Vigneron and I sit down in London to mark the release of the latest iteration of Laurent Perrier’s utterly distinct prestige cuvée Grand Siècle.

His admission as we settle in that he is a ‘chef de cave des caves’ – a cellar master of the cellars, as opposed to the media rooms and airport lounges – rings true.

The new release – Itération 27 – marks a year since Vigneron took charge at the family-run house.

Laurent-Perrier’s modern success is built on the legacy of Vigneron’s mentor, Fauconnet, a man very much in the same mould.

‘Every house has a different culture – some cellar masters are more communicator than technician,’ Vigneron says.

‘But here the job is about keeping the idea of what Laurent-Perrier is, to guard the history of the maison as I was trained by Michel, and to keep freshness and elegance – this is my work.’

Kept in reserve

Work, it must be said, is already familiar to Vigneron, who was appointed to the house in 2004 after four years as a winemaking assistant within Laurent-Perrier’s sister house De Castellane, just three years after completing his studies in Reims.

Hailing from Bergères-les-Vertus in the Côte des Blancs, where Vigneron’s wife grows and produces Champagne Perrot-Batteux, Vigneron is the definition of a continuity candidate.

Continuity may be the order of the day, but that doesn’t translate to standing still.

Today’s Champagne winemakers have to deliver consistency in extremes of climate arguably never seen before, relying ever more on their greatest asset – their store of reserve wines, whose varied attributes can complement whatever nature throws up.

‘Knowledge of the reserves is critical to the job,’ says Vigneron, whose cellar after a harvest is made up not just of 700 tanks of that year’s wine, but also a remarkable 300 of reserve wines from previous harvests. All of these must be tasted, assessed and directed to blends or further storage.

For anyone wanting to taste a snapshot of this work, in 2024 Laurent-Perrier released the Héritage cuvée (£65-£80), a wine with a makeup not normally seen in Champagne: 100% reserve wines, with no young base year in the blend.

‘In being all about the reserves, it keeps the spirit of Grand Siècle,’ Vigneron says, although there is ‘more freedom’ to make Héritage than there is with the multi-vintage Grand Siècle that tops the portfolio, which must be a blend of only three vintages.

Two years on from the Héritage release, it has developed beautifully.

‘We’re really seeing the effects of double maturation, first in the reserve tanks and then in the bottles,’ says Vigneron.

The art of the blend

It’s in the Grand Siècle itself, though, that Vigneron’s art reaches its pinnacle. ‘The aim is to recreate the perfect year,’ Vigneron says of the concept that has been in place since 1959, ‘not just to blend together three consecutive vintages.’

In theory only vintages bottled individually as Laurent-Perrier Millésime can be used as ingredients for Grand Siècle (although hawk-eyed fans may spot an outlier in the current release), but even these are kept back as separate components, presenting Vigneron with a highly complex blending task when the decision is made to create an iteration.

Itération 27 contains 65% of the generally sunny and very hot 2015 vintage.

‘Chardonnay had a lot of generosity and needed balancing with vintages of vivacity and tension,’ Vigneron says.

The vintages that make up the blend, 2013 and 2012, seem to elevate the wine far beyond where most 2015 vintages alone can reach. ‘It’s a work of great precision – we can’t force it.’

While the Millésime Brut 2018 bottling (£72-£80), which has also just been released to the market, seems likely to feature in future Grand Siècle iterations, it’s worth noting that Laurent-Perrier didn’t make vintage Champagnes from 2016, 2014, 2013, 2010 or 2009, all of which were widely released by other houses.

It’s a restraint that has served this discreet maison well.

‘The family ownership means there are no obligations,’ Vigneron points out. ‘The wines can lead us.’

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Zareh Mesrobyan, head of wine at Estelle Manor – a luxury hotel and country club with four restaurants, a bar, and a cafe – saw off competition from 28 other sommeliers to claim the coveted title.

This year’s competition was the first UK event hosted by Ruinart’s new cellar master Caroline Fiot, who took over following the untimely passing of her predecessor, Frédéric Panaïotis, last year. The jury was completed by Emma Denney, director of wine at Claridge’s and 2024 challenge winner, and myself, Natalie Earl, representing Decanter.

Second prize was awarded to Joanna Nerantzi, head sommelier at Raffles London at the OWO, while Grace Shih, head of wine at Restaurant St Barts, took third place.

The challenge centres on a blind tasting of four wines, in which participants must assess technical details – intensity, acidity, body, tannin, alcohol, flavour – to make an informed case for a wine’s potential origins, climate, grape variety and winemaking technique.

Correctly identifying the exact wines is a bonus, but not necessarily the goal; what the jury is looking for is the ability to reason precisely, and communicate why their assessment has led them to a particular conclusion.

At a time when answers are available at the touch of a button, the value of that expertise, and of the human connection it enables between sommelier and guest, has never felt more important.

This year’s theme was rosé, with the blind tasting spanning both still and sparkling examples. It served as a reminder that rosé is a category worth taking seriously, pushing participants to think creatively about food matching and the different scenarios in which these styles can be enjoyed at their best.

The wines in the blind tasted were revealed as:

• Nyetimber, Sparkling Rosé, England NV
• Eric Rodez, Rosé Macération Edition 37, Champagne NV
• Gusbourne, Still Rosé, England 2025
• Domaine Tempier, Rosé, Bandol 2025

The competition runs across nine countries around the world, with each national winner earning a four-day educational trip to Champagne, which includes tastings, vineyard visits and masterclasses.

The Ruinart Sommelier Challenge was created in 2010 by Panaïotis alongside the Ruinart winemaking team, with the ambition of building an international training and mentoring programme committed to supporting sommelier wine education.

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A glass fills with pale gold, capped with a meringue-soft mousse which subsides, slowly, to a simmering ring around the glass.

There’s little remarkable about the pour until a glance sideways reveals a number etched on the side of the bottle: 1979.

Sensing my astonishment, Lanson Chef de Cave Hervé Dantan raises a knowing smile. ‘The 1979 has always been like this!,’ he says. ‘From the first time I tasted it.’

Intense aromas soar up from the glass – cooked limes, coffee, kerosine, toasted nut and vanilla – it’s still gliding on a gently bubbly texture while serving up intense, complex refreshment.

Despite the fortune to taste older Champagnes on a regular basis, disappointments at the hands of overt oxidation, bad corks or careless storage are commonplace.

How come Lanson’s treasures seem to last so well?

Turning out the cellar

First in the list of reasons is a renovation of the house’s library that has proven itself a model for the region.

‘It took four years to do the restoration of all the wines going back to 1904,’ explains Dantan, who had two people working constantly on a highly technical project which included laser-tasting bottles for pressure (without opening them), colour and chemical analysis, cork analysis and, where needed, tasting.

‘We had to taste some 1914, some 1918 – it’s wasn’t torture, but we learnt so much about the potential of ageing these wines. It was an incredible process,’ he recalls.

Around 15% of the library was culled after all 200,000 bottles were individually checked.

The end result is that every bottle in the extensive library is now as close to guaranteed in condition as possible, tagged with its own ID card and, in the case of the Lanson Vintage Collection, available for collectors to purchase in their own personal private cellar space at the maison.

Unhurried development

While the vintage takes up most of the cellar, a separate archive exists for prestige cuvée Noble.

It was this precious store which was raided for an extraordinary ‘vertical’ tasting in April 2026, starting with the 1979 and proceeding through a series of both Noble Blanc de Blancs and Noble releases.

With the Chardonnay part of the blend put together first (and sometimes released as a standalone Noble Blanc de Blancs), 30% Pinot Noir from the Grand Cru village of Verzenay is added to complete the main cuvée, which spends around 12 years ageing in the cellars before release.

Even then, this is clearly not a wine in a hurry.

Four aged examples of Lanson Noble

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New York’s vibrant hospitality scene was celebrated last week at the Star Wine List of the Year 2026 awards. The event recognised the city’s leading restaurants and wine bars across 13 categories, highlighting the venues currently setting the benchmark for cellar depth, by-the-glass creativity and expert service.

Winners across the 10 international categories will now advance to compete at the Star Wine List of the Year Global Final, taking place in Sweden this June, hosted by Terra Skåne.

The awards were judged by a high-profile panel of industry experts, including Master of Wine and Master Sommelier Doug Frost, ASI Best Sommelier of Europe, Africa and the Middle East 2024 Mikk Parre, and renowned New York sommelier Yannick Benjamin, also a Decanter World Wine Awards judge.

Top cellars and by-the-glass innovators

Among the leading Gold Star winners was 2-Michelin starred restaurant Atera, which collected top honours for its extensive and meticulously curated cellar programme. Meanwhile, Benoit New York was recognised for the strength and diversity of its by-the-glass offering, proving that great wine doesn't always require pulling a cork on a full bottle.

Chambers was also highly celebrated, securing (for a third year) the Gold Star for the Sustainability Prize, a category of growing importance to both trade and consumers. Brooklyn wine destination The Four Horsemen featured prominently among the winners as well, underlining its continued influence on New York’s contemporary, low-intervention wine scene.

Other notable venues recognised across the awards included newcomer Saint Urban, New York institution Peasant and Coqodaq for its sparkling wine selection, alongside more regional category winners.

The results reflect the sheer breadth of wine experiences now available across the city, ranging from destination fine-dining restaurants to more compact, sommelier-led neighbourhood wine bars.

The diversity on offer is epitomised by Special Jury Prize winner Noreetuh, a modern Hawaiian restaurant in the East Village, offering wine lovers something out of the ordinary.

Precision and personality

In comments published alongside the awards, the judges highlighted both the rigorous quality and the distinct personality of the winning lists.

Alongside a strong foundation in classic regions and producers, 'New York reveals a dynamic and confident wine culture, where sommeliers embrace individuality, championing lesser-known regions and low-intervention wines with conviction,''said Parre.

Reflecting on the strength of the city's wine offerings, Frost MS MW added: 'New York does not starve for big wine lists, filled with the names of wines most of us can only dream of drinking, much less buying.'

For consumers, the awards offer a timely snapshot of where to drink wine well in New York right now, whether searching for classic fine wine vintages, grower Champagne, emerging regions or adventurous tasting flights.

A global wine hub

The Star Wine List results reinforce New York’s position as a global epicentre for fine wine, arriving just ahead of next month’s Decanter Fine Wine Encounter New York.

Taking place in Manhattan, the event will see top producers from around the world gather for exclusive tastings and masterclasses. Among the experts involved, award-winner Chamber's Pascaline Lepeltier will co-host a sold out masterclass with Champagne Salon & Delamotte.

A full list of winners and categories is available via Star Wine List.

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There are rich pickings for fans of vintage and prestige Champagne this summer as wines from one of Champagne’s few trilogies – sequences of three fine seasons where single-vintage wines are widely produced by the houses – start to hit the market.

A stellar trio

2018, 2019 and 2020 all featured hot, sunny weather, with subtle variations in rainfall and temperature meaning each has its own character.

For the time being it’s the 2018s that are starting to trickle through.

‘It was a fantastic vintage,’ says Charles-Armand de Belenet, managing director of Champagne Bollinger, which launched the 2018 La Grande Année in both white and rosé editions this spring.

‘After the nightmare of 2017, we had perfect weather, with lots of rain at the start of the year and then beautiful sunshine.’

There will be very few Champagne producers who did not make a 2018 vintage, not only because of the quality but also because the yields were among the most generous ever recorded.

The question marks in this vintage are in terms of depth, concentration and low acidity. The wines are instantly delicious, but are they sometimes a bit too easy-going?

As demonstrated, though, by this fine pair from Bollinger, as well as the latest vintage releases from Louis Roederer and Laurent-Perrier reviewed below, this is a year that, while certainly warm, sunny and approachable, offers more elegance than previous heatwave summers such as 2015, 2009, 2006 or 2003.

Pol Roger’s vintage rosé from the following year, 2019, widely viewed as the most complete and perfect of the trilogy – may be the most impressive rendition of this cuvée yet.

Unexpected stardom for an underrated vintage

It’s not only widely the fêted vintages to look out for, though. Charles Heidsieck offers only the fifth vintage of its prestige blanc de blancs, Blanc des Millénaires from 2017, a year widely regarded as a disaster in Champagne thanks to fast-moving acetic rot at harvest.

‘In mid August, the talk was of the vintage of the century,’ says Charles Heidsieck cellar master Emilien Erard, ‘but two weeks later, it was a disaster’.

A disaster, that is, almost everywhere apart from the chalky Côte des Blancs, where the resilient Chardonnay grapes on fast-drying soils escaped much of the rot and offered up a harvest of fine intensity and quality.

With the exception of isolated growers and an excellent, if low, production of Dom Pérignon, blanc de blancs will be the best style of the vintage – and Blanc des Millénaires will prove among the very finest.

Heading back in time

Two fine releases from Billecart-Salmon from the late-ripening 2013 season proved that this vintage, despite its bright acidities and reputation for relative austerity, can still yield quite approachable, welcoming wines in comparison to higher-acidity vintages of the past.

These are impeccably built cuvées that, while ready to drink in terms of balance, will gain much in terms of complexity from further cellaring.

In the meanwhile, enjoy more approachable releases such as Lanson’s excellent Noble 2012, as well as Henriot’s Cuvée des Enchanteleurs 2015, which reverts back to its much-loved historical name before the change to Cuvée Hemera in 2005.

Finally, after a Comtes de Champagne Rosé 2012 that was arguably the finest ever release of this lesser-known Pinot Noir-dominant rosé prestige cuvée comes the 2013.

An entirely different vintage in character yet one that, especially given a little patience, will prove this cuvée just as deserving as its more famous blanc de blancs sibling.

Latest Champagne releases

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At the table with Carlton McCoy MS

Carlton McCoy has spent decades immersed in the world of fine wine – from restaurant floors and cellars to overseeing some of Napa Valley and Bordeaux’s most prestigious estates.

Now, ahead of a special Heitz Cellar masterclass at Decanter's Fine Wine Encounter in New York on 6 June, McCoy sat down with Decanter to discuss how Napa Cabernet is changing, why collectors should rethink old assumptions around aging and what makes mature Napa wines such compelling bottles at the table today.

Join Carlton McCoy for a one-of-a-kind tasting of Heitz Cellar wines, including rare library vintages dating back to 1979 at Decanter Fine Wine Encounter New York on 6 June.

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South Africa’s leading Cap Classique producer, Graham Beck, has launched its first English sparkling wine. The vintage cuvée is the first traditional method fizz made outside of South Africa by the Robertson-based winery.

Made in limited quantities, Graham Beck Artisan Collection English Sparkling 2018 is a blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grown in Hampshire and West Sussex. The house worked with four growers to source fruit.

The project was overseen by Graham Beck cellar master Pierre de Klerk and former cellar master and COO Pieter ‘Bubbles’ Ferreira. It marks their final collaboration before Ferreira's retirement.

Speaking to Decanter, Ferreira explained that the idea of making sparkling wine outside of South Africa went back many years. ‘Champagne is obviously the ultimate benchmark for any winemaker in the sparkling wine world,’ he said.

‘But we also did study tours to Franciacorta; we’ve been in Cava country and I’ve been visiting the UK vineyards since the days when there were only three or four wineries here.’

However it was a trip to Düsseldorf wine trade fair ProWein in 2016 that made the idea take root. ‘South Africa was in the New World hall, and next to the South African stand was Wine GB – brand new. There were maybe 10 producers flying the English flag,’ he said, adding that hype around England’s sparkling wine potential also started around that time.

Later that year, Ferreira toured southern England’s key wine regions with winery owner Antony Beck, son of Graham Beck. Helped by Ian Kellet, founder of Hambledon Vineyard in Hampshire, they explored the unique geology of the landscape.

‘When we began studying the vineyards and chalk soils of southern England, we recognised the potential immediately,’ noted Ferreira. The chalk formations of the South Downs – similar to those found in Champagne – lend a distinctive mineral backbone to wines. While England’s cool maritime climate can produce base wines with vibrant acidity and pure aromas.

Nicknaming the project GBinGB – Graham Beck in Great Britain – the house decided to work with selected growers, rather than establishing its own vineyards, which as Ferreira explained who have been a 10-year project to achieve first vintage. Instead they set up contracts with growers, arranged access to cellar space in Hampshire and started to produce in 2018, which is widely regarded as one of finest English vintages to date.

‘2018 was a gorgeous vintage in the UK,’ confirmed Ferreira. ‘It was beautiful and ripe. It was sunny – a fantastic year.’

Ferreira and De Klerk visited the vineyards to determine harvest dates and were hands-on throughout vinification, assemblage, tirage, ageing and disgorging of the new cuvée. The parcels of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier were vinified separately, then assessed individually before the final blend was assembled.

A small proportion of the base wines underwent fermentation in neutral French oak, adding texture and complexity to the final cuvée. It was bottled early to maximise extended lees maturation, creating the signature Graham Beck creaminess.

‘The opportunity to bring Graham Beck’s philosophy of traditional-method sparkling winemaking to England is incredibly exciting,’ concluded De Klerk. ‘This wine reflects both the character of its English terroir and the precision and patience that define the House style. It’s a continuation of our pursuit of the perfect bubble.’

Graham Beck Artisan Collection English Sparkling 2018 will be released in the UK this summer with an RRP of £45.

Allocations will also be available in South Africa later in the year.

How does it taste?

Decanter's Regional Editor for South Africa, Julie Sheppard, reviews the new release.

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Across Champagne, the signs of what the French call la transmission – the handing down of family expertise – is underway.

Driving through the village of Louvois on the way to the more famous grands crus of Bouzy and Ambonnay, the pale stone frontage of Champagne Guy Méa flashes by.

Stop by to meet Franck and Sophie Moussié, though, and the bottles that greet you are now labelled Domaine Méa.

This is a common signal: showing that new hands are at work in this family enterprise that is split between some of the lesser-known crus of the Montagne de Reims in Champagne’s heartland.

They might be new hands, but they’re not necessarily complete revolutions.

‘Five generations of Méa have worked here,’ says Franck. The 2014 and 2015 vintages were made in conjunction with the whole family.

Then 2016 – the vintage where Franck and Sophie abandoned herbicides and pesticides and started their journey toward organic certification – was the first they made alone.

New hands, small changes

There’s a little less of a sense of rebellion or counter-culture among the next generation of vignerons of the Montagne de Reims compared to those of the Marne Valley or Côte des Bar, where history and prestige weigh less heavily on the shoulders of the wines.

In the Montagne de Reims, you’ll find fewer obvious signs of a ‘natural wine aesthetic’ (even though almost all of the young growers are veering toward organic and low-intervention practices).

There are also fewer ultra-modern labels, and fewer off-piste wine styles.

The fruit that comes from these villages hardly needs playing around with, though, and the young vignerons know it.

Take the grand cru village of Verzy, where Adrien Renoir is turning heads with his ultra-precise, direct and transparent Champagnes.

‘It’s the restraint, the salinity and the length that marks Verzy out,’ Renoir says as we taste through an expansive lineup of wines that includes a number of single-vineyard expressions.

Bold and rich styles have a place too

There’s no doubt that family holdings in these northern grand cru villages are the jackpot for any new vigneron.

Among those reaping the rewards is also Matthieu Godmé-Guillaume, who’s taking over and re-shaping his mother’s domaine (Champagne Sabine Godmé) in neighbouring Verzenay with a series of wines from the north face that embody a slightly bolder, richer winemaking style.

Even if most of the growers in the well-known grand cru villages keep an eye on the classics, there are two names in slightly lesser-known parts of the Montagne ready to elevate their sub-zones with one aesthetic – 100% oak fermentation.

Edouard Carré of Carré Frères promises to be the most significant new grower voice in the eastern Montagne de Reims Chardonnay villages since David Léclapart.

Carré is working with the deeper Chardonnay styles found here, as well as partial new oak fermentation, to yield a style of almost Burgundian aromatic richness.

Carré is keen to build a style of his own and not follow the crowd: ‘I didn’t do an internship at Sélosse, I don’t have a model…I just make my wines the way I like,’ he says.

Stick to your own identity

On the other side of the Montagne, Thomas Herbert and Marie-Charlotte Mignucci are finding their feet after steering the family domaine, Didier Herbert, in a markedly different direction (as Herbert & Co) with a smaller production, all-oak fermentation and strikingly unusual branding.

It hasn’t been without its bumps in the road, but like Carré, Herbert feels that the abundance of new growers in Champagne means you must stick to your own identity.

‘A lot of the young generation want to make a change from their parents...but we all have the same recipe, we’re all trying to make the same thing!’ he laughs.

Even if it has been a little slower than other parts of Champagne, the qualities that have made the Montagne de Reims the heart of Champagne’s grand cru terroir are speaking loudly through the next generation as they hone their styles.

They are all well worth discovering.

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The Grande Montagne de Reims has the largest concentration of grand and premier cru villages in Champagne. As such, it is not always the first place Champagne fans might think of for value.

This area runs from the premier cru village of Villers-Allerand, through the north and south-facing grand cru villages famous for Pinot Noir, and then curves round to Louvois.

The grapes grown here – and especially those grown in the grand cru villages themselves – are some of the most costly by the kilogram in all of Champagne.

They are sought after by Champagne’s maisons for vintage and prestige cuvées. When it’s easy to sell the fruits of your labour, what’s the incentive to produce entry-level Champagnes from these grapes?

Pride, more than anything. In the realms of terroir-specific Champagne, £50 may not quite bring home the calibre of wines it used to.

As our value Champagne focus highlighted last year, inflation and taxation mean that it’s only very large-scale producers and co-operatives that can afford to turn out wines under £45 in the UK any more, with only a handful of independent names faring well at that price level.

That being said, among producers with large holdings in top villages (and a real quality focus at entry level, not just on more expensive bottlings), it remains possible to track down wines that are not only fine value, but also offer a real sense of the shifting characters of Champagne’s vineyard heartland.

As our recent in-depth Champagne report highlights, the Grande Montagne can be thought of in three areas. Here is a selection of affordable options for discovering each terroir.

North-facing grands and premiers crus: Cool and restrained

Although these crus are mostly Pinot Noir, there’s also Chardonnay and Meunier here which retain the brisk freshness of these cooler slopes.

Independent family producer Duménil in Chigny-les-Roses makes graceful, delicate and accessible wines, such as the Blancs de Blancs made entirely from fruit from their home village of Chigny-les-Roses.

Looking to black grapes, the house of Cattier, based in the same village, turns out the fruit-forward, pretty and fragrant Blanc de Noirs Premier Cru, rounded out with 40% reserve wines in the blend.

For a little more chalky intensity and structure, independent domaine Michel Arnould in the grand cru village of Verzenay produces the good value, brisk Observation from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (among a number of well-priced cuvées).

While leading domaine (and producer of some of the top wines on the Montagne as a whole) Vilmart & Cie produces the superb Pinot-led entry-level Grande Réserve from Rilly-la-Montagne, boasting depth and polish from reserve wines in the blend.

The east face: Fine Chardonnay

Outside the Côte des Blancs, the villages of Trépail and Villers-Mamery are some of the finest for Chardonnay in the region.

Arnaud and Mathilde Margaine’s estate A Margaine is this area’s most celebrated independent producer, with the Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs a perfectly precise, aromatic and juicy Chardonnay that remains one of the best value Champagnes on the Montagne.

A great choice for those that tend to find blanc de blancs too light or acidic – here in Villers-Marmery, the deeper soils yield slightly fleshier wines, even with low dosage levels.

South-facing grands and premiers crus: warm and sunny

The sun-catching villages of Ambonnay and Bouzy offer up a more generous style of Champagne, although their fame means fine entry-level wines are hard to come by.

Star independent domaine Pierre Paillard offers up one of the south face’s top value Champagnes in its entry-level Les Parcelles.

It’s firm and intensely flavoured with oak-ageing complexity. It’s a perfect introduction to chalky, sunny Bouzy, one of the earliest-ripening villages in Champagne.

Six wines with a sense of the Montagne without the price tag

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Champagne is big, covering 150km from north to south and 120km from east to west. If you’ve got just one night in the region, then it’s best to stay focused.

You won’t get the whole picture in 24 hours, but whether you’re in it for a serious Champagne crash course or a relaxing escape, these two itineraries make a perfect first trip.

Itinerary one: Reims, Epernay and a 24-hour Champagne crash course

When it comes to sights, evenings out and general buzz, the city of Reims holds all the cards over smaller Epernay, and it’s here that you should stay overnight.

There are sound and comfortable budget options, but for one night only it’s worth heading centrally to options such as La Caserne Chanzy or Hotel de la Paix for amenities.

Drop your bags and head for Reims Cathedral in the daylight for a dose of history before the Champagne starts flowing.

An impressive 33 French kings were crowned here between 81 and 1825, although visitors today head for the stunning stained glass windows, ranging from 13th century originals to Marc Chagall’s famous 1974 replacements for glass lost during the Second World War.

Champagne celebrated 10 years as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2025, so combine history and bubbles with an essential stop in the chalk crayères to the south of the city.

Several fine Champagne producers use kilometres of cellars built around Gallo-Roman chalk pits to age their wines, with Ruinart, Taittinger and Pommery open for visits.

Both Taittinger and Ruinart offer impressive, recently renovated facilities that include tasting and hospitality, with Ruinart offering a series of rare cuvées by the glass to tempt visitors into the striking new pavilion designed by Japanese architect Sou Foujimoto.

Leave at least two hours to complete a tour and tasting from the centre.

Downtime and on to Epernay

Take your time to soak up Reims in the evening. Head to Place du Forum, and the excellent Wine Bar by Le Vintage, for interesting grower Champagnes by the glass, or sit out in the square in the summer to catch regular free concerts.

Dining options range from Michelin star splashes such as l'Assiette Champenoise, Domaine Les Crayères or newly starred Arbane, to lo-fi options such as Sacré Burger or Au Cul de Poule.

On day two, head to Epernay (travel light if you’re on the trains – there is no left luggage in either Reims or Epernay station).

Brush up on some Champagne essentials at the Musée du Vin de Champagne et d’Archéologie Régionale on the Avenue de Champagne (or the intriguing Pressoria in nearby Aÿ, also home to some famous names in Champagne and a couple of good dining options).

Of the Grands Maisons on or near the Avenue itself, Boizel, Moët et Chandon, Leclerc-Briant, Gosset and Perrier-Jouët all either offer full tours and tastings or fine hospitality.

Epernay is tourist-centered, and dining options are a little thin on the ground here – book ahead to Sacré Bistro for modern dining, or local favourite La Grillade Gourmande.

Itinerary two: Tune out and take it slow in the vineyards

The region has finally caught up with the demand for comfortable escapes in the vineyard landscape itself, from where it’s easy to arrange visits to Champagne producers you may not have had the chance to see from the main centres of Reims and Epernay.

The glitz and glamour of the five-star Royal Champagne is hard to beat, although it’s by far the most costly option in the region.

Located 10 minutes drive from Epernay, it has everything you’d expect from a hotel of this size and grandeur, with one of the region’s top Champagne lists in the Michelin-starred restaurant.

More affordable, though, is nearby Loisium, whose main attraction is a heated outdoor pool, spa and comfortable rooms (although dinner options in nearby Aÿ are better).

There are fine boutique stay-and-dine options in the attractive Château de Sacy and Champagne Palmer’s Domaine du Chalet on the Montagne de Reims, as well as Domaine Jacques Sélosse’s Les Avisés in the Côte des Blancs.

If you are out in the vineyards, don’t miss the opportunity to visit smaller grower-producers.

Top hotels can arrange this for you, but beware the fact that they may have commercial agreements to send guests to certain producers – it’s best to do your research first (read our various regional guides and reports).

Tour companies such as Sparkling Tour or A La Française offer small group tours of independent growers, or you can even arrange a private tour with companies such as Instants Champagne or Delectabulles (who focus on independent women-led Champagne houses).

If you’re arranging your own visits, bear in mind that smaller producers always need visits booking in advance, and will be unlikely to accept visits during August and harvest season (normally September, depending on the vintage).

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About Cristian Rimoldi

Cristian Rimoldi is export director for Champagne Salon and Champagne Delamotte in the heart of the Côte des Blancs. Born in Argentina, as a youngster he spent a year studying in the US before returning to his home country to embark on marketing and business administration studies in Buenos Aires. His appreciation of French culture eventually led to him settling in Paris, where he completed a master’s degree in business and marketing at the IAE-Sorbonne and, later, an MBA specialising gastronomy and wine.

Cristian Rimoldi will be hosting a masterclass at Decanter's Fine Wine Encounter New York 2026 on 6 June, featuring Champagne Salon and Delamotte wines spanning several decades.

At the table with Cristian Rimoldi

Meet Cristian Rimoldi and taste a rare line-up of Champagne Salon and Delamotte wines at the Decanter Fine Wine Encounter New York on 6 June.

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The low-slung chalky slopes to the south of Champagne’s capital city Reims are known simply as the Montagne de Reims.

It’s Champagne’s most northerly sub-region, but it has such a range of soil types and vineyard exposures that attempting to define any particular style is rather difficult.

As I sit in the tasting room at Huré Frères in chilly Ludes, a village a little southeast of the city of Reims, on the north face of the massif, the sun barely inches around the crest of the hill behind us to clear the January mid-morning fog; it becomes clear that this sweep of vineyard villages is a world within a world.

‘There’s nothing that sums it up better than the “opposite” villages of Ludes and Bouzy,’ says François Huré of Huré Frères contrasting his village with the famous grand cru located just 12km away on the Montagne’s south face.

‘Bouzy is one of the first places to ripen in Champagne, and Ludes is one of the last,’ he says.

This stylistic rift, between the brightness and tension of the north face and the power of the south face, plays out time and again over a grey January week spent crossing the ancient forest that separates the two areas.

When it comes to choosing which wines to buy from the Montagne, the first question simply has to be: team north, or team south?

The north face: Purity, patience & poise

Why have the famous villages of Mailly, Verzenay and Verzy historically been rated grand cru, despite their unfavourable northern exposure (orientation of the vineyards)?

Paul Froissart of Lafalise Froissart in Verzenay points out that the Montagne itself, a 30km-long wooded plateau standing at up to 298m, protects the vineyards (although he jokes that his visitors from Colorado and Canada ‘seem disappointed by’ its modest height).

‘When the vine is green, the storms come from the southwest, and the Montagne protects the grands crus of Mailly, Verzenay and Verzy from the huge atmospheric depressions,’ he explains.

Perhaps the people who set the vineyards here on their path to fame – from the monks of the Abbaye St-Basle de Verzy to the Marquis de Sillery in the 18th century – understood just how important it is to take shelter in this most northerly wine-growing climate?

Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon of Louis Roederer, which claims to be the second largest owner of vineyards in Verzenay, refers to the village as the Chambertin of Champagne, due to its wines being ‘structured, round in texture and saline’.

He says it’s ‘completely different’ from Verzy, which is ‘more delicate’ and sharper in profile, thanks to the chalky soil and the impact of the forest that encroaches on the vineyard.

Next door in Mailly, dominated by one of Champagne’s oldest and highest-quality cooperatives, Mailly Grand Cru, the exposure shifts a little to the west and we find ourselves in one of the latest-ripening villages in all of Champagne, famed for its taut, energetic Pinot Noir.

GH Mumm, which today owns Verzenay’s famous windmill, has significant historical vineyard holdings here, and there is evidence of the company placing orders for wines from the village dating back to 1727.

Cellar master Yann Munier points out the great value of the cooler north face today: ‘The villages allow us to retain a lot of elegance and ageability in the era of climate change.’

He chooses Pinot from Verzenay exclusively for the house’s RSRV Blanc de Noirs

The south: Generosity & power

In the era of climate chaos, the flipside is that the sunny, quick-drying, chalky south-facing villages of Montagne de Reims are some of the most charmed places in the region when the summer weather wreaks havoc – as it did in 2021 and 2024.

‘There was a strong sense of north versus south in 2021,’ says Quentin Paillard of Champagne Pierre Paillard in south-facing Bouzy.

‘When the sun rises at 6:45am here, the north has to wait until 7.30am,’ he says, explaining how Bouzy is able to dry off and warm up faster than the north when rain and cold strike.

The challenge here is more about taming the power of the south in hot vintages. This is something the top growers have long realised they can achieve in the vineyards through selection of the best vine material, better management of the soil and more attentive viticulture.

It’s not something that these traditionally profitable vineyards, dominated by the houses and cooperatives, have always prioritised, but even Ambonnay’s biodynamic pioneer Benoît Marguet admits that ‘things are changing’ when it comes to quality viticulture.

There’s one area, though, where power is the order of the day: reds and rosés. Bouzy and Ambonnay are the traditional homes of red Pinot Noir, either for still Coteaux Champenois wines – used for blending into rosé Champagnes – or indeed for deep maceration-style rosés such as that from Eric Rodez,

More than Pinot Noir

If the grand cru sites grab the headlines for Pinot Noir, the eastern-flank villages of Trépail and Villers-Marmery are – thanks to their exposure being similar to that of the famous Côte des Blancs – home to fine Chardonnay that still goes ‘underappreciated’, according to Mathilde Margaine of A Margaine in Villers-Marmery.

The fact that prestige cuvées such as Dom Ruinart and Rare go hunting for these Chardonnays (which Champagne Palmer’s Rémi Vervier describes as the ‘Meursault to the Chassagne of the Côte des Blancs’, thanks to their relative generosity) is testament enough to their quality.

Lastly, the cooler parts of the Montagne’s chalkier terroirs, specifically around Ludes, Chigny-les-Roses and Rilly-la-Montagne along the north face, west of Mailly, yield a must-try rarity in Champagne: Meunier.

Here it is not grown on the rich clays or sands, as it is in the Marne valley (the extensive sub-region running to the south and west of the Montagne) and Petite Montagne (west/southwest of Reims city), but on the same chalk of the grands and premiers crus.

According to François Huré, this brings more freshness to the grapes.

They’re certainly wines worth trying for anyone convinced that Meunier is simple, fruity, or unable to age.

Montagne de Reims vintages

The north/south split means that, even in Champagne’s increasingly yo-yo vintage pattern of extreme weather, there’s always someone on the Montagne that’s performing well.

Chardonnay is a little more steady in character, but when it comes to the south face it can be a fruitful strategy to look for cooler or simply more classically balanced vintages such as 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2021.

As far as the north face is concerned, the wines of the top producers here stand apart with their energy and freshness in the sort of heatwave vintages that can push the limits elsewhere, such as 2015, 2018 and 2020 (as well the forthcoming 2022).

The wines are often a little more angular in difficult years such as 2017 and 2021, but can be beautiful in clean, cool years such as 2013 and 2016, too.

On both sides of Montagne de Reims there’s one vintage to look out for above all others, though: 2019.

‘You could tell there was something special in the fruit,’ says Quentin Paillard, who remembers tasting the juices out of the presses at harvest time. ‘It’s an emotion we’ve never quite had since.’

North & south: Hewson’s pick of 30 Montagne de Reims Champagnes

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Nestled in the historic Champagne village of Aÿ lies one of the region’s most recognisable names: Champagne Bollinger.

A family-owned house since its inception in 1829, it is nearing its 200th anniversary in just a few years.

A staple on wine lists and shop shelves, it’s a brand we think we know well. Yet on a recent visit – the launch of Bollinger's classy prestige cuvée La Grande Année 2018 – I still discovered many things that surprised me.

Here are five facts you need to know about this iconic Champagne house.

1. Never-ending underground cellars

Underneath the quiet streets of Aÿ lies an astonishing six kilometres of cellars where wine bottles rest and age patiently in a naturally cold environment.

Descending down 48 steps, the cellar opens out into a maze of endless tunnels. One could easily get lost among the bottles attempting to navigate this rabbit warren.

Thankfully we were guided through by someone who knows them intimately.

2. The house still has a human riddler

While the majority of Champagne houses today rely on automated riddling machines, Bollinger still performs manual riddling for all of its special cuvées and vintage Champagnes.

The house currently has two and a half riddlers: two experienced riddlers and one in training.

Asked how many bottles he riddles in a day, riddler Olivier Lannez says: ‘about 45,000 bottles!’ his eyes gleaming with pride.

3. The last resident cooper in Champagne

Not only does Bollinger own the largest collection of barrels in Champagne, it has the only resident cooper in the region. Gaël Chaunut manages around 4,000 barrels single handedly.

And with a new barrel room just inaugurated, there will be another 1,000 barrels under his remit.

In a nod to traditional cellar practices, chestnut branches are sometimes fixed around the rims of the barrels.

This simple technique protects the cellar floors from scratches when the heavy barrels are moved around.

4. Bollinger makes a still red wine

It may come as a surprise that alongside its famous bubbles, Bollinger also makes a very rare still red wine.

La Côte aux Enfants is made from 100% Pinot Noir grapes, and comes from the legendary La Côte aux Enfants vineyard.

Given it is not sparkling, it cannot be labelled as Champagne, and is therefore labelled under the Coteaux Champenois appellation.

This 4ha plot was once divided between 50 different owners. Recognising the extraordinary potential of this land in the early 20th century, Jacques Bollinger gradually bought each small plot. Bollinger now owns the entire vineyard.

Although this plot of Pinot Noir has long been used for red wine production, both for the still red and for use in Bollinger's prestige La Grande Année rosé, the house also launched a blanc de noirs Champagne from the north-west part of the plot in 2012.

The red is only made in the best vintages, and feels close in style to a top-tier Burgundy: vibrant red fruit, savoury aromas and complex notes of truffle and forest floor. Heavenly!

5. Stepping into a time capsule

Hidden deep within the Bollinger cellars is a historic wine library, which it calls Galérie 1829, housing bottles dating back to the 1830s.

I reflected on how much history these wines must have witnessed, with generations of winemakers from the Bollinger family carrying forward its legacy.

To amuse myself, I first checked my birth year, then my mother’s, and finally my grandmother's, just to live in a moment where three generations of women in my family could share this quiet connection through time.

My ancestors, of Indian heritage, would probably be appalled at the thought of women drinking wine.

Madame Bollinger, though, would probably be proud.

Elisabeth 'Lilly' Bollinger played a pivotal role in making Bollinger into the iconic brand it is today.

After her husband, Jacques Bollinger, died in 1941, she took charge of the house during the Second World War.

A true visionary, she travelled to the United States after the war to promote her Champagne.

She brought in forward-thinking practises, such as late disgorgement and continued traditional ones like oak vinification, that the house still uses today.

So next time when you open a bottle of Bollinger, picture those winding cellars, the team of riddlers, the skill of the cooper, and Lilly Bollinger's legacy.

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Taittinger’s prestige cuvée Comtes de Champagne, made from 100% Chardonnay, is one of the region’s most recognisable wines. Lesser spotted, though, is its pink cousin.

The newly released 2012, however, is one of its most impressive vintages.

Scroll down for Tom’s tasting note and score for Comtes de Champagne Rosé 2012

‘The story is a bit different from the white version,’ says Taittinger cellar master Alexandre Ponnavoy.

While the white cuvée debuted in 1952, prestige-level rosé Champagne was a later development, and Comtes Rosé didn’t appear until 1970.

Although initially Chardonnay dominant, the rosé has evolved over time to become Pinot Noir dominant, reflecting a ‘fashion throughout the 1990s and 2000s for fruitier, crisp rosés with lots of red fruit,’ says Ponnavoy.

The Comtes Rosé 2012, though, signals a slight change in direction from some of the deeper, fruitier rosés released over the last decade.

This is a release of beautiful expressive fruit but, in comparison to 2011 for example, an ultra-refined level of silky polish and restraint that, although still a very different wine from the white, seems to approach it in delicacy.

Why is Comtes Rosé 2012 so good?

Ponnavoy has begun a process of refinement in the winemaking – especially the production of the red wine used in the blend – but believes much of this apparent bump in quality in 2012, quite evident over the more unusual 2011, is simply down to the vintage.

‘Between the warmth of 2011 and the minerality and freshness of 2013, you have 2012,’ he says.

It was a year that promised disaster in Champagne, beset by frost, disease and low yields. It was saved by a clement run up to harvest that yielded grapes of phenomenal concentration of both ripeness and acidity.

‘You have to imagine the wonderful potential of aging here,’ he says.

Indeed, ageing is something that keen-eyed Champagne fans might remark on. Taittinger has started keeping hold of Comtes Rosé a little longer than the white Comtes before release. This extra ageing on lees is also a factor in the 2012’s immediate quality.

‘After several tastings we decided not to sell after eight or 10 years, but after 12, to achieve all the complexity of the cuvée,’ he says, ‘It’s a long piece of work!’

Unlike some other vintage and prestige rosés, this is not a wine made simply by adding red wine into a white blend destined for another cuvée – something Ponnavoy believes would be a ‘huge mistake’ for a wine with its own identity.

Instead, Comtes Rosé is blended from the bottom up each vintage. All the grapes are sourced from grand cru villages in the Montagne de Reims and Côte des Blancs.

It is a rosé d’assemblage, or a blended rosé, made by blending in a specially made red wine to the white base before bottling for the secondary fermentation.

It is the village of Bouzy, famous for its southern exposure, chalk soils and historical red wine production, that appears central to the blend. ‘We have done lots of trials, but if you don’t use Bouzy you lose the identity of the wine,’ says Ponnavoy.

In 2012 the rosé proves itself to be much more than a sideshow to the white release; this is an age-worthy, remarkable rosé worth buying.

Comtes Rosé 2012 tasted and rated

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For all but the most obsessive – and patient – Champagne collectors, the question of assessing whether 1995 or 1996 turned out to be a better vintage might seem like purely an academic one.

Dig a little deeper, however, and there is much to learn for any Champagne or wine lover.

Scroll down for notes and scores for a clutch of 1995 and 1996 Champagnes

1996, together with 2015, can be considered one of the most significant turning points in modern Champagne.

Through the unexpected development of 1996 wines initially heralded as exceptional, the Champenois’ understanding of their climate, ripeness and flavour took a huge leap forward.

Ripeness signals

Although 1996 and 2015 are in some ways polar opposite vintages, they share a common thread: if you picked your grapes based on traditional notions of ripeness, you were probably picking too early.

It’s for this reason that Moët et Chandon cellar master Benoît Gouez called 1996 the ‘most overrated vintage ever’ in 2016, during the launch event of the Grand Vintage 2016.

This was the moment Champagne learnt that merely reaching 10 degrees of potential alcohol on paper did not mean the wines would taste ripe.

This turning point is recognised by Louis Roederer’s Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, who credits the success of 2008 – similar to 1996 in terms of weather – to the lessons learned in 1996.

‘If 2008 is great today, it’s because all the cellar masters were also there in 1996, and they knew the mistakes they made’.

The growing seasons

On paper, neither of these growing seasons were extreme. That being said, 1995 was undoubtedly more complicated due to warm and wet spells in the late spring and early summer. This initiated a fight against downy mildew that favoured more resilient Chardonnay.

Despite more than 500ha of Champagne being hit with frost in 1995, yields in both years exceeded 10 tonnes per hectare.

The real difference between 1995 and 1996 emerged over the mid summer.

In 1996, cool and cloudy weather kept acidities high. Yet a mild and clement September, with little disease pressure, little dilution and strong, dehydrating winds, resulted in an exaggerated concentration of sugar (which, in hindsight, led to early harvesting).

While 1995’s complications with mildew tarnished the feeling around the vintage, the relatively modest sugar accumulation was not accompanied by any lack of ripe flavour thanks to spells of warmth during critical periods in June and August.

The wines today

Acidity is certainly sky-high in the 1996s. However, as tastings over the last few years have shown, this is not, in my view, the chief issue with some of the wines.

Jancis Robinson MW wrote a decade ago that ‘the fruit was falling away’ in the 1996 Champagnes. That process today is even more evident.

In fact some of the wines – despite being harvested at pleasing sugar levels when acidity had dropped to an acceptable range – show a muted, green-toned fruit that proves that the flavours in the grapes simply weren’t ripe by modern standards.

When you add to that high dosages, prominent lees ageing and malolactic creaminess (which was common in this high acid year), plus a tendency to oxidise, the 1996s today too often come across as extreme, unbalanced and angular.

The 1995s, on the other hand, failed to excite at harvest because the grapes, on paper, were not exceptionally ripe – just 9.2% potential alcohol. By today’s standards this would be disappointing.

The wines, however, have told a different story, offering up-front pleasure, solid structure and good balance, if not the sort of electric acidity or dramatic palates of 1996s. Nonetheless, the 1995s are still in the running for the top wines of the decade.

The exceptions

Although the reputation of 1996 still suffers today, it’s certainly not a write off.

Indeed, Decanter contributor Charles Curtis MW writes in his book Vintage Champagne: ‘Connoisseurs are still arguing about 1996, but I refuse to come down on the side of the haters. Frankly, I have had too much pleasure from too many wines to rank this as anything but five-star status’.

In fact, among the wines tasted side-by-side for this article, the 1996 vintage was preferable in the case of Bollinger’s RD and Louis Roederer’s vintage cuvée.

Further experiences with 1996 buck the trend, including a delicious Pol Roger in magnum and a fabulous Billecart-Salmon Clos St-Hilaire tasted at the estate last year.

Unfortunately, there is not a huge amount of 1995 and 1996 Champagne left on the market. What’s more, there can of course be huge variability with Champagnes of this age due to the vagaries of storage conditions and cork quality.

In short, it’s a lottery, yet overall there are more hits from 1995 today. It will be 1996, though, that remains the more famous of the two – as well as the most controversial.

Tasted and rated: 1995 vs 1996 Champagnes

Many of the wines reviewed below were tasted at a vertical organised by Bordeaux Index in London. Prices and stockists have been listed where available.

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Rhône Valley

From the five Rhône wines that scored 100 points throughout 2025, two make this list, from either end of the valley and from slightly older vintages: Clape’s 2010 Cornas and Château de Beaucastel’s 2014 white Châteauneuf.

Both are still on the market, so prospective buyers or those lucky enough to have them in their cellar will be richly rewarded. M Chapoutier’s white Hermitage L’Ermite is a fine showing from the tricky and varied 2024 vintage, which you can read about in our extensive en primeur coverage.

While 2024 Hermitage reds are less powerful than you might expect, it’s the whites that reign supreme. Château de Saint Cosme’s Le Claux warranted inclusion here, not just for its score of 97 points but also as a great representation of the heights that Gigondas continues to reach – and Saint Cosme is undoubtedly one of the best in the appellation.

Given that he’s a winemaker who has been cited as inspiration for other winemakers I’ve spoken to more times than I can count, Eric Pfifferling’s wines are still possible to come by, although they do sell out rather quickly.

A wine that is ‘tremulous and beautiful’, Domaine l’Anglore’s Tavel Les Sables simply had to make the cut for this year’s Wines of the Year selection.

Champagne & rest of France

In just a short time, young Adrien Dhondt has become a second generation Champagne paragon: his wines are some of the most sought-after in the region.

Les Nogers Cuis 1er Cru is included here for the impression it made on Champagne correspondent Tom Hewson, who profiled Champagne Dhondt-Grellet on Decanter Premium online in October 2025.

Meanwhile, the rosé Champagne category offers a panoply of styles and colours, but as they’re often priced above their white counterparts, they’re frequently overlooked and misunderstood.

The reality is there are plenty of serious rosé Champagnes that are exemplary wines in their own right, showing great technical finesse, impressive complexity and potential for long ageing.

Laurent-Perrier’s Alexandra rosé is the perfect example of this; an icon of its style. Beyond Champagne, it will come as no surprise to see the Loire’s Sauvignon stronghold Sancerre on this list.

The 2020 Les Ruchons from Henri Bourgeois was one of Beverley Blanning MW’s favourites in her exploration of Sancerre’s revival. Finally, it may seem quite the coup to feature Bandol and Corsica alongside these French stalwarts, yet it’s thoroughly well deserved.

Corsican wines are increasingly turning heads, with more making their way to UK shores. And in our panel tasting featuring Provence whites, Bandol stood out as the most exciting source appellation.

Wines of the year 2025: Rhône, Champagne and regional France:

Wines from the Rhône are listed first, then those from around France

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Champagne Dhondt-Grellet: The young grower at the top of his game

Thomas Herbert

Herbert & Co, Champagne, France

By Tom Hewson

In the quiet village of Rilly-la-Montagne on the Montagne de Reims, a transition is underway that is emblematic of Champagne’s rapid influx of new ideas. Two brands – Didier Herbert and Herbert & Co – currently live under the same roof, made by the same man: Thomas Herbert.

Didier Herbert is Thomas’ family brand, founded in 1920 and run by his father since 1982. With its traditional livery and customer base formed around the (now struggling) French market and longstanding visitors to the winery (many of whom apparently come to collect his father’s novelty wire caps), this is what Thomas calls a ‘classical’ brand.

Next to the remaining bottles of Didier Herbert on the shelves lie signs of something utterly different: neon lights, striking monochrome graphics, unusual bottle closures. Giant blue tongues saying things like ‘1,000% Meunier’ sit framed on the floor, awaiting hooks. This is Herbert & Co.

Not all plain sailing

‘These two brands, Didier Herbert and Herbert & Co, are completely opposite,’ says Thomas, making it clear that the transition has not been a straightforward case of the keys being handed down the family line.

Thomas, who trained as an interior architect, returned to work with his family in 2016 without an understanding that he would take over, but after his father’s attempted sale outside the family fell through, Thomas and his partner managed to buy it.

‘We don’t do anything for Didier Herbert any more,’ he says. ‘In four or five years, the brand will be gone.’ It’s not only family negotiations that sometimes prove obstacles as generations switch over: the costs of making a wholesale change in the cellar is enormous.

‘We can’t buy the barrels – it would be crazy, €80,000 – so we lease them.’ The vineyards, too, have been modernised, in a process which started with Thomas stopping herbicide usage before he took over ownership. ‘I had to fight for this – before, the vineyards were like the moon,’ he says.

He’s no idealist, though: ‘I don’t do it to save the planet, it’s just part of our work.’

Although he has lost access to some of the vineyards his father used, he seems happy with the 30,000 bottles per year Herbert & Co is now producing. After all, having a giant tongue on your label might not be for everyone:

‘If I was selling a million bottles it might be a problem!’ he admits.

Leo & Roc Gramona

Gramona, Catalonia, Spain

By Ines Salpico

Resilience, tragedy and responsibility: three words that largely explain why and how Leo (Leonard) and Roc Gramona found themselves at the helm of their family’s eponymous traditional-method, longageing sparkling powerhouse in 2023.

The cousins – sons, respectively, of Xavier and Jaume Gramona (cousins themselves) – are the sixth generation to take the reins of the storied Penedès winery, whose origins go back to the 1850s.

A path, however, from which they veered at first, sceptical of being able to define their identity within the microuniverse of the family business.

Roc studied oenology and worked a series of harvests across the world, eventually settling at Cellers de Scala Dei, in Priorat; Leo went off to study engineering and work at corporate consulting. It would be another consultant working for Gramona who, in 2018, highlighted that continuity and lineage are the essence of the company.

The cousins were therefore challenged to join Gramona and become acquainted with its operations and ethos in the hope of one day taking up the batons from their respective fathers. Leo and Roc agreed, though not without reservations. In parallel, the cousins wanted to test – and prove – their abilities and stylistic leanings, in some ways defiantly different to their family’s.

Their personal project, L’Enclòs de Peralba (‘the white stone clos’), was thus born. The pair partner with small growers to produce a range of low-intervention yet technically exact wines that give centre stage to the terroirs and indigenous varieties of Penedès.

The project’s success gave the pair confidence while also consolidating their own stance at Gramona.

Transition & evolution

The years that followed were an intense if at times trying school: Covid-19 dried up the company’s main sales channel overnight and demanded quick and dramatic adaptation.

‘Then came the magical years of 2022 and 2023, with great sales and people really eager to go out and share a good bottle of wine,’ says Leo. Unfortunately, the sense of optimism and reprieve was fleeting.

Xavier Gramona’s untimely death, in August 2023, as the result of a fall, shook the family’s emotional foundations and precipitated leadership transition. The cousins were asked to step up and take over their fathers’ responsibilities, with Jaume Gramona moving to a strategic oversight position as the company’s president.

The transition was a period of intense emotions. ‘We really had to put our egos aside and understand where we come from and where we’re heading to collectively,’ Leo says.

‘It’s about surrendering to something bigger than ourselves.’ Roc agrees: ‘We all want to say something through the wines we make. But it’s important to overcome the “wanting to replace the father” stage and acknowledge the contribution of previous generations.

That’s when real transition and evolution happen.’ There are clear echoes of their fathers’ own journey: from a conventional, French-influenced winemaking approach to biodynamic pioneers and champions of a quality-first, terroir-driven philosophy that led them to leave the Cava DO and establish the Corpinnat group of like-minded producers in 2017.

They too found a mission that transcended their personal goals. As a result of the long ageing cycles of Gramona’s wines, the two cousins are still selling the wines produced under their fathers’ leadership.

‘It’s very humbling,’ says Leo. At the same time ‘there’s a curious – serendipitous or not – convergence between the work we’ve done at L’Enclòs de Peralba and the [future] direction of Gramona’.

A serendipity six generations in the making.

Next instalment: Santiago Deicas & Gianna Kozlović

Wines from a new generation:

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Champagne Dhondt-Grellet: The young grower at the top of his game

A list of the top 10 scores of the year and a list of the year’s most memorable Champagnes will always be slightly different.

While scanning through memories of the year, though, it wasn’t just the wines that I expected to be great – and were – whose flavours come rushing back, but wines that went a little against the grain.

Wines that reminded me that, whilst we learn easy-to-grasp takes on good and bad vintages, or winemaking techniques, or the style of certain producers, some bottles stick in the memory because they don’t quite fit the story.

A surprise from an underrated vintage

During a stunning vertical tasting of Rare that took place in Versailles in October 2025, a magnum of 1999 – not reputed as a fine vintage, and one whose wines today are almost without fail rather heavy – astonished not only the professional tasters present, but even the winemaker Émilien Boutillat.

No, it wasn’t the top wine of the tasting. But it was a great reminder that great bottles – and especially great magnums – can come out of the blue, and that writing off any single vintage in its entirety is always a mistake.

Aged rosé and hidden gems

Aged vintage rosé Champagne is one of the secret passions of bubble aficionados, and I had my itch scratched at Laurent-Perrier this year when a bottle of the rare ‘Cuvée Alexandra’ was brought out from the rather austere 2007 vintage (which was notoriously difficult for Pinot Noir).

On the same day, I drove over to Adrien Dhondt of Dhondt-Grellet and tasted a range of wines which included not only superb renditions of the very difficult 2021 harvest, but also a stunning 2019 from ‘Les Nogers’ in the lesser-known village of Cuis – a reminder that not all great blanc de blancs from Champagne is from the famous grand cru villages of the Côte des Blancs.

Late-disgorged delights from 2002

Going back in time, late-disgorged 2002s have provided some high points despite some original releases starting to tire.

Philipponnat’s 1522 ‘L.V.’ 2002 was a deep, complex star at a terrific vertical of this underrated cuvée at the estate this summer, whilst Pol Roger’s Vinothèque Blanc de Blancs 2002 is creamy, mature, immersive Chardonnay of pure hedonistic delight.

Innovation and southern discoveries

This was also the year of discovering the finest zero sulphite Champagne I have ever tasted in Nicolas Maillart’s swaggering, enveloping and complex ‘Les Loges’ Blanc de Noirs based on the 2019 vintage which topped our blind panel tasting in the December issue.

Heading to the south of Champagne for a regional report on the Côte des Bar was a highlight of 2025, with Etienne Sandrin’s incredibly vivid, sapid and elegant Pinot Noir making quite an impression across the range. His ‘Beauregard’ from 2020 was one of the most striking wines of the trip.

Potential ‘best ever’ releases

Two wines which vie for the titles of ‘best ever releases’ of their respective cuvées had to be featured, too – the imperious Dom Pérignon P2 2008, the late-released edition of one of the great Dom Pérignon vintages of modern times, and the most refined release to date of Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne Rosé from the fabulous 2012 vintage.

Finally, the year in Champagne was marked by the sudden passing of one its best-loved figures in Frédéric Panaïotis, Chef de Cave of Ruinart.

His 2013 Dom Ruinart epitomises all the work undertaken to raise this cuvée to the very heights of blanc de blancs – I was lucky enough to taste this with Panaïotis, and was left in no doubt that it is a wine Champagne lovers will be enjoying for decades to come.

Tom’s Champagne highlights of 2025: 12 wines to try

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Champagne Dhondt-Grellet: The young grower at the top of his game

An Antipodean Christmas barbecue

Smoke, char and spice can be cruel palate partners to delicate Champagnes. It’s a shame to bypass the bubbles entirely, though.

So look out for Pinot-heavy Champagnes that have perhaps seen some oak or a decent level of ageing (vintage level or above), such as Bollinger’s latest B16 limited edition vintage.

This is also great territory for juicier, deeper styles of rosé Champagne, where use of red Pinot Noir can bring a little substance and food-friendly grip to tackle those richer flavours alongside gentle dosage.

With the barbecue smoking away, it’s best not to over complicate things – Taittinger, Piper-Heidsieck, Veuve Clicquot and Laurent-Perrier offer more pronounced red-fruit expressions among the maisons, with Perrier-Jouët’s Blason Rosé also on juicy, easy-going form.

A traditional Japanese…KFC?

KFC reportedly makes one third of its annual sales of fried chicken at Christmas time in Japan, in a tradition that developed in the 1970s thanks to the efforts of Takeshi Okawara, who managed the country’s first outlet in Nagoya.

Arguably this makes Japan home to the most Champagne-friendly Christmas dinner in the world – crisp, salty and with minimal spice or sweetness, fried chicken is a well-worn Champagne match, especially with blanc de blancs.

There’s no need to think that fast food only merits entry-level Champagne, though.

To really hold up to the traditional accompaniments such as mac ‘n’ cheese, you might want a dash of ageing, or oak richness.

Long-aged prestige blanc de blancs, such as Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne, are a classic match, and vintage options such as Pol Roger Blanc de Blancs 2016 or Palmer Blanc de Blancs 2018 are also well suited.

Ripe, oak-influenced non-vintage grower Champagnes such as those from Carré Frères or Doyard would work beautifully.

A Greek feast

Mediterranean flavours call for Champagnes with some breadth and vinosity.

Dishes with red meat such as traditional roast lamb, roasted vegetable flavours, or tangy and savoury lahanodolmàdes (stuffed cabbage rolls) in a lemony sauce would all do well with Champagnes that have seen some ageing post-release, or a non-vintage with a healthy dose of reserve wine.

Bruno Paillard’s Première Cuvée features a perpetual reserve of wines going back to 1985 which really ups the depth and savoury, food-friendly character on the palate.

Avoid anything too Chardonnay-heavy or pure in style. Oak-aged cuvées such as Billecart-Salmon’s Brut Sous Bois will be perfect, too.

A Swedish ‘julbord’

There’s plenty to enjoy with Champagne when it comes to northern European and Scandinavian food, but one ingredient that sets the hazard lights flashing is vinegar; pickled herring is one to save for the schnapps.

Traditional salmon and potato-based courses, though, provide happier matches, although strong smoky/sweet marinades used for hot smoked salmon and gravlax will kill delicate Champagnes. So go for something Pinot Noir-forward (even rosé), fruity but not too vinous, and probably not zero dosage.

Of the houses, Charles Heidsieck’s Brut or Piper Heidsieck’s Essential Blanc de Noirs would be good bets.

Or look to the Aube, where rosés, such as Drappier’s Rosé de Saignée, would be perfect.

South Korean winter favourites

31% of Korea’s population is Christian, and while Christmas is a minor holiday here – there’s no traditional single holiday meal – the winter period features traditional foods such as manduguk (dumpling soup), tteokguk (rice cake filled with meat or seafood and served with clear broth), and sweet potato noodles.

South Korea has proven a growth market for Champagne, with the country’s umami-rich cuisine well suited to certain styles.

To match this, look for some savour from Pinot Noir and Meunier, longer lees ageing, or reserve wines, as the strong flavours in the food may kill very fresh styles.

Henri Giraud’s wines, such as MV20, could tackle many of these savoury, deep and even spicy layers.

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Tom Hewson, Eugenio Egorov and Sarah Knowles MW tasted 79 wines, with 2 Outstanding and 50 Highly recommended

Blanc de noirs Champagne: Panel tasting scores

79 wines tasted

Exceptional 0

Outstanding 2

Highly recommended 50

Recommended 26

Commended 1

Fair 0

Entry criteria: producers and UK agents were invited to submit their current-release blanc de noirs Champagnes (made from 100% red grapes: Pinot Noir and/or Meunier)

Scroll down to see the top-scoring wines from our blanc de noirs Champagne panel tasting

Celebrating Champagne’s heritage

Although Chardonnay is a mainstay of Champagne today, making blanc de noirs – or ‘white from black’ – from black-skinned Pinots is written in the region’s DNA.

The practice of gently pressing the bunches whole in order to extract almost no colour from the skins was a speciality in the time of Dom Pérignon (17th century), and today the Pinot Noir and Meunier grapes – especially (but not uniquely) from the regions of the Montagne de Reims, Marne Valley and Côte des Bar – yield a fantastic diversity of styles.

Among the wines scoring 90 points or more in this tasting were plenty of familiar growers and small houses.

Yet it was also exciting to discover the fine performance of lesser-known, limited-edition cuvées such as those from Boizel (see recommendations), Jacquart and Piper-Heidsieck.

Prominent houses such as Cattier and Nicolas Feuillate offered fine, approachable styles with a touch of toasty, buttery richness, while plenty of independent estates offered precise, invigorating and dry options.

High-end

‘The quality was, broadly speaking, very good,’ says Sarah Knowles MW.

‘We had very few poor wines at all in a large lineup. I also found the diversity of styles particularly interesting – from more traditional, long-aged, plum-scented wines through the more reductive styles (which I particularly enjoyed) and out to the more elegant, brighter wines.’

Eugenio Egorov was similarly impressed by the broad diversity of styles.

‘While the rich, Pinot-driven character is the signature of the blanc de noirs style, the influence of the winemaker plays a big role,’ he notes.

‘Through masterful choices in vinification and dosage, a vast spectrum of expression is possible. We encountered everything from rich, vinous Champagnes to elegant, precise and highly approachable cuvées.’

With plenty of top wines from the excellent 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020 vintages, which are all currently on the market, there’s no doubt that it’s a particularly good time to explore Champagne’s Pinot heritage.

What to eat with blanc de noirs Champagne, by Fiona Beckett

The Champenois have always paired Champagne with food, but many people still think of it purely as an aperitif wine – a wine for parties and other celebrations.

Not grower Champagnes, and not blanc de noirs, which are much more serious, complex wines that can happily be enjoyed through a meal.

Their typically rich toastiness makes them a natural for roast chicken, a richly creamy risotto with truffles – almost anything umami (think dishes with white miso and sesame). And because they’re effervescent – they share this with other Champagnes – they work with almost anything fried, including chips!

Lighter, fresher styles will work with seafood, especially grilled lobster and scallops.

In general, I find it helps to think of hot food rather than cold with wines of this weight and quality, though they would be spot-on with a pâté en croûte or rare roast beef.

In a restaurant, they’re perfect with the luxury snacks that increasingly kick off a meal, especially with anything on toast or in pastry. Oh and don’t forget Vacherin Mont d’Or; it’s a sublime cheese match for a blanc de noirs.

See all notes and scores from the blanc de noirs Champagne tasting

The judges

Tom Hewson correspondent for Decanter and Decanter Premium online, and a DWWA judge. A jazz musician, he writes on sparkling wine more broadly on the Six Atmospheres Substack

Eugenio Egorov is wine director at Six Senses London hotel & spa. Born in Ukraine, he began his hospitality career in restaurants in Italy and Florida, USA, before moving to London in 2014

Sarah Knowles MW is a buyer for The Wine Society, covering categories including Champagne. A DWWA judge, she has been a Master of Wine since 2015 and previously worked in buying for on-trade specialist Amathus Drinks

Blanc de noirs Champagne panel tasting results:

Wines were tasted blind

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It’s no secret that the Champagne market has continued to cool in 2025, with sales to August down 1.8% compared to the same period in 2024.

The good news for shoppers, though, is that the price hikes seen over the last two years show signs of softening as the region seeks to move some stock.

Scroll down for the latest Champagne releases tasted and rated in time for festivities

The festive period looks set to be a tempting one for buyers, with release prices of many of the grande marque prestige cuvées at least equal, but often lower, than those of last year.

Headline releases include Taittinger’s superb follow-up to the acclaimed Comtes de Champagne 2013, this time from the cool, focused, yet far from austere 2014 vintage.

This blanc de blancs, all from Chardonnay in grand cru villages of the Côte des Blancs, is already starting to open up, although the blossoming of the 2013 (which is still widely available) with only a couple of years of ageing post release is a reminder that even a little patience with this most reliable of prestige cuvées can pay off.

Although major new prestige cuvée releases have proven a little slow since the spring, perhaps due to the slowing market, there have been a few headlines.

Charles Heidsieck offers the second edition of its reborn, extremely limited and imaginative Champagne Charlie, which breaks the mould for high-end Champagne by blending a top quality, relatively youthful vintage (in this case 2019) with generous helpings of top notch reserve wines, here going back all the way to a Cramant Chardonnay from 1996.

Perfectly aged

For hunters of the rare and exclusive, Pol Roger continues its Vinothèque programme of perfectly aged vintages released direct from its cellar with some striking wines, including a beautifully mature 2002 blanc de blancs.

Fans of terroir-specific Champagnes can enjoy a brilliant duo of Meuniers from Billecart-Salmon (Rendez-vous No 7 and Rendez-vous No 8) that highlight the diversity of this misunderstood grape.

Bollinger replays the concept behind its B13 – a vintage release that isn’t a Grande Année due to its atypical makeup and style, but is still offered as a unique interpretation – with the compact, complex and invitingly priced B16, while Rare Champagne tackles the warm, dry 2015 vintage.

A selection of independent Champagne releases are also reviewed here. They range from a joyful and typically approachable vintage blanc de blancs from Legras & Haas, and top grower releases from rising stars in the Côte des Blancs: La Rogerie and Agrapart Avize, as well as Penet-Chardonnet in the grands crus of the northern Montagne de Reims.

Latest Champagne releases tasted and rated

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If Champagne is the ultimate celebration drink, then Champagne cocktails really make your celebrations pop. Is there anything better than offering your guests a sparkling cocktail in an elegant flute or coupe – or treating yourself to one before the guests arrive?

Decanter Premium: The perfect gift for a special wine lover

The great news is that many Champagne cocktails are super-simple to make, and involve little more than pouring your ingredients into a glass. ‘The Kir Royale is the ultimate easy-to-make sparkling cocktail,’ says Pietro Collina, bar director for Thesleff Group, a collection of top London restaurants and bars.

‘It is simply a mix of Champagne and crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) and a lemon twist. The beauty of this drink is that it works as a template for endless variations. Once you master the ratio, you can swap the cassis for apricot liqueur, peach or St-Germain (elderflower) to create your own signature Royale for the evening.’

Top tips for making Champagne cocktails

While it’s surprisingly easy to create drinks with wow factor at home, there are a few useful tips that will help you to make Champagne cocktails like a pro. First: think about your glassware.

‘Flutes are always popular for drinks like French 75s and feel very festive, while also having the benefit of preserving the carbonation in your cocktail longer due to a smaller surface area for bubbles to dissipate,’ advises Alex Leidy, general manager at Silver Lyan in Washington DC.

‘You can never go wrong with a classic flute; it preserves the carbonation the best,’ agrees Collina. ‘However, if you want to add a bit of theatre and vintage flair to your New Year’s Eve, use a cocktail coupe. It looks elegant, though you have to drink it a little faster before the bubbles disappear!’

Whichever glass you choose, remember to chill it. ‘Beyond matters of preference, the best kind of glass for a sparkling cocktail is a cold one,’ says Leidy. ‘Putting whatever glassware you intend to use in the fridge or freezer for a few hours before hosting will go a long way towards keeping the final drink at its most refreshing for as long as possible.’ It also gives your glass a festive frosted look.

What Champagne to use?

Don’t use vintage Champagne or exclusive cuvées in sparkling cocktails. The complexity of these prestige Champagnes will be lost in the mix. Instead choose a non-vintage (NV) cuvée. ‘An entry-level bottle from any reputable Champagne house is perfect,’ notes Leidy. Supermarket own-labels are also a good value choice.

Next think about the style of fizz. ‘Brut or extra brut Champagnes are best for spirit-forward or minimal-ingredient cocktails,’ recommends Carmine Marano, bar manager of Advocatuur, Rosewood Amsterdam. You can even choose an ultra brut, the driest style of Champagne to balance out sweeter cocktails.

There are six recommendations at the bottom of this article to give you inspiration.

Festive Champagne cocktails: 12 recipes to make at home

Air Mail

This tropical twist on the Champagne Cocktail (see below) first appeared in a recipe pamphlet published in Cuba by the Bacardí company in 1930. The Cuban air mail service began in the same year, which might mean the drink was invented then and named after it; but there’s no evidence to support that theory – nor do we know who actually created it. Nonetheless, it’s a great party drink. Although the original recipe called for Cuban rum, specifically Bacardí Gold, you can use any gold rum (aged one to three years). Try Bacardí Carta Oro (£23.94, Master of Malt). To make your own honey syrup, dissolve 5ml honey in 5ml warm water.

• Ingredients: 45ml gold rum, 15ml lime juice, 15ml honey syrup, Champagne to top
• Glass: Highball
• Garnish: None
• Method: Put the rum, lime juice and honey syrup in a shaker with ice and shake until your hands are cold. Strain into an ice-filled highball glass and top with Champagne.

Buck’s Fizz

The Buck’s Fizz was invented in 1921 at the Buck’s Club in London. Viewed by many as the classic breakfast cocktail, it’s also a great choice for festive celebrations thanks to its orange citrus taste. Exact quantities can be adjusted according to the size of your glass; just remember to always use a 2:1 ratio. Or for a lighter option, try a Mimosa. This twist on a Buck’s Fizz is a mix of equal parts Champagne and orange juice.

• Ingredients: 100ml Champagne, 50ml freshly squeezed orange juice
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: Orange slice
• Method: Pour the Champagne into a chilled flute, then pour in the orange juice.

Champagne Margarita

This recipe comes from The Cocktail Edit, a new book by Decanter contributor Alice Lascelles. ‘I can’t think of a combination more hedonistic than tequila and Champagne – and this one is wickedly good,’ she says. ‘It would be a great drink to kick off a party, or even as a thirst-quenching punch. Just lengthen with a bit of sparkling or still water and charge with lots of ice. For more elegance, serve in a coupe, undiluted, over a single ice cube.’

• Ingredients: 50ml tequila, 25ml lime juice, 12.5ml sugar syrup, 50ml Champagne
• Glass: Cocktail glass or rocks
• Garnish: Lime wheel
• Method: Shake the first three ingredients and strain over ice and top with Champagne.

Classic Champagne Cocktail

One of the oldest cocktails, tracing its roots back to the mid-1800s, this simple mix is a decadent treat – plus it’s easy to make. Simply build the ingredients in the glass and stir gently to mix. No cocktail shaker required. Try H by Hine (£22.75, The Whisky Exchange) a Cognac created especially for use in cocktails.

• Ingredients: 1 sugar cube, 2 or 3 dashes Angostura Bitters, 20ml Cognac, Champagne to top
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: None
• Method: Drop the sugar cube into a chilled Champagne flute and saturate it with the bitters. Add the Cognac. Top up the glass with Champagne, stir gently to mix and serve.

Cranberry Fizz

This is a seasonal twist a classic Bellini, which is made with Prosecco and peach purée. You can buy ready-made cranberry syrup, such as Routin 1883 Cranberry Syrup (£14.95, Amazon). But it’s easy to make your own fruit syrup if you have fresh cranberries. Put 200g of cranberries, 50g caster sugar and 150ml orange juice in a pan and
bring to the boil. Simmer for five minutes, then strain through a sieve and leave to cool. This will give about 200ml of purée, which will keep in the fridge for a week.

• Ingredients: 10ml cranberry syrup, 75ml Champagne
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: None
• Method: Pour the syrup into the bottom of a chilled Champagne flute. Slowly top with Champagne and stir gently to mix.

French 75

Created in 1915 at the New York Bar in Paris by Harry MacElhone, this gin and fizz combo delivered such a kick that it felt like being shelled by a powerful French 75mm field gun used in World War I. A few of these will certainly get your party started… Use a well-balanced London Dry gin, such as Portobello Road 171 (£30, Amazon).

• Ingredients: 60ml gin, 30ml freshly squeezed lemon juice, 5ml sugar syrup, Champagne to top
• Glass: Champagne flute or coupe
• Garnish: Lemon twist
• Method: Put the gin, lemon juice and sugar syrup into a cocktail shaker. Fill half way with ice and shake until your hands are cold. Strain into a chilled glass (flute or coupe) and top with Champagne. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Kir Royale

Starting life as a simple Kir or Kir Aperitif, this mix was created at the Café George in Dijon, where it was known as a Cassis Blanc and was made with Bourgogne Aligoté. But it was popularised by World War II French Resistance hero, Canon Félix Kir, who gave his name to the drink. Your Kir becomes Royale when you add Champagne instead of white wine – choose an ultra brut or zero dosage style to balance the sweet fruitiness of the crème de cassis. Try Gabriel Boudier Crème de Cassis de Dijon (£16.50, Soho Wine Supply).

• Ingredients: 10ml crème de cassis, Champagne to top
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: None
• Method: Pour the crème de cassis into a chilled Champagne flute and fill the glass slowly with Champagne.

Millionaire’s Martini

This Martini-with-Champagne mix harks back to the era of classic cocktails and has been revived by Sipsmith, the gin brand that kick-started the craft gin revolution in the UK. The recipe is taken from SIP: 100 Gin Cocktails with Only Three Ingredients, a great book that shines a light on simple gin mixes and is packed with cocktail history.

• Ingredients: 40ml London Dry gin, 40ml dry vermouth, Champagne
• Glass: Coupe
• Garnish: Lemon twist
• Method: Combine the gin and vermouth in an ice-filled mixing glass and stir until properly chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass and top with Champagne.

Old Cuban

One for fans of Daiquiris and Mojitos, this deluxe rum-and-mint mix was created by top bartender Audrey Saunders in 2001. An icon of the New York bartending scene, Saunders is best known for her work at the Pegu Club in Soho, though this recipe predates her time there. One of her skills was reinventing classic recipes, and this mix, which uses an aged rum rather than the white rum of a Mojito or Daiquiri, puts a decadent spin on those drinks, while adding the zinginess you’d find in a French 75 (see above). Try using Appleton Estate 8 Year Old Reserve Rum. (£32.50, The Whisky Exchange).

• Ingredients: 45ml gold rum, 22.5ml lime juice, 22.5ml brut Champagne, 15ml sugar syrup, 6 fresh mint leaves, 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters
• Glass: Coupe
• Garnish: Mint leaf
• Method: Muddle the mint leaves, lime juice and sugar syrup in a shaker. Add the rum, bitters and ice, then shake until your hands are cold. Double-strain into a chilled coupe and garnish with a mint leaf.

Sloe Gin Fizz

The Gin Fizz is a classic and simple mix of gin, lemon juice and sugar syrup, topped with soda water. For a more festive and decadent take, use Champagne and a fruity sloe gin, such as Hayman’s Sloe Gin (£26.50, Amazon). Use frozen blackberries or raspberries to garnish if you don’t have fresh ones.

• Ingredients: 50ml sloe gin, 25ml lemon juice, 10ml sugar syrup, Champagne
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: Blackberry or raspberry
• Method: Put the gin, lemon juice and sugar syrup in a shaker with ice. Shake until your hands are cold, then strain into a tall Champagne flute. Top with Champagne.

Sparkling Red Bells Ring

This fruity twist on a French 75 was created by the team at Mr Fogg’s bars in London. Simone Spagnoli, group bars manager, says: ‘For a show-stopper, the Sparkling Red Bells Ring is the perfect choice. Using the French 75 as a base, the addition of winter fruit and spiced red berries syrup is not only festive in taste, but also creates a vibrant red colour. Make this if you want to impress in-laws or friends.’ He recommends serving it as a pre-Christmas lunch tipple. ‘We use Moët & Chandon Impérial Brut NV Champagne, as the white fruit notes of pear, white peach and apple work particularly well with the spiced red berries,’ Spagnoli adds.

• Ingredients: 30ml St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur, 20ml apple juice, 20ml pomegranate juice, 10ml Monin Spiced Red Berries Syrup, 10ml fresh lime juice, 30ml NV Champagne
• Glass: Champagne flute
• Garnish: Red fruit
• Method: Put all of the ingredients except the Champagne into a shaker with ice. Shake until your hands are cold and strain into a chilled flute. Top with Champagne.

Twinkle

This modern classic was created in 2002 by Tony Conigliaro at The Lonsdale bar in London – and it has to be best name ever for a sparkly party drink. The original recipe used elderflower cordial, but St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur (£27.95, Amazon) works brilliantly and is more commonly used today.

• Ingredients: 30ml vodka, 15ml elderflower cordial or St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur, Champagne to top
• Glass: Champagne coupe
• Garnish: Lemon twist
• Method: Put the vodka and elderflower cordial (or liqueur) into a cocktail shaker. Fill half way with ice and shake until your hands are cold. Strain into a chilled coupe and top with Champagne. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Six Champagnes for cocktails

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Red grape Pinot Meunier, or just Meunier, as it is known in France, accounts for roughly a third of land under vine in Champagne, with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir making up most of the remainder.

The grape is recognisable in the vineyard due to its leaves, which have fine hairs resembling a coating of white dust or flour on their undersides, hence the name Meunier, which means ‘miller’ in French.

This Champagne workhorse has sometimes been considered a lesser cousin to its popular counterparts, rather unfairly, given its reliability in the vineyard.

The three key varieties all have different roles to play in Champagne and other sparkling blends.

Think of friends at a gathering. Chardonnay is the well-dressed guest reclining elegantly on the sofa while self-assured Pinot Noir brings structure and weight to dinner table discourse. Meunier, previously considered less stylish than the other two, bursts into the room with its youthful character and vivacious acidity, although it may leave the party early, being generally less recognised for its ageing potential.

But expressions in Champagne and beyond are showing Meunier is emerging as a successful single varietal in its own right.

Although less common, some producers make a Blanc de Meunier, a Champagne made from solely Pinot Meunier grapes.

Master Sommelier Roberto Duran, who advocates for the variety, references the ‘lighter, more elegant style’ of Cazé-Thibaut’s Naturellement Extra. He also highlights the oxidative style of Denis Salomon’s Histoire de Famille which ‘brings powerful new energy and dimension to Meunier Champagne pairings.’

‘It matches especially well with one of my favourite dishes, beef tartare, integrating with the slightly spicy seasoning and complementing the meatiness of the beef,’ Duran adds.

And Pinot Meunier’s glory doesn’t stop at the sparkling category.

Kent producer Simpsons Estate makes a 100% Pinot Meunier still white, brimming with ‘tangy ripe red apple and pear’ according to a recent tasting note from Decanter contributor David Williams.

Over the pond in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Decanter’s North American Editor Clive Pursehouse describes a red expression in the form of Eyrie Vineyards’ Dundee Hills 2022 as having ‘aromas of wild green strawberries, mint and alpine meadow herbs’.

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Champagne’s Côte des Blancs saw a significant arrival in 2025. Champagne Barons de Rothschild opened the doors of a new winery and cellar complex in an imposing, recently renovated 1874 building, complete with its own vineyard clos.

The winery may be new, but the house is not. Its opening in fact marks the 20th anniversary of the coming together of three branches of the Rothschild family in 2005.

Scroll down to see notes and scores for six Barons de Rothschild Champagnes

Time to ease in

Rather than rushing out of the gates, though, this has been a project born of patience.

‘When I joined in 2011, we only bottled 5ha,’ says cellar master Guillaume Lété, ‘we were just trying to learn about the terroir, about which villages we would use, how we would do vinification’.

It is therefore somewhat of an unusual achievement to have already reached today’s production of 600,000 bottles, in a region where true startups on this scale are rare.

It’s rare because buying vineyards is extremely hard. What’s more, signing grape contracts – especially for sought-after Chardonnay in the Côte des Blancs, which forms the backbone of the house’s style – is fought out in an environment of steep competition with other houses.

Fortunately Barons de Rothschild has at its helm a true Champagne native in Lété, who grew up in nearby Avize in a vine-growing family.

Lété has overseen the shift from the early days, when the wines were made under his guidance at the nearby co-operative, to the first vintage processed in the new winery in 2024.

Here he stores an impressive selection of reserve wines and a perpetual reserve system which lends considerable character to the non-vintage wines.

Consistent improvement

With impressive results in both Decanter panel tastings and the Decanter World Wine Awards 2025, there’s plenty of evidence to back up Lété’s belief that the wines have gained in precision over the last five years, too.

‘There was a big change with the wines based on 2018 for me,’ says Lété, whose local connections have proven important for grape sourcing.

Grapes are sourced from 90ha (8ha of which the house owns), and 90% is from grand and premier cru villages.

‘I prefer to work with growers who also make their own wine,’ he says, believing they have the right ‘philosophy’ to reach the maturity in the grapes Lété is searching for.

With the focus on Chardonnay, the style leans into cleanliness and purity, yet with approachability always in mind.

Even with the range entirely in extra brut, Lété says the ‘natural sucrosity’ of the grapes yields balanced wines that have shifted away from some of the more overt buttery/pastry notes encountered in earlier releases, to more purity today.

Partial oak vinification, too, plays a part in the complexity in blends of two of the high points of the portfolio: Brut Nature and Rare Collection.

Crème de la crème

The new project closest to the house’s heart, though, is also the one closest to home – the 0.52ha Grand Clos vineyard, situated outside the new winery.

Released for the first time with the 2019 vintage, it displays the decadent aromatics of ripe fruit of this grand Champagne vintage, bolstered by 100% vinification in oak.

‘Built like a Burgundy wine,’ says Lété.

Twenty years on, the excitement of a startup mentality still feels palpable among the small team here as they work on a highly promising 2025 vintage.

While patience will continue to be a theme behind the cellar doors, though, the wait to taste a clear vision of this young house’s ambition is over.

The Barons de Rothschild range:

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In some respects, vintage Champagne is an affront to the traditions of the Champagne region.

‘Champagne is a blended product,’ in the words of the Comité Champagne, the ruling body of the Champagne industry.

The region prides itself on the consistency of its wines, and the overwhelming majority of production are non-vintage blends – the Comité Champagne reports that vintage Champagne represented only 1.2% of exports in 2024. For seasoned wine lovers, however, this tiny sliver of the market can provide wines of spectacular quality.

It has long been held that vintage Champagne is produced only in exceptional years. Luckily for wine lovers, it has become more common in the modern era of global warming.

Making a great vintage

The best vintages unite ripe fruit and abundant extract with thrilling acidity and structure. In my book ‘Vintage Champagne: 1899 to 2019’, I awarded only three vintages a top, five-star rating since the turn of the millennium: 2002, 2008, and 2012.

All the factors came together nicely in 2012: ripe fruit (potential alcohol of 10.6% at harvest), crisp acidity (an average of 7.8 g/L), and very healthy fruit.

The year did not begin auspiciously, however. A spring frost that damaged 10–17% of the crop was followed by heavy rain that brought mildew and cool weather that disrupted flowering, all factors that limited the crop.

Fortunately, the rain stopped in mid-July, and conditions turned sunny and warm thereafter. The mid-August heatwave dried the grapes thoroughly, and harvest began on 10 September, producing a small crop of concentrated grapes with exceptional balance.

Results were superb throughout the region.

Chardonnay focus

Tasters at the Decanter Masterclass sampled exquisite wines produced from across Champagne made by houses both large and small.

The tasting opened with two Blanc de Blancs Champagnes, made exclusively from Chardonnay. The first was produced by the venerable grande marque producer Delamotte.

The house style is clean and rich; the base wines are fermented in stainless steel, and all undergo malolactic conversion to soften the crisp acidity.

The 2012 was a blend of 20% each of the five grand crus of the Côte des Blancs: Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Avize, Oger, Cramant, and Chouilly. The wine aged for nine years on its lees before being disgorged.

The second Champagne was the top-of-the-range Fleur de Passion from the small artisanal producer Diebolt-Vallois, who craft it from the grapes they grow on their family estate in the grand cru of Cramant.

Here, the base wines are all fermented in cask, and the malolactic conversion is not done, resulting in a zingy profile. This wine was also aged nine years before release, but the dosage with 3 g/L sugar was about half of that used by Delamotte, accentuating the wine’s crisp, refreshing nature.

A prestigious vineyard

From the Côte des Blancs, the tasting moved on to the Marne Valley and the incredibly famous Clos des Goisses from Champagne Philipponnat.

This exceptional wine is produced from a single steep vineyard in premier cru Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, whose vines are planted in thin, chalky soils that face due south and yield grapes of great concentration.

The 2012 was a blend of 61% Pinot Noir and 39% Chardonnay. Two-thirds of the base wines were fermented in small casks or larger oak uprights, and the rest in tank. Malolactic conversion was blocked, and the wine was given an extra-brut dosage of 4.5 g/L.

A generous contribution

The next stop on the tour of the vintage was the Montagne de Reims, where Champagne Laurent Perrier and Champagne Pierre Paillard both generously provided two wines each.

Laurent Perrier, based in the grand cru Tours-sur-Marne, showed its vintage 2012, produced from equal parts Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from top villages throughout the region, aged for more than nine years before release.

The house also contributed its exceptional Alexandra rosé. This wine, a blend of 80% Pinot Noir and 20% Chardonnay, is made in the saignée (or maceration) method and aged for 10 years before release.

Pierre Paillard showed two wines, both from the grand cru village of Bouzy, where the house is based. La Grande Récolte is half Pinot Noir and half Chardonnay from its oldest vines, fermented in cask and aged for a decade before being finished with a dosage of 1 g/L.

Les Mottelettes is a rare bird, produced from Chardonnay from a single vineyard near the heart of the village of Bouzy, mostly known for its Pinot Noir. Co-planted with the Chardonnay is a small amount of Pinot Blanc.

The far south

We finished our Champagne journey far to the south in the Côte des Bar. Concordance is the name of the flagship cuvée from Champagne Marie Courtin, where owner and winemaker Dominique Moreau is among the most gifted in the region.

This Champagne of extraordinary purity and freshness is truly a high-wire act, since she fashions it from a single parcel of biodynamically grown Pinot Noir vines, vinified in tank without the use of sulfur or any other additive during fermentation of the base wine.

The wine was disgorged for our tasting and received no dosage.

We concluded with two Champagnes from the outstanding firm of Drappier, established more than 200 years ago in cellars first constructed in 1152 by Bernard of Clairvaux.

Grande Sendrée is their blend of 55% Pinot Noir and 45% Chardonnay from an exceptional single-vineyard site. One-third of the grapes are fermented in cask and large oak uprights; the wine aged nine years on the lees before receiving a dosage of 4.5 g/L.

The last wine was Drappier’s Millésime Exception 2012, produced from parcels selected from throughout the region.

This diverse selection of Champagne amply demonstrated the thrilling quality and age-worthy character of the 2012 vintage, when lovely wines were produced by large and small wineries throughout Champagne.

The best of these wines will continue to improve for decades in the cellar, truly demonstrating the seduction of time.

Vintage Champagne 2012

Wines are listed in tasting order

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Production

'Méthode Champenoise' is the traditional method by which this sparkling wine is produced. Following primary fermentation and bottling, a second fermentation takes place in the bottle by the addition of a liqueur de tirage.

Non-vintage wines make up the vast majority of production in the region and are a blend of the latest vintage plus several older reserve wines. Non-vintage wines require a minimum of 18 months ageing before release.

In years where there is an outstanding harvest, producers may ‘declare’ the vintage and make wines using only grapes from that particular year. A minimum of 36 months maturation is required for these wines.

See all our latest Champagne content below:

From the moment you walk through the gates at Champagne Henri Giraud in Aÿ, there’s a sense that this is a house with a difference.

The celebrated grand cru vineyards of Aÿ are associated with names such as Bollinger, Deutz, Gosset and Ayala: houses that exude a sense of classicism and heritage with their cast-iron gates, quiet hallways and historic cellars.

Step into Henri Giraud, on the other hand, and you’ll see a Japanese water feature, twisting forms of glass and steel, and wall-to-wall colour.

There’s even a cigar room. In an age in which restraint is the default setting for everything in Champagne – from the wines themselves to the design and communication that surrounds them – Giraud wears its heart on its sleeve.

This is a house that isn’t afraid of a little hedonism, a little decadence, a little fun.

See Hewson’s notes and scores for six Champagnes from the historic house of Henri Giraud

All in the family

Despite the modernity, the Giraud-Hémart family has been present in Aÿ for 400 years. It’s an anniversary the house couldn’t pass up. About 1,000 bottles were popped at the celebrations in June.

It was the arrival of Claude Giraud during the 1970s that saw the first wines bottled under the name Henri Giraud after his father, who first began making the family’s own wines under the label ‘Giraud-Hémart’ following World War II.

In a relatively rare feat for a successful small Champagne house, it remains entirely family owned to this day.

‘After phylloxera and later the [second world] war, they installed themselves in the village and began to make their own wines,’ says Emanuelle Giraud, who today looks after the day-to-day running of the estate. ‘It has always been a family story.’

Claude was also the instigator of what has become the house’s signature: its combination of fine Pinot Noir from Aÿ with a highly original use of oak vinification.

This includes new barrels that the house commissions (and indeed helps produce) from the Argonne forest to the east of the Champagne region.

‘Claude began working with the forest in the 2000s,’ says cellar master Sébastien Le Golvet, the mastermind behind many of the house’s most imaginative developments over the last decade.

‘People know about the difference between oaks in different forests, but they didn’t look at the terroir of the forest itself – the difference between trees!’

In a strikingly detailed project, the house selects individual trees for individual barrels, even adjusting the kind of tree used – faster-growing or slower-growing, with different sun expositions and wood grain sizes – depending on the requirements of the vintage in the vineyards.

Next-level terroir

The goal is ‘not to make oaky wines, but to put together the terroir of Aÿ and the terroir of the Argonne’, says Le Golvet – much of the house’s work with wood is therefore focused on extreme-precision toasting to achieve nuanced profiles and avoid bitter, tough extraction from the barrels.

Together with a series of perpetual reserves – a solera-style system for blending and storing base wines across multiple vintages – tailored to each cuvée, the marriage between vineyard and forest yields wines of striking density, flavour concentration and gastronomic potential.

These wines have also shown constant evolution towards greater precision and refinement over the past decade. Champagne lovers who haven’t sampled Henri Giraud wines for a few years should not be wary of diving back in.

‘I always say the best wines of Giraud are tomorrow’s,’ says Le Golvet. Today’s wines, though, remain essential discoveries for anybody who is curious about modern Champagne.

Hewson’s pick: Six of the best Henri Giraud bottlings

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Data from international merchant Bordeaux Index and its LiveTrade online trading platform showed prestige cuvée Champagne prices were mostly down in 2025 so far, albeit Bollinger, La Grande Année 2012 was up 7%, but several wines saw better performance in the third quarter of the year (see table below).

Bordeaux Index’s Geraint Carter highlighted ‘more of a balance between buyers and sellers’, albeit talk of market recovery is premature.

‘We’ve had good success with vintage Champagnes with 15 to 20-plus years of age, which offer compelling value,’ he added, including Taittinger, Comtes de Champagne 2006, Dom Pérignon, Rosé 2002 and Bollinger, La Grande Année 2008.

Many prestige Champagnes remain more expensive than five years ago, despite falling back since a market bull-run peaked in late 2022. Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade, said its Champagne 50 index was down 4.6% in the first nine months of 2025 and 20.8% over two years, yet still up 16.7% versus September 2020.

‘The Champagne 50, unlike the broader market, remains a way off its 2020 lows,’ said Liv-ex’s September market report. ‘With its volatility decreasing and trade volumes remaining strong as the [broader] market begins to stabilise, a full retracement back to 2020 levels appears increasingly unlikely.’

Nevertheless, consumer interest in new releases has reportedly been patchy. Recent successes include Cristal 2013 in magnum, said Bordeaux Index’s Carter.

Miles Davis, market expert at Vinum Fine Wines, reported good demand for Taittinger, Comtes de Champagne 2014.

Lauren McPhate, partner at Tribeca Wine Merchants in New York, said: ‘The frequency of purchase of prestige cuvée Champagne has definitely slowed over the last year.’

Consumers were increasingly tired of some producers’ higher release prices, she said, also noting the recent 15% US import tariff on EU wines. ‘Champagne as a category has not slowed down, however. We’re seeing great turnover in our $50-$100 category, which tends to be heavy on grower Champagne.’

Fine wine & spirits specialist Bordeaux Index kindly sponsors this section of Decanter, and provides its view on the market here every issue. It can be found at bordeauxindex.com.

2025 has been a challenging year for prestige Champagne, though ultimately one not without encouragement. Trading is down around 10% year-on-year, slightly outperforming the broader fine wine market.

Factor in lower pricing and volumes are marginally higher than last year – a sign that engagement remains healthy despite understandable consumer reticence. The market now feels more balanced between buyers and sellers, with a notable trend of large stockholders selling through to retail buyers worldwide.

Mature vintages offering value and near-term drinkability have attracted deep and consistent attention – think Comtes 2005 & 2006, Dom Pérignon 2004 and Bollinger LGA 2008. Prices, meanwhile, are starting to reflect a mood of cautious optimism. Prestige cuvées have shown a modest uptick after continued declines in the first half of the year.

Yet given the scale of the pullback since the 2022 peaks, this remains a story of consolidation rather than resurgence. The worst may well be behind us, but recovery looks set to be gradual and ‘organic’. The market is steady and well tested, just don’t expect effervescence.

Bidders send venerable Scotch whisky sale to heady heights

Special bottlings of decades-old Scotch whiskies sparked strong bidding among collectors at the latest Distillers One of One charity auction, host Sotheby’s has said. Total sales hit £2.9m as bidders vied for 39 one-off lots in the 10 October auction, held at Hopetoun House near Edinburgh.

‘Bids [were] leaping in increments as much as £140,000 at a time,’ said Sotheby’s. Top lot was a 1.5-litre, spiral-shaped decanter housing The Glenlivet SPIRA 60 Year Old 1965 single malt.

It sold for £650,000, including buyer’s premium, far outpacing a pre-sale high estimate of £110,000. Other highlights included a 1.5L hand-blown decanter of The Glen Grant Eternal 77 Year Old 1948, which fetched £400,000 (high e: £120,000).

Auction proceeds will primarily benefit the Youth Action Fund, which supports disadvantaged young people in Scotland, said Sotheby’s.

Rothschild cellar yields 19th-century gems

A collection of 19th-century Bordeaux wines from a Rothschild family member’s cellar has been a highlight of New York’s autumn auction season. Zachys auction house said that every lot found a buyer after it offered the wine collection of the late Jacqueline (de Rothschild) Piatigorsky.

Total sales hit $11.16m and several lots soared above estimates.

‘The opening 35 lots set world records,’ said Zachys. A magnum of Château Lafite Rothschild’s celebrated 1870 vintage sold for $387,500, including buyer’s premium, eclipsing a pre-sale high estimate of $75,000.

That’s a record auction price for the wine in magnum, said Zachys. Lafite 1870 is regarded as one of the f inest wines of its era, produced just two years after the Rothschild family acquired this Bordeaux first growth estate.

Several magnums of the 1869 vintage also featured; the highest-priced selling for $231,250 (high e: $30,000). A three-bottle lot of Château Haut-Brion 1899 and a six-bottle lot of Château Giscours 1875 each sold for $106,250 (high e: $18,000 and $6,000 respectively).

Henri Jayer, Cros Parantoux 1999 Wines in the collection were acquired on release and had been stored in Pauillac ever since, said Zachys. According to Charles Antin, the global head of wine auctions at Zachys, the sale represented ‘truly a pinnacle of my wine-auction career.’

He added: ‘It was gratifying to see so many of our collector friends and clients respond to what was truly a once-in-alifetime offering of unmatched provenance.’

Disclaimer: Decanter’s Market Watch pages are published for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment advice. Wine prices may vary and they can go down as well as up. Seek independent advice where necessary and be aware that wine investment is unregulated in several markets, including the UK.

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The village streets of Champagne’s Côte des Blancs are tightly packed with domaines – squeezed into old houses and courtyards, jam-packed with tractors and lorries during harvest and bottling.

Yet one of its hottest addresses, Champagne Dhondt-Grellet, sits away from this hustle and bustle, in the quiet village of Flavigny on the plains, nestled behind an unassuming treeline.

Scroll down for notes and scores for six Dhondt-Grellet wines to try

It’s here that Adrien Dhondt, now in his 13th year in charge of the wines, has slowly been offering his take on what modern blanc de blancs can be.

Upon my first visit in 2022, the domaine, despite early success, was still very much a family farmhouse. It had played host to his parents’ domaine since they took their vineyards out of the village co-operative in 1986 in order to produce their own wines.

Descending into the vaulted cellars, though, reveals Dhondt’s intent with the wines nowadays: while his parents had produced traditionally styled blanc de blancs, the cellar is now stacked high with Burgundy barrels, the only steel tank in sight kept above ground for the family’s reserve wine.

Beside the farmhouse lies a smart new glass-fronted tasting room, with the smell of fresh paint still lingering.

Dhondt’s trademark baseball cap and shorts may have slowly given way to a touch more formality as he transitions from up-and-comer to established figure in the region, but he remains a winemaker of irresistible ease, charm and unpretentiousness.

Earlier this year, despite his increasing fame, heightened wine prices and decreasing availability, I arrived to find him engaged in conversation with a small group of visitors from Iceland, happily explaining the sort of Champagne basics that some similarly celebrated winemakers may feel to be beneath them.

In the vines

Dhondt’s vineyard holdings are geographically particular: the vineyards are spread not only over the famous Chardonnay region of the Côte des Blancs itself, but also in the Sézanne – the slightly sunnier southern neighbour.

The main focus, though, is on the northern part of Côte des Blancs via the famous grand cru village of Cramant, as well as Cuis and Grauves on the other side of the hill, both known to be cooler and later-ripening, with more varied soil types than the pure chalky strictness of the main Côte.

Dhondt released a limited run of wines from a négociant project under his own name in 2024, sourced from bought-in grapes from Avize, Oger and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger.

These are blanc de blancs with pristine, ripe fruit and 100% oak vinification that will appeal to anyone searching for Champagne-level refreshment with Burgundy-like body and complexity.

Although Dhondt himself is resistant to the ‘Burgundy with bubbles’ label sometimes applied to this new-wave style of Chardonnay, feeling it ‘denigrates Champagne’s terroir’.

The style never strays, though, into overt, sweet-toned oakiness or vinosity, despite his professed love for ‘wines with a bit of substance and concentration’ and the continual rotation of new oak in the cellar (which can form up to one third of the barrel usage in some cuvées).

Some of the wines’ crunch and freshness is likely down to the cooler positioning of many of the parcels, and perhaps also down to viticulture, which avoids pesticides, herbicides and synthetic chemical treatments, although is not certified organic.

Geographic imprint

All of Dhondt’s wines today have a strong geographical imprint. The more approachable Sézanne fruit forms the basis of the new entry-level Roc Solare cuvée (from a 2021 base), which replaces the Dans un Premier Temps cuvée.

Terres Fines comes from the cooler villages of Cuis and Grauves, tending to offer a little more precision.

Although more affordably priced, both present fully-realised, expressive examples of Dhondt’s developing style. Both excel, too, at capturing the freshness of the 2021 harvest without some of the angularity sometimes present in this complicated year.

Being a specialist in Cuis, Dhondt also makes Les Nogers, one of the few single-vineyard bottlings of this village.

There are two bottlings from the grand cru of Cramant. The cuvée called Cramant is a blend of two parcels, one in the lieu-dit Les Garennes, and the other from Les Longues Verges which is affected by the court-noué virus which concentrates the grapes.

‘It’s not the stereotypical style for the village,’ Dhondt says, pointing to the richer, deeper soils found in the northerly part of the village.

Le Bateau, also from Cramant, is a single, mostly south-facing 0.14ha site that has the more classic, chalky terroir. The current release of 2019, which Dhondt calls ‘the most beautiful vintage in Champagne in a long, long time,’ is already ascending to the ranks of Champagne’s most sought-after, rare and pricy blanc de blancs.

New to the lineup is the blanc de noirs La Côte aux Vents (‘the windy hillside’), which plays on the fact that Cuis and Grauves have always historically had a fair percentage of the red grape Pinot Meunier planted.

It’s testimony to Dhondt’s viticulture that, even in the torrid 2021 season, he harvested ripe and expressive Meunier, yielding a beautifully sprightly curio in one of the region’s most compelling blanc de blancs portfolios.

Six Dhondt-Grellet wines to try

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Champagne needs little introduction, nor does it require a celebratory occasion to pop open — but this Champagne Day, held annually on the 4th Friday of October, we can think of a few exceptional examples worth discovering.

Year after year, results from the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA) attest to the quality of Champagne, and the 2025 competition was no exception with 18 Gold, six Platinum and three Best in Show medals awarded to this classic region.

Champagne’s three Best in Show medal winners are of particular note: Barons de Rothschild, Rare Collection Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut 2014, Lanson, Noble Brut 2008 and Rare Brut 2012. We haven’t featured three Champagnes for our Top 50 Best in Show in recent years, but all three wines impressed the Co-Chairs. It’s the second consecutive year we see 2014 vintage for Chardonnay in Champagne receiving the highest accolade. The wine is incisive, darting and mouth-watering, the judges noted.

Scroll down to see a top selection of 96-97 point Champagnes from DWWA 2025

Vintage Champagnes saw a majority of top medals awarded, with 20 of the top 27 (Gold, Platinum and Best in Show winners) awarded to sparkling wines from a vintage. The 2018 vintage stands out with five Champagnes awarded 95+ points from this vintage.

Magnum bottles also saw a huge success this year with two wines receiving top medals. Platinum-awarded Henriot, Cuve 38 Réserve Perpétuelle Edition 6 Blanc de Blancs Brut NV was praised for its complexity and pure understated elegance, while Gold-awarded Saint-Réol, Brut Grand Cru 2008 was described as refined and nuanced.

Below find a selection of 96-97 point Champagnes, well worth discovering, from the 2025 Decanter World Wine Awards, with many more to discover at awards.decanter.com

Champagne Day: 96+ point wines to try

Best in Show

Barons de Rothschild, Rare Collection Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut 2014

Best in Show, 97 points

For the second year in succession in our Top 50 Best in Show, the strength of the 2014 vintage for Chardonnay in Champagne (and notably on the Côte des Blancs) is gorgeously evident in our winning Blanc de Blancs. It wasn’t an easy summer (July was cold and wet) but great Champagne, remember, is made by a long, lingering and luminous growing season, with heat an almost optional extra. A fine spring and a glorious September teased Chardonnay to the sort of delicate perfection that you can taste in this bottle. Even the mousse is delicate, while the aromas evoke the wet-stone, seashore and seaweed notes typical of Extra Brut rather than the sweet creaminess of luxurious Brut Blanc de Blancs. The palate is incisive, darting, driving, aquiline and mouthwatering. As you sip, once again it’s wet stones, spring leaves and plant sap that come to mind: fine vineyards, clearly. No hurry to drink: this bottle would love a little more time in a cool cellar. Alcohol 12%

Lanson, Noble Brut 2008

Best in Show, 97 points

In contrast to the 2014 Champagne vintage described above, the 2008 vintage was looking like a dud – until a fine August and a wonderful September saved the day. The lesson is the same, though – great Champagne is the consequence of a painstaking, incremental ripeness that inches rather than races towards harvest. This wine is a classical blend of 70 per cent Chardonnay with 30 per cent Pinot, and its decade-and-a-half on lees have paid huge dividends. It’s hard to get the kind of aromatic complexity you’ll find here – that refined synthesis of fresh autumn fruits with bread dough, baking fruit tarts, nuts and preserves – in any other way, and it’s achieved with great assurance and panache. The palate is layered, but after the aromatic symphony you may be in for a surprise: this is very darting, athletic and lively in the mouth, and the resonant acidity is almost a pole of interest on its own. Yes, it’s fully aged – but there’s no hurry to drink, either. Alc 12.5%

Rare Brut 2012

Best in Show, 97 points

We haven’t featured three Champagnes for our Top 50 Best In Show in recent years (though this was the case in both our 2019 and 2020 DWWA competitions), but this blend of 70 per cent Chardonnay and 30 per cent Pinot Noir proved as hard to ignore as its two peers. The 2012 vintage pattern differed from those of 2008 or 2014 – but still demanded both patience and fortitude. April frosts were cruel this year, and for those whose vineyards jumped that hurdle, the cold spring weather that followed was unencouraging. Late summer, though was very dry, and just warm enough to create the nervy ripeness blenders love. You can almost smell that tension in the aromatic restraint of this Champagne, but keep looking and you’ll find much to relish, too, including flowers from the Chardonnay and root spice from the Pinot. Age mingles the two seamlessly. Once in the mouth, this is a Champagne of structure and proportion, and it’s here, too, that you can see the skill and restraint with which all the elements have been chamfered and jointed into place. Alc 12%

Platinum

Deutz, Amour de Deutz Brut 2014

Platinum, 97 points

A delicious interplay of honeyed toast, ripened fruit and smoky savoury notes with a soothing, creamy mousse and svelte acidity. Exuding charisma and typicity with a thrilling swirl of oyster shell minerals at the end. Alc 12%

Esterlin, Cléo Blanc de Blancs Brut 2012

Platinum, 97 points

Everything that a vintage Blanc de Blancs should be: exquisite vertical tension on the finely beaded mousse, seamless acidity and a gorgeous flavour profile of honeyed brioche and lemon confit with a lick of apple crumble. Alc 12%

Esterlin, Éclat Brut NV

Platinum, 97 points

Rapturous orange blossom, yellow apple and lemon tart aromas linger deftly over the nose and harmonise delicately with the creamy mousse. Smooth and subtle with a decisive freshness from the acidity and crunchy mineral finish. Alc 12%

Henriot, Cuve 38 Réserve Perpétuelle Edition 6 Blanc de Blancs Brut NV Magnum

Platinum, 97 points

A triumph of complexity: rippling beads of smoky saline and vibrant lemon tension drive through the centre and resolve with abounding ripened white peach and toasted nuts, ending with a succulent chalky finish. Pure understated elegance. Alc 12%

Mandois, Clos Brut 2012

Platinum, 97 points

A succulence of smoky lemon, honeyed yellow apple and quince fantails over the nose uniting with the plush toasty warmth of the palate, weaving around the racy lime zest acidity. Finely textured, long and immersive. Alc 12.5%

Telmont, Blanc de Noirs Brut 2015

Platinum, 97 points

Bursting with red fruit and floral splendour wrapped around a sweet vanilla pastry cream cushion. Mouth-filling and rich with an orange rind acidity to sustain and a zing of gingerbread spice on the long finale. Alc 12%

Gold

Piaff, Blanc de Blancs Brut NV

Gold, 96 points

Blissful aromas of pear, peach and lemon panna cotta magnify over the palate, flirt with the chalky mineral acidity and unite on the glistening seashore ending. Alc 12%

Taittinger, Prélude Grands Crus Brut NV

Gold, 96 points

Opulent tropical and stone fruit interweaves with lush hazelnut and creamy brioche which spills out onto the silky palate. Poised and fresh with an expansive mousse. Alc 12.5%

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame Brut 2018

Gold, 96 points

Whistle clean strawberry fruit aligns beautifully with a throng of plush peach, apple tart and ginger biscuit characters. Lifted and driven with a buttery texture and chalky finish. Alc 12.5%

Search all DWWA 2025 results

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Krug cellar master Julie Cavil has worked with highly regarded composer, pianist and producer Max Richter to develop a Champagne and music ensemble entitled ‘Every Note Counts’.

It’s the latest chapter in Krug’s tradition of interpreting the character of Champagne cuvées through music, in collaboration with renowned artists.

Richter, known for blending traditional orchestrations with modern electronic elements, worked with Cavil to compose individual pieces of music inspired by three Krug Champagnes from the celebrated 2008 vintage.

Each composition is intended to accompany its corresponding cuvée, as well as reflect its character, the Champagne house said.

‘Clarity’ is a soloist piece composed around Krug, Clos d’Ambonnay 2008, which is created from a 0.68-hectare walled plot of Pinot Noir.

‘Ensemble’ is chamber composition created around Krug 2008, ‘evoking the ideal circumstances of the year,’ Krug said.

Meanwhile, ‘Sinfonia’ has been inspired by Krug Grande Cuvée 164ème edition. This Grande Cuvée is created around the 2008 vintage, but is assembled from 127 wines spanning 11 different years back to 1990.

‘These musical pieces recompose the singularity of the 2008 harvest,’ said Krug.

It said the three Champagne cuvées would be presented together under the name, ‘Krug from Soloist to Orchestra in 2008 (Act 2)’, with 200 cases produced. 

It added the pieces of music will be released in February 2026, alongside a documentary following Krug and Richter’s collaboration, from Reims to a recording studio in Oxfordshire.

There is a long tradition of comparing Champagne to the composition of classical music at Krug, which was founded in 1843.

Olivier Krug, sixth-generation family member of house, which is today owned by LVMH, previously told Decanter, ‘My great-grandfather had a salon de musique in the 1920s and 1930s.

‘When I joined [the business], my dad explained Krug to me using musical analogies. He said his role was the conductor.’

Beyond the concept of translating specific cuvées or growing seasons through sound, there has been research into how music may influence the taste and enjoyment of wine.

Susan Lin MW recently wrote about her work exploring music’s potential to enhance the sensory experience of tasting wine.

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Tuscany is an ongoing bright spot in a weak market, according to international merchant Bordeaux Index and its LiveTrade online trading platform, and recent vintages of top Super Tuscans have led trading on this Italian region’s wines in 2025 (see chart below).

While Sassicaia remains a top seller, Bordeaux Index’s Geraint Carter said recently: ‘Tignanello and Solaia [have] continued their strong upward trend, thanks to a compelling mix of quality, value and pricing stability.’

Shaun Bishop, CEO of California-based merchant JJ Buckley, told Decanter: ‘We’ve seen good demand for great Super Tuscan brands like Sassicaia, Solaia and Tignanello, and prices have been steady versus last year.

However, he said that ‘lesser-known brands, even with high critical acclaim, have seen softer demand’. Italy’s Piedmont has seen softer demand across the board, he added.

US import tariffs, set at 15% on EU wines in August, could be a factor to watch, although it was too soon to properly assess their impact. Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade, highlighted Tuscany’s relative price stability in a declining market.

The Tuscan portion of its Italy 100 index dipped 1.3% in the first half of 2025, while the Piedmont portion dropped 5.6%. The multi-region Liv-ex 1000 index fell 4.7%. Despite recent decline, Liv-ex’s Italy 100 was up more than 12% over five years.

Rare Masseto collection comes to auction

Auction house Christie’s said it will offer an ‘extremely rare’ private collection of leading Super Tuscan Masseto during a wider, London-based online wine auction to run from 2-16 September.

It includes large-format bottles and features every Masseto vintage from 2020 back to the debut 1986 wine, ‘which is labelled Ornellaia Merlot Toscana Vino da Tavola’.

Noah May, head of wine and spirits at Christie’s for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said it was an exciting opportunity for collectors to explore the wine’s evolution.

He agreed that Tuscany has stayed ‘pretty strong’ on the market and he highlighted the top wines’ relative value, alongside quality in the bottle.

Fine wine & spirits specialist Bordeaux Index kindly sponsors this section of Decanter, and provides its view on the market here every issue. It can be found at bordeauxindex.com.

Tuscany has held up well against the broader fine wine market backdrop of an extended period of drifting prices. This is interesting as the price pattern since 2021 was comparable to that of Champagne, which has some logic given the brand-driven nature of both regions and their appeal to new market entrants.

However, Tuscany has proven more resilient, perhaps because of the smaller volumes involved. Interest in the excellent 2021 and 2016 vintages may have helped. Piedmont has seen a more substantial decrease in demand, but this is not unusual, it remaining a region where activity waxes and wanes.

Despite the quality of the wines, it sits towards the periphery of the fine wine trading space. It is difficult to know what would change the context of Piedmont activity – it is not a region that new buyers generally turn to. Lower prices may attract attention, however.

Wine trade gala The Golden Vines branches out to Miami

Exclusive wine and spirits event The Golden Vines will take place in the US for the first time, organisers have said. Miami will host the annual event’s fifth edition from 7-9 November.

A packed schedule includes masterclasses, lunches and gala dinners featuring leading producers, from Château Lafite Rothschild to California’s Harlan Estate. Created by Liquid Icons, a group founded by the late, great Gérard Basset OBE MW MS and friend Alexander A ‘Sasha’ Lushnikov, tickets to The Golden Vines weekend cost $15,000 per person.

A charity auction of ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experiences will be held to support the Gérard Basset Foundation, which focuses on education, training and mentoring. Crurated, an online fine wine members’ platform, also said it will offer bespoke benefits to a select group of Golden Vines clients via a partnership with Liquid Icons.

Champagne launch sparks global interest

A first single-plot cuvée from Champagne Barons de Rothschild has recently debuted at auction in London, and offered collectors a fresh name to watch.

A three-bottle collection of ‘Le Grand Clos 2019’ sold for £16,120, including buyer’s premium, via auction house Bonhams in London in July – signalling the new cuvée’s global launch.

Respectively numbered 0001, 0002 and 0003, the bottles have been signed by three central members of the Rothschild family: Benjamin de Rothschild, Eric de Rothschild, and Philippe Sereys de Rothschild.

Only 1,788 bottles of Le Grand Clos 2019 have been produced, by chef de cave Guillaume Lété. Grapes are sourced from a small ‘clos’ spanning 52 ‘ares’ (0.52 hectares) and acquired by Champagne Barons de Rothschild in 2013.

The plot is located in the premier cru village of Vertus, where the 20-year-old company also recently inaugurated a new winery and cellar building.

‘This historical release inspired global collectors, and we received strong interest from every continent,’ said Amayes Aouli, global head of wine and spirits at Bonhams.

Proceeds from the sale will go to Guy Laliberté’s One Drop Foundation, a charity helping to provide safe drinking water, and the winning bidder is also entitled to a tour of the new Vertus winery, plus lunch or dinner with a Rothschild family member.

Several Champagne houses have released new iterations of top cuvées in recent months, including Pol Roger’s Sir Winston Churchill 2018, and Krug Grande Cuvée 173ème Edition.

Disclaimer: Decanter’s Marketwatch pages are published for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment advice. Wine prices may vary and they can go down as well as up. Seek independent advice where necessary and be aware that wine investment is unregulated in several markets, including the UK.

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A court in Reims sentenced ex-winemaker Didier Chopin, 56, to prison earlier this month over his role making and selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of fake Champagne.

Chopin, from the Aisne area, was jailed for 18 months with another 30 months of prison time suspended. He was also fined €100,000, and his holding company was fined €300,000, according to French media.

However, Chopin’s lawyer confirmed to Decanter that he would appeal against the court’s ruling, as also reported by several French media outlets this week, including France Bleu.

At the recent trial, the court heard of a fraudulent scheme estimated at several million euros.

Flavourings were added to still wines sourced from France’s Archèche region and also Spain. Wines were then carbonated with carbon dioxide gas, before being passed off as genuine Champagne, the court heard.

It was reported that more than half a million bottles were produced in the scheme, which ran between 2022 and 2023, although a more precise figure wasn’t given.

News of the appeal created fresh uncertainty around the case. Chopin’s lawyer had previously argued for a suspended prison sentence, according to France 24 / Agence France Presse.

At the recent trial, regional wine body the Comité Champagne joined the prosecution as a civil party.

Following the court verdict on 2 September, Charles Goemaere, managing director at Comité Champagne, said: ‘We welcome this ruling, which severely condemns a serious attack on the common heritage of Champagne winegrowers and houses. We are determined to defend the integrity of the Champagne appellation worldwide.’

In a separate court case in July, three people were convicted in a high-profile trial regarding human trafficking of Champagne harvest workers.

The Comité Champagne also joined the prosecution as a civil party in that case, reiterating its ‘zero tolerance’ approach to offenders.

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The countdown is on for the Decanter Fine Wine Encounter London (DFWE) returning to The Landmark on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 November. and this year’s masterclass line-up is shaping up to be one of the most exciting yet.

Friday will open with an intimate tasting featuring 70 exceptional producers alongside exclusive VIP lunches. On Saturday the spotlight shifts to three unmissable masterclasses, each designed to inspire wine lovers of all levels.

These exclusive 75-minute sessions will bring together world-renowned winemakers, rare vintages and some of the most respected names in the world of wine.

2012 Vintage Champagne

Opening the day, Charles Curtis MW – one of the worlds leading Champagne experts – will present a deep dive into the stellar 2012 vintage, hailed as one of the finest of recent decades. Shaped by adversity yet celebrated as a triumph, 2012 produced champagnes of remarkable character and longevity.

Guests will explore a hand-picked line-up including bottles from Laurent-Perrier, Pierre Paillard, Delamotte, Diebolt-Vallois, Marc Hébrart, Drappier, Marie Courtin, Philipponnat and more.

2012 VINTAGE CHAMPAGNE MASTERCLASS

Château Smith Haut Lafitte

In the afternoon, Bordeaux takes the spotlight with a vertical tasting from Château Smith Haut Lafitte, led by Head Winemaker Fabien Teitgen. This guided tasting will showcase both white and red wines spanning 25 years, including two aged magnums from 2005 and 2000.

This masterclass will highlight the estate’s exceptional Pessac-Léognan terroir, it’s commitment to sustainable viticulture, and the age-worthy elegance that defines Smith Haut Lafitte wines.

CHÂTEAU SMITH HAUT LAFITTE MASTERCLASS

Journey to the Tuscan coast with Antinori

The final masterclass offers a rare chance to experience the Antinori legacy with Alessia Antinori, sixth generation and the future of this legendary family, and Renzo Cotarella, CEO & Chief Wnemaker.

Together they will guide guests through four decades of Bolgheri brilliance, featuring two of the estate’s most iconic wines: Guado al Tasso, a Cabernet-led blend and Matarocchio, a 100% Cabernet Franc made only in exceptional years. Expect top-scoring vintages such as Guado al Tasso 2022 (94 pts) and Matarocchio 2013 (96 pts).

ANTINORI MASTERCLASS

With only a limited number of seats available, these unmissable masterclasses are expected to sell out quickly. Whether you’re an expert or exploring wine for the first time, this is your chance to taste, learn and be inspired by the people shaping the world of wine today.

Essential information

DFWE London

Date: Friday 7 November 2025 from 3pm – 8pm

Saturday 8 November 2025 from 11am to 5:30pm

Location: The Landmark London, NW1 6JQ

Price: Friday Grand Tasting Ticket £115

Saturday Grand Tasting Ticket £115 | with Cellar Collection access £155 | Masterclass tickets from £125

BUY TICKETS

There are few wine regions in the world where vintage means as much as it does in Champagne.

But what exactly are vintage Champagnes, and is this once-exalted category starting to fade in importance?

Tom’s pick of the best vintage Champagnes listed below

Champagne aficionados of the first half of the 20th century would likely find themselves baffled by today’s Champagne terminology: non-vintage, multi-vintage, single-vineyard, limited editions, late-disgorged releases, vintage, premium vintage, prestige cuvée, library releases…the list goes on.

Fitting today’s Champagnes into neat style categories is rather complex.

What’s more, Champagne houses regularly have six to 10 cuvées in their range, where once there may have been two or three.

Up until the 1970s, though, the choice was simple: either non-vintage or vintage.

Vintage Champagne: What does it mean?

The region’s appellation regulations help to simplify things somewhat: a non-vintage Champagne cannot carry a year of production on the label; it may be produced from a blend of harvests; and it must spend a minimum of 15 months ageing before release.

A vintage Champagne, on the other hand, is the product of one sole harvest (which has to appear on the label), and it must spend a minimum of 30 months ageing before release (although they are regularly aged for much longer).

Price gap

Vintage Champagnes have always been more expensive than non-vintage Champagnes. Today, the price gap has widened further.

André Simon’s 1962 book The History of Champagne reports that a 1945 agreement between the Ministry of Food and the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, aimed at suppressing the black market after World War II, stipulated final selling prices of grandes marques vintage and grandes marques non-vintage as 28 shillings and 25 shillings respectively.

Hardly much of a premium when you consider that today’s vintage Champagnes are commonly around two or three times the price of their non-vintage counterparts. Take Taittinger for example, whose non-vintage currently retails at £36 while its vintage is £61.

The emergence of prestige cuvées

By the 1970s, the idea of a category even more exalted than vintage began to form.

According to writer Cyril Ray in his 1971 book Bollinger, Tradition of a Champagne Family, Bollinger realised in 1961 that it was ‘expected to produce a premium quality wine’ above its non-vintage and vintage offerings.

This premium offering later became Bollinger’s prestige cuvée, RD.

This followed on from the early successes of Moët et Chandon’s Dom Pérignon and Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne.

Since then, the basic understanding of Champagne’s quality has been three-tier: non-vintage, vintage and prestige cuvée.

But is the middle child now being forgotten about?

Vintage squeeze

Ray writes of grandes marques producing single-vintage wines as ‘a means to getting talked and written about’.

Today, however, it’s the prestige releases that tend to steal the limelight, with the vintage category languishing.

Champagne’s 2024 export report showed that prestige cuvées represented a huge 18.9% of the region’s value, while the vintage category was the smallest of all at 1.5%.

Some houses, such as Billecart-Salmon, have stopped making vintage Champagne altogether. Others, such as Ruinart, make such tiny quantities that they are not even found in the UK market.

Value hiding in plain sight

Even if quantities are small, though, many of the major houses still make mid-tier vintage Champagnes that retail between £70-£100.

Producers such as Lanson, Piper-Heidsieck, Deutz, Taittinger and Laurent-Perrier all make vintage cuvées that offer serious value, regularly available for £80 or less.

That value stems from an excellent growing season, top-notch base wines, rigorous blind tastings and an open-minded approach to finding the grapes that best tell the story of the year, even if they’re not from the sort of prized grand cru sources that are used for prestige cuvées.

To illustrate this last point, Elise Losfelt, former cellar master of Charles Heidsieck, says that the house’s 2018 vintage relied heavily on Chardonnay from a rather unlikely source: the little-known village of Trigny, in the Petite Montagne de Reims.

Surprisingly, it had a ‘kick of freshness and concentration’ from a vintage that could be ‘heavy and mature,’ she says.

Perhaps Trigny’s Chardonnay will never step into the limelight again, but it’s a perfect example of why the blending of vintage Champagne tests the winemaker’s creativity, rarely using the exact same ingredients from one year to the next.

Vintage cuvées evolve

Elsewhere, inventive producers have taken to re-imagining their vintage cuvées, with names and identities beyond a simple millésimé.

At Champagne Palmer & Co, vintages are made in top years, but only released once the quality is deemed high enough after a six year ageing period.

It’s a sort of ‘double selection,’ according to managing director Rémi Vervier. Palmer & Co’s vintage cuvée is now known as Grands Terroirs, to highlight its link to the vineyards of the northern Montagne de Reims.

Other houses are also seeking to lend these more expensive wines a stronger stamp of identity and heritage than simply the vintage.

Louis Roederer, for example, which makes its vintage release from Pinot Noir from the clay-rich terroirs of the house’s own La Montagne estate in the northern Montagne de Reims. By contrast, the shallower, chalky plots are selected for the (much larger) production of Cristal.

Philipponnat’s cuvée 1522 is another example. ‘Clos des Goisses [the estate’s top wine] is a single-vineyard cuvée, and I felt we needed a superior vintage cuvée,’ says head of the house Charles Philipponnat, ‘so we created 1522 in the year 2000 as a homage to our ancestors, who owned vines in the [lieu-dit] Le Leon in Aÿ in 1522.’

The 1522 cuvée is based heavily on Pinot Noir from the Le Leon lieu-dit.

A vertical back to the original 2000 release confirmed what many in Champagne know well: despite their relative insider status today, these meticulously made wines, sourced from some of Champagne’s top villages, can age beautifully, even if they may reach maturity a little before their prestige siblings.

Tips for buying vintage Champagne

Current sweet spots for vintage Champagne range from the 2008 to 2012 releases.

Well-stored vintage releases back to the mid 1990s are also well worth exploring.

It can be worth trading up to magnums at vintage level, too. The 1996 shone at a recent tasting, and even promised further ageing potential.

Even if prestige cuvées have taken vintage Champagne’s seat at the top of the table, this remains a happy hunting ground for anyone in search of true value.

Identifying the cuvées may be a little more complex than it was in 1945, but as a way to explore the heights of long-aged, well-sourced Champagnes – and even plan fascinating comparative tastings without breaking the bank – the vintage category is hard to beat.

Top 15 vintage Champagnes to seek out:

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Nothing marks the end of summer like the school’s re-opening and the start of the annual September releases campaign.

This is the second tranche of international releases, or ‘Hors Bordeaux’, following the 50+ wines launched by négociants in March.

SCORE TABLE: All the Place de Bordeaux September releasesScroll down for Georgie’s ‘ultimate autumn case’

It’s no secret that the fine wine market is struggling at the moment, amid a backdrop of lingering US tariffs, a subdued Chinese market, and broader economic headwinds.

However, the 2025 campaign underscores the resilience, perseverance and prestige of La Place delivering a crafted – and increased – number of fine wines from around the world.

The autumn releases also present a joyous and fascinating moment to check in on both new and old vintages from some of the world’s most iconic and reputable estates. And this year’s cohort is a bounty of beautiful wines waiting to be explored.

The campaign, that technically kicked off on 28 August with Domaine de Baronarques, will run through to the end of September (with some extensions into October) and features more than 130 wines from 12 countries including: Italy, Spain, the US, Germany, Chile, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Hungary, South Africa and France.

The calendar of releases takes on a clearer structure than in previous years with the coming days seeing the release of starry names like Opus One (1 September), Masseto today (2 September), Almaviva (3 September), Solaia (4 September), and Penfolds Grange (8 September), alongside Bordeaux gems such as the historic re-releases from Latour (2012) and Palmer (2015).

The releases will be split by region giving each country the limelight – Australia, Spain, Italy, US, France then South America – with a dedicated Riesling week in October like last year.

New and exciting wines

Akin to last year’s flurry of German Rieslings entering La Place, this year is the first time wines from the Loire Valley will be included alongside other French bottlings. It’s an exciting development that seeks to not only present the best of France all in one accessible place but also offer more white wines satisfying current market trends and demand.

The number of wines due to be released may also give way to a potential dedicated ‘Loire week’ within the campaign.

Jean-Quentin Prats, CEO of Joanne Rare Wines which manages more than 100 ‘Hors Bordeaux’ wines, captures this strategy: ‘We want to focus on establishing what we already have however if there was one area we could increase, it was white.’

Indeed there are five new white wines on offer this autumn. ‘[There is an] increase in French whites, and one area is the Loire Valley where you have very high-quality products, old vines on amazing soils and great know-how. And there is a demand in the market for that,’ Prats added.

Alongside the Loire wines including; Domaine Delaporte (three cuvées from Sancerre), Domaine Sébastian Brunet (old-vine Chenin in Vouvray) and Luneau-Papin (biodynamic wine from Muscadet), are new wines from Adega Algueira (Cornamuse Godello from Ribeira Sacra), a sublime Chardonnay from Zuccardi (Gualtallary), the excellent House of Arras Late Disgorged Grand Vintage 2008 (Tasmania), an 18-year-old Riesling from Jim Barry (Clare Valley) and a red and white from Sonoma’s Flowers Winery.

Despite global challenges – declining wine consumption, tariff-driven price hikes, and shifting demand – La Place remains a dynamic stage for producers’ unwavering commitment to excellence and the increase in wines showcases that.

This campaign is a heartening reminder of the resilience of wineries and merchants striving to spotlight world-class wines (at a mixture of price points), in a turbulent market.

My highlights

Australia

There are several superlative wines in the mix this year starting with the 100-point Cloudburst Chardonnay from the 2023 vintage. It was tasted at the end of a 10-year-vertical, which will be coming to Decanter Premium this month, and showcases the very best of what owner and winemaker Will Berliner can achieve with his vineyard-come-garden. A sublime wine.

More white Australia gems come in the form of aged Tasmania sparkling House of Arras 2008 which was utterly delightful, Giaconda’s Chardonnay is another knockout by winemaker Rick Kinzbrunner and Jim Barry’s Florita Riesling 2015 is well worth seeking out.

For the reds, Penfolds Grange is absolutely top class as is Jim Barry’s The Armagh – exceptionally captivating and great quality.

Argentina

I completely fell in love with Sebastian Zuccardi’s Finca Canal Uco stopping just short of 100-points. It’s an amazingly fresh and focussed Malbec from high-altitude vineyards in Paraje Altamira. I’ve met Sebastian a few times in Bordeaux to taste through his ever-expanding range of wines and I adore his approach and sensitivity to the cuvées he creates.

The accolades continue for Argentina with a brilliant Cheval des Andes and fabulous Catena Zapata Adrianna Vineyard.

Austria

How lucky we are that Gerhard Kracher’s wines are now on the Place de Bordeaux. It’s a little tricky keeping up with the dozen or so Trockenbeerenauslese cuvées he produces (among lots of others) each year of which a selection are chosen to present to La Place.

This year there are five wines – numbered in order of sweetness – the denser a wine, the higher the number. If you haven’t tried these wines before don’t hesitate. They’re all excellent with numbers two, three and five standouts among the impressive range.

Chile

Ever since I visited Chile – and all of the La Place producers bar Vik in 2022 – I’ve been captivated by what’s being produced there.

Seeing the magnificent vineyard vistas and getting to know the viticulture and terroir helped me understand the efforts that are going on in the country to create world-class wines.

Seña this year is absolutely incredible – a must-buy if you can, but Almaviva and Santa Rita are also excellent. I also love the work Sebastian Labbé is doing at Viña Santa Rita wtih Casa Real. Such attention to detail is showcased in the wines.

France

The French contingent is strong and varied this year with everything from Champagne to Burgundy to Bordeaux as well as the Loire Valley providing plenty of enjoyment and value – particularly for two first timers.

Cuvée Eugenie, the Pouilly-Fumé from Domaine Lebrun delights with richness and juiciness while the benchmark producer Domaine Luneau-Papin, with ninth generation Pierre-Marie and daughter-in-law Marie at the helm, have produced a lovely and very drinkable biodynamic Gula Ana 2023 for its first outing on La Place.

There are eight Champagnes being released this month spanning six different vintages giving fizz lovers plenty to get stuck into.

My personal favourite was Philipponnat’s mature Clos des Goisses 2000 which is in its peak drinking window, but Leclerc Briant’s organic Château d’Avize 2015 is also captivating, with amazing acidity.

Clos Lanson’s 2011 is accessible and easy to drink and sits well within the list of back vintages, all tasted together in July (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). The vertical will be written up in a dedicated article on Decanter Premium later this month.

In Bordeaux, the new vintage of Château Cheval Blanc’s Le Petit Cheval Blanc is as good as it’s ever produced – even more evident after tasting back vintages to 2018 – another tasting that will appear on Decanter this month.

Always anticipated, Château d’Yquem’s off-dry ‘Y’ 2023 is stunning as is Château Rieussec’s 2023 vintage. Bordeaux’s sweet wines might not always get the limelight – and these are just two of the varied options coming from the lauded appellation – but it’s a great reminder of the enjoyment that these wines can bring whether you drink them young or old.

I tasted a 1975 – 50-year-old Rieussec at the estate last week and it was utterly delicious.

I have yet to taste Château Palmer’s 10-year-on release or Château Latour’s 2012.

Château d’Aussieres, the Languedoc estate from Lafite Rothschild, is packed full of flavour but silky and smooth with lots to like. Great drinkability and value.

Germany

I missed Germany entry onto La Place last year as I had just given birth, but there are some stunning wines that deserve greater visibility and appreciation.

Sweet, or even off-dry, wines don’t always have the best reputation, and can often be a hard sell ,but there’s something magical when sweetness and richness meet racy acidity, energy and vibrancy like several do in the list.

Heavyweights Ernst Loosen, Schloss Johannisberg, Steinmetz and Domäne Serrig are all represented this autumn.

I loved Ernie’s Riesling Auslese and Domäne Serrig’s Grosse Lage – both excellent quality and with interesting, historical stories behind them. Seek them out.

Italy

Most of the Italian wines were tasted by both myself and Decanter’s Italy editor James Button who came to Bordeaux for the tasting.

Standouts come in the form of Bibi Graetz’s Testamatta and Colore, both brilliant and worth getting hold of.

Antinori’s Solaia and Masseto’s grand vin deliver once again, both with 98 points and one of my favourite wines ever Allegrini’s Fieramonte is un-put-down-able.

I also tasted the new trio of impressive Caiarossa wines which offer great value as well as a mini-vertical of Gianni Mazzei’s Concerto which was extremely impressive. The new vintage doesn’t quite reach the heights of last year but there’s a wonderful signature to this wine with extreme drinkability.

Spain

Telmo Rodriguez’s Yjar (Rioja) and Matallana from Ribera del Duero are both worth trying to get hold of, as is the new complex and enjoyable wine from Adega Algueira – Cornamuse from Ribeira Sacra.

Despite the challengingly hot conditions, CVNE has produced a concentrated but balanced and finessed Real de Asúa Carromaza 2022.

USA

North American wines make up the bulk of the releases, many from the hot and dry 2022 vintage of which several were covered by Jonathan Cristaldi in his Napa Valley vintage 2022 report.

Highlights for me include the ever-brilliant Dalla Valle Vineyards Maya 2022 and an exceptional Quintessa 2022.

I also loved Luc Morlet’s slightly older 2018 vintage of Coeur de Vallée Cabernet Sauvignon and all three Verité wines from Sonoma.

The final La Place vertical to accompany this report will come in the form of 10 vintages of Inglenook’s Rubicon. I was lucky enough to attend a masterclass with winemaker Philippe Bascaules in July where we tasted vintages back to 2013.

This wine is really hitting its stride with a wonderful energetic quality to the wine despite the tough conditions.

Where value and interest lie

In a market favouring affordability, look to under £40 releases from Spain (Dolio) and southern Italy for everyday luxury as well as some of the German Rieslings which have incredible quality to price ratios. The wines from the Loire and Languedoc also provide excellent value.

Given the nature and prestige of some of these wines, prices can be on the very high side with the most expensive likely to top US$400-500. That said, if money were no object these would be my top 12 picks.

Which wines should you buy? My ultimate case of 12:

Ordered by style and score; sparkling, white, red, sweet.

House of Arras E.J. Carr 2008 (97-points): Vibrant Tasmanian fizz.

Philipponnat, Clos de Goisses LV Extra Brut 2000 (98-points): Mature and mouthwatering.

Cloudburst, Chardonnay 2023 (100-points): Sublime, vibrant, and complex.

Château d’Yquem, Ygrek 2023 (96-points): Fresh, succulent and moreish

Bibi Graetz, Colore 2023 (99-points): Nuanced and spectacular.

Jim Barry, The Armagh Shiraz 2022 (99-points): Bottled happiness.

Seña 2023 (99-points): Incredible Bordeaux-style blend.

Quintessa 2022 (99-points): Classy and energetic.

Zuccardi, Finca Canal Uco 2022 (99-points): Fresh, focused Malbec.

Dalla Valle Vineyards, Maya 2022 (98-points): Seductive and bold.

Kracher, Nummer 3 TBA 2022 (98-points): Exotic and zingy.

Dr Loosen, Riesling Auslese 2019 (98-points): Dense yet invigorating.

History of the releases

Beginning as a niche extension to Bordeaux’s en primeur system, the twice yearly ‘Hors Bordeaux’ releases have grown into a global fine wine powerhouse providing international producers access to premium markets via the region’s efficient distribution network.

Collectors can secure allocations at ex-cellar prices, often with ageing potential that drives secondary market value. These releases, many of which are actually back vintages, will test the market sentiment post a lacklustre Bordeaux 2024 en primeur campaign that failed to ignite serious enthusiasm despite some heavy discounts on 2023 release prices.

Generally a good indicator of enthusiasm is the appeal for Opus on the 1st of the month, this year releasing at a recommended UK onward selling price of £235 (8% down on the 2021 / 6% down on the 2019 according to Wine Lister.

It comes to the market below all recent back vintages. The consulting, data and analytics company said: ‘As one of September’s perennial best sellers, if any release has a chance of seeing demand in this difficult market, it’s Opus One.’

One courtier noted: ‘Everyone is waiting to see what the release prices for Opus and Almaviva will be – if they’re good for the market and people buy it will create a dynamic demand’.

It’s not just about price however, similar to the Bordeaux 2024s. There will be brands who have to decrease and some who will hold firm from strategy or lack of increase over the years. Let’s hope there’s some rebounding for this collection of wines.

Yet to be tasted

• Pym Rae, Mount Veeder, Napa Valley 2021
• Klein Constantia, Vin de Constance, Constantia, 2022
• Quintessa, Illumination, Sonoma County, 2024
• Flowers, Chardonnay, Sonoma Coast, 2023
• Château Palmer, Margaux 3éme Grand Cru Classe, 2015
• Château Latour, 1er Grand Cru Classe, Pauillac, 2012

Additional tasting notes for this report were done by Tina Gellie, James Button, Ines Salpico, Jonathan Cristaldi. In some instances there may be two tasting notes.

SCORE TABLE: All the Place de Bordeaux September releases:

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‘This wine is a lot of work,’ says Laurent-Perrier oenologist Constance Delaire as we taste the current release of the house’s Cuvée Rosé, one of Champagne’s best-known rosés.

Most rosé Champagne is made using the assemblage method, which sees red wine from Pinot Noir added to a white base wine before bottling for the second fermentation.

Laurent-Perrier’s Cuvée Rosé, on the other hand, is made using a different method, and it’s an approach that many Champagne houses would consider unthinkably complex for making a rosé at scale.

Scroll down for notes and scores for Laurent-Perrier’s rosé Champagne

Although commonly referred to as saignée in Champagne, the method used by Laurent Perrier is more accurately described as maceration.

Outside of Champagne, saignée technically refers to rosé wines made from bleeding off pale must from red wine ferments.

In Champagne, however, saignée is used, albeit inaccurately, to refer to rosés made from red grapes which are destemmed, macerated for a precise amount of time to extract colour and flavour, pressed, and then fermented.

It is usually the preserve of small Champagne producers and growers, due to how labour-intensive it can be.

Such are the demands of this method, in fact, that Laurent-Perrier has built an entire winery dedicated solely to this one cuvée.

True dedication

Olivier Vigneron, the new cellar master at Laurent-Perrier, joins our tasting late, having been checking in on his wines after a few weeks of travelling.

‘I’m a cellar master of the cellar, really,’ he says, as opposed to a public ambassador for the house, as many other cellar masters are today.

‘At harvest time, Olivier and Michel would pretty much sleep next to the tanks for Cuvée Rosé,’ Delaire says of Vigneron and longtime predecessor Michel Fauconnet, who still consults at the house.

The making of a rosé icon

‘You have to start in the vineyards with a very strict selection,’ says Delaire, ‘the whole harvest for the rosé goes through a sorting table’.

This in itself is fairly extraordinary in Champagne. Sorting tables are vibrating units where individual bunches, or indeed grapes, are picked over by hand. They are a rare sight, except for top prestige rosé production.

‘We keep only the berries, separated by village, in cold maceration for 48 to 72 hours,’ says Delaire.

Perhaps sleeping next to the tanks doesn’t seem so crazy after all: the timing for pressing off the juice before it becomes too extracted is crucial.

‘You can miss it, even by an hour,’ says Vigneron.

So what’s the point of this process? ‘The idea is to get perfect extraction of the fruit,’ says Delaire.

Laurent-Perrier’s rosé comes out a shade darker than many.

Thanks to its 100% Pinot Noir makeup (compared to most rosé Champagne which also includes some Chardonnay and Meunier), it is fragrant and rich in red fruit characters.

What’s more, thanks to long lees-ageing (unusual for a non-vintage Champagne), there’s none of the slightly raw youthfulness that saignée – maceration – styles can sometimes display.

The current releases are based on the excellent pair of vintages, 2019 and 2018.

A step further

As if Laurent-Perrier’s unique approach to non-vintage rosé production wasn’t enough, its Grande Cuvée Alexandra Rosé has an equally unusual conception.

‘We wait for the maturity of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at the same time’, says Delaire – meaning this cuvée can only be made when the two grape varieties ripen concurrently.

It’s a sort of hybrid winemaking, where a strict selection of Pinot Noir – all from grand cru villages on the Montagne de Reims – is macerated and added to freshly pressed grand cru Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs.

‘It’s a really complicated wine to make,’ she says.

Complicated it may be, but the grand cru Chardonnay brings excellent longevity, which means this exceptional bottling can age into one of Champagne’s greatest rosés.

As we taste a library edition of the 2007 release, its beautiful aromas of dried strawberries, preserved citrus, truffle honey and pastry cream fill the room.

The colour has started to turn a little copper, and the mousse settles into silky maturity.

It’s a fine reminder of something that the team at Laurent-Perrier knows extremely well: sometimes you have to do it the hard way to get the greatest result.

Laurent-Perrier rosé:

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It’s no secret that Champagne prices in the UK have shot up since the Covid pandemic.

A recent report by consultancy firm Wine Lister found that between December 2021 and December 2024, prices increased by 21% among 15 top-selling brands. This is considerably larger than for any other sparkling wine type.

In 2024, Champagne sales declined significantly, by 9.2% overall and 10.8% in export markets.

In trying to explain this slump, Maxime Toubart, president of Champagne’s grower association SGV (whose members sell their grapes to Champagne houses), accused the houses of ‘disproportionate’ price rises compared to the prices paid to grapegrowers.

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Infrastructure & vintage struggles?

Houses will argue that small and difficult vintages, such as 2021, and significant cost increases in areas such as energy, vineyard work and shipping, have led to these price rises.

In practice, most of the leading grandes marques set recommended retail prices above the £40 mark today, and the long-held sense that Champagne ought to be available in the UK for around £30 is certainly being tested.

In search of value, then, I tasted 50 white Champagnes that can be obtained at a full price of £40 or below per bottle in the UK. The top 15 are featured below.

What sort of quality can we expect from Champagne at that price point, though?

How much of the bottle price is actually going to the wine producer, and how much is eaten up with taxes and various costs, including distribution and promotion?

I spoke to Justin Howard-Sneyd MW, who has sourced Champagnes for the UK market, to find out how the numbers stack up.

Howard-Sneyd estimates that about £15 (€18) of that £40 full price will make it to the Champagne producer (see box, below).

Their costs then include at least €8-€9 for the grapes or base wine (assuming these are largely bought-in, rather than grown by the producer, which they usually are at this price in the UK), €2-€3 for dry goods and €3-€4 for cost of production, leaving €2-€5 profit for the producer.

‘It’s the UK government and the retailer’ who make the most money, says Howard-Sneyd.

Vital statistics for a £40 bottle of Champagne in the UK

Price before VAT is added: £33.33

Before retailer margin: £23.33

Before UK duty: £20.67

Before shipping, warehousing, deliver & ERP (packing costs): £19.77

Before distribution, marketing & promotional support: £17.77

Before in-market promotion & discounting: £15

A question of style

The Champagnes tasted here fell into two camps: wines that made efforts to taste bold and flashy, despite their price; and wines that seemed to put their resources into getting the basics right – fruit quality, balance and refreshment.

Including large amounts of reserve wine in the blend (even if those reserves might not be of the best quality), or adding lots of dosage (in the form of a rich, aged liqueur d’expédition) when topping up after the disgorgement stage can help fairly basic wines get some warm, biscuity-type tones that feel expensive for a single glass, but can get tiring for more.

Cheaper Champagnes often use more tailles – the must resulting from harder pressings of the grapes – which can bring a juicy fruitiness and low acidity to the wines, although, as was sometimes found in the tasting, can also increase bitterness, needing a little more sugar in the dosage to compensate.

The top-scoring wines here all avoided those pitfalls with aplomb, proving there are still a few treasures to be found without stretching the budget.

Tom Hewson’s 15 affordable Champagne recommendations

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France’s wine harvest will jump as much as 17% in 2025 from a year earlier, with higher volumes especially in Burgundy, Champagne and the Loire Valley due to more favourable growing conditions, according to the first forecast from the French agriculture ministry’s Agreste statistics division.

This year’s vintage is expected to end up between 40 million and 42.5 million hectolitres, the statistics office said in a report, a recovery from the previous season, when disastrous weather resulted in the smallest harvest in more than 60 years at 36.3 million hectolitres. Volumes are seen close to the five-year average.

France is expected to remain the world’s second-largest wine producer behind Italy in 2025, based on current forecasts. The country has faced some unusually severe production declines in the past decade due to adverse weather events linked to climate change, from spring frosts, hail and drought to extreme rainfall.

‘In 2025, weather conditions have been more favourable,’ Agreste said. ‘The dry, hot start to the summer helped limit disease pressure, and there is no major weather event to report at this stage.’

In Bordeaux growing area, south-west France and Languedoc-Roussillon, this year’s production increase is partially cancelled out by grubbing-up plans started in 2023, with more than 20,000 hectares of vines removed in those areas since the previous harvest, the statistics unit said.

Burgundy has had favourable weather this season despite some local hail damage, with volumes expected to be ‘significantly’ higher, after severe mildew pressure in 2024. In the Loire Valley, vineyards are healthy, with production forecast to jump from 2024 and seen above the five-year average, despite some hail damage.

Champagne didn’t experience any weather or grape-health issues at this stage, with volumes expected to significantly exceed last year, and be close to average.

In the Bordeaux region, flowering went well and dry weather resulted in far less mildew pressure, Agreste said. Better yields mean production is seen around last year’s level, even after growers grubbed up 8,000 hectares of vines since the previous harvest.

Languedoc-Roussillon is looking better than last year after beneficial rainfall, and production is forecast to rise year-on-year even after more than 10,000 hectares of vines were grubbed up. Grape development is normal and mildew under control, though the Grenache variety suffered from coulure, or the failure of grape flowers to develop into fruit.

Agreste noted a ‘marked precocity’ for grape development in many areas of France, with early flowering in Burgundy, early ripening in the Loire Valley and an expected early harvest in Champagne. Grapes in Bordeaux are 10 to 12 days ahead of schedule, the statistics unit said.

Agreste is scheduled to update its production forecast in September, including a breakdown by region.

Meanwhile, neighbouring Italy is estimated to produce 45million hectolitres this year, in line with previous years even as growers faced drought and episodes of bad weather, farmers’ union Coldiretti said on 31 July. High temperatures accelerated ripening and prompted an early start to harvesting, while grape quality is good to excellent, with fungal diseases such as downy mildew and odium under control.

In Spain, wine and must production is seen at 37.5-38 million hectolitres, according to Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias, the country’s federation of agri-food cooperatives. That would be up from production of around 31 million hectolitres in 2024.

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In most descriptions of the Champagne region, the Petite Montagne de Reims gets grouped as part of the larger area of the Montagne de Reims, Champagne’s most northerly subregion.

Admittedly, although its name suggests otherwise, the Petite Montagne is a sizeable stretch of mostly east-facing vineyards that does indeed join up with the Montagne de Reims proper at the village of Villers-Allerand.

Scroll down to see top Champagnes from the Petite Montagne de Reims

However, this gently undulating subregion – which has become a vibrant hub for top-class independent growers – can surely be considered its own unique entity.

This is due to one fundamental difference between the Petite Montagne and the wider Montagne de Reims: soil type.

A different underground world

Most trips to Champagne begin with a murky descent into a cellar carved from the region’s immense chalk bedrock.

After all, it’s not only the vines that make use of the extraordinary properties of this compressed marine deposit.

The wines, once in bottle, spend many years ageing in this formidable network of cool, calm subterranean galleries.

Just 15 minutes drive southwest of Reims and its famous chalk cellars, however, the underground world is rather different.

‘It’s like being at the beach!’ says Nicolas Maillart, a grower-producer in the village of Eceuil in the Petite Montagne.

He reaches into a hole in his cellar wall and lets a fistful of fine, dry sand run through his fingers.

Much of the Petite Montagne is characterised by these sandy soils.

Building the cellar was such a complex job that a series of commemorative photographs still line the walls of Maillart’s estate.

Key villages of the Petite Montagne

All premier cru except for Gueux; with their most widely planted grape variety:

Chamery: 42% Meunier

Ecueil: 76% Pinot Noir

Sacy: 46% Pinot Noir

Villedommange: 58% Meunier

Vrigny: 87% Meunier

Gueux: 85% Meunier

A place and style of its own

This change in soil type impacts the style of the wines.

‘Our Pinot Noir is more aerial, less massive,’ says Richard Desvignes at Lacourte-Godbillon in Eceuil.

Benoist Perserval, of Perserval-Farge in Chamery, agrees: ‘Our wines have a little less tonicité [tension], but they’re easier to drink young’.

Ineffable character

Other than the soil, though, there’s little to differentiate the landscape here from the nearby slopes of the Montagne de Reims.

Although the rolling hills are not quite as high as the Grande Montagne area, the aspects and slopes are not wildly different.

The area can catch some of the cooler temperatures and rainfall that the nearby Ardre Valley often experiences, but ripeness and harvesting dates are often a little earlier than the north-facing parts of the Grande Montagne.

Yet the Petite Montagne is different, and has attracted the interest of the larger houses:

‘Ruinart came here looking for Chardonnay,’ says Perseval, ‘they need some that is ready younger, for their non-vintage’.

Over the other side of the hill, in the village of Courmas, Piper-Heidsieck sources elegant Meunier for its new cuvée, Essentiel Blanc de Noirs.

Séverine and Yann Alexandre, of the well-regarded eponymous estate also in Courmas, sell Meunier to Krug.

Petite Montagne top names to know

Bonnet-Ponson

Clément Perseval

Emilien Allouchery

Frédéric Savart

Guerlet-Deguerne

La Closerie

Lacourte-Godbillon

Louis Brochet

Nicolas Maillart

Perrine Fresne

Perseval-Farge

Roger Coulon

Thomas Perseval

Yann Alexandre

Meunier mania

Meunier in particular seems to thrive here, yielding wines of beautiful finesse and florality compared to the fruitier, rounder examples from the villages of its traditional home in the Marne Valley.

Francis Egly of Egly-Ouriet was one of the first to shine a light on the region via his cuvée Les Vignes de Vrigny, made from 100% Meunier in the village of Vrigny.

Since Jérôme Prévost created the now rare and much sought-after La Closerie Champagnes made from Meunier in Gueux, the area has exploded with independent names.

Nowadays, the most notable mover-and-shaker in Vrigny is Champagne Roger Coulon, whose sleek new tasting room seeks to draw high-end visitors to this quiet, sometimes neglected subregion.

Edgar Coulon, now the 9th generation at the estate, strives to retain acidity through farming the vines organically: ‘A lot of Meunier tastes flat as it ages’, he says, ‘it’s important to keep the energy’.

His wines have immediate aromatic generosity, and the constant refinement in the cellar is palpable. Unusually for Champagne, Coulon’s wines now rest an entire year in the cellars after disgorgement before shipping.

‘It costs a lot of money,’ says Coulon, but he feels it’s worth it, as his wines reach his clients at a perfect stage of evolution.

A spirited group

Many of these independent producers have a zealous drive for organic viticulture.

In the village of Chamery, in the southern part of the subregion, 25% of the vineyard is organic. This compares to 8.1% in Champagne overall.

There’s a relaxed, youthful undercurrent here, which is in contrast to many of Champagne’s villages.

Each spring, the village assembles for Chamery Circus, a tasting where the dress code is jeans and t-shirts, barbecues are fired up and local musical talent, buoyed by a glass or two, takes to the stage.

Pinot Noir presence

Just to the north of Chamery, the village of Eceuil breaks the mould for Meunier dominance with its extensive plantings of sought-after Pinot Noir.

One of the village’s stars, Nicolas Maillart, tends a recently planted parcel of his speciality: ungrafted vines of Pinot Noir, which can survive here on their own roots thanks to the inability of phylloxera to spread in sandy soils.

Maillart’s resulting wine, Les Coupés Franc de Pieds, is one of this area’s most intense, evocative treasures.

Between them, the resourceful Champagne makers of the Petite Montagne are building an identity as vivid and energetic as anywhere in the region.

The statement is clear: the Petite Montagne de Reims may be petite in size, but in ambition, character and interest, it’s anything but.

Top Champagnes from the Petite Montagne

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Living and working conditions for more than 50 Champagne harvest workers, including undocumented migrants, have been the focus of a high-profile human trafficking trial in France. 

A criminal court in Châlons-en-Champagne this week sentenced three defendants to prison sentences of varying severity, according to French media.

Charges related to the treatment of workers recruited to pick grapes for the 2023 harvest, and regional trade body the Comité Champagne joined the prosecution as a civil plaintiff.

One victim reportedly told the court that workers were treated ‘like slaves’.

Video footage published by France 3 / France Télévisions showed the poor state of the workers’ accommodation in Nesle-le-Repons.

There was no running water or electricity and the group was required to work 12-hour days, from 7am to 7pm, with ‘rotten sandwiches’ offered for food, one victim said.

Three defendants were convicted on human trafficking charges. 

One of them, a woman from Kyrgyzstan in her 40s who was director of a service agency, was sentenced to four years in prison – with two years suspended, according to France24 / Agence France Presse. The report said her lawyer described the ruling as unfair and added she would appeal.

Two men in their 30s also received part-suspended prison sentences, and the defendants were ordered to pay €4,000 to each victim, the report said. 

‘Zero tolerance’

Following the case, the Comité Champagne said, ‘We have already said this, and we will say it again: the events that occurred in 2023 are serious and unacceptable. 

‘They required an appropriate response, and sanctions were taken accordingly. We had a duty to stand by the victims.’ 

It added, ‘You do not play around with the health and safety of seasonal workers. Nor do you play around with the reputation of our appellation.’

Officials said they won’t hesitate to join the prosecution on such cases, if required.

‘Our position remains unchanged: zero tolerance for this type of behaviour,’ the Comité Champagne said. ‘We will systematically act as a civil party if any further cases lead to legal proceedings.’

Last year, the Comité Champagne and other regional partners launched a new action plan designed to better safeguard harvest workers in Champagne vineyards.

Named ‘Together for the Champagne harvest’, the plan emerged from a working group set up in October 2023 to examine health and safety guidance for seasonal workers.

Around 120,000 seasonal workers help to pick and process grapes in Champagne each year.

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After a cautious six months, Champagne is back into release season with a string of wines at vintage and prestige cuvée level, many from the 2018 harvest.

This was a year of relief in the region. After a dismal 2017, the vines abounded with enormous natural yields, easy summer conditions and trouble-free ripeness.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for the latest Champagnes released this spring and summer

As the vintage’s character becomes more clear with time, the wines continue to display a charming, forward nature, with few of the downsides of some of the extreme vintages of the last decade.

Dilution and low acidity, though, can mean the wines are not often as dynamic or structured as some of the more ageworthy vintages, and it looks to be the most straightforward of the touted trilogy of 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Pol Roger has captured some density and ripeness of Pinot Noir admirably well in an immediately glossy, creamy and forward Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill that will see smiles on the faces of any longtime fans of the cuvée – not least given how expressive it already is upon release.

Likewise Charles Heidsieck offers both white and rosé 2018 cuvées, both tuned beautifully for early drinking but not lacking the potential for mid-term cellaring.

Deutz, too, has found success with the latest two single-vineyard releases from Aÿ under the moniker Hommage à William Deutz, which, rather similarly to Pol Roger, feel like a step up in precision and clarity over the previous 2015 releases.

The release from the Meurtet parcel in particular stands out.

Older vintage releases

Beyond 2018, Bollinger carries on with its successful PN series of Pinot Noir creations by returning to the village of Tauxières for the PN TX 20. It’s a juicier, more hedonistic take than the superb PN VZ 19, yet just as imaginative and complex.

These wines continue to be superb purchases, especially since the PN AYC 18 edition.

There are also vintage releases reviewed from Ayala (La Perle 2015), Perrier-Jouët (Belle Epoque 2016), Lanson (Noble 2008) and perhaps most notably two fine releases from Billecart-Salmon in the prestige cuvée blend Nicolas François 2012 and a particularly sumptuous, sensual edition of Le Clos Saint-Hilaire from 2009.

Meanwhile, in the world of independent Champagne there are wines reviewed from one of the Montagne de Reims’ most prominent names, Eric Rodez in Ambonnay, as well as a pick from up-and-coming négociant project Valetin Leflaive.

The latter has been making some noise in the quiet village of Oger by releasing an ever-growing band of single-parcel Champagnes.

Finally, the latest two Krug Grande Cuvée editions – the white 173ème and the rosé 29ème – arrive relatively forward and open, with the majority of the blends coming from the torrid 2017 vintage.

Krug’s track record of producing fine blends even when faced with difficult harvests is unmatched, though, as a recent vertical including wines built on 2011 and 2010 harvests showed.

While avid Champagne followers may be reticent in approaching wines that show the particularities of this vintage to even a modest degree, these wines will hit the mark for those in search of the spirit of generosity and depth the house is known for.

The newest Champagne releases to look out for:

Wines are listed alphabetically, white then rosé

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Champagne Louis Roederer launched the latest edition of its Brut Nature Blanc and Rosé from the 2018 vintage at the Grand Palais in Paris in late May 2025.

The Brut Nature wines are a collaboration with French designer Philippe Starck.

Back to the roots

Speaking at the launch event of the wines underneath the domed glass roofs of the Grand Palais, Starck said that, ‘my whole life, I tried to strip everything down to the core. I wanted to go back to the roots, all my life I said “less is more”.’

Indeed, Starck’s ideas of minimalism and purity inform the wines.

For Louis Roederer’s cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, this meant stripping everything that could be classed as artifice away from the wine and creating a ‘minimalist’ Champagne.

Scroll down for notes and scores for the new releases

Bare essential from a single hillside

To strip things down to these bare essentials, the fruit that makes Roederer’s Brut Nature cuvées is co-harvested, departing from the usual philosophy of keeping every plot separate to be blended later.

The plots dedicated to the Brut Nature wines are on a south-facing, concave hillside in the village of Cumières, sloping down to the Marne river, on soils of heavy clay on top of a chalk subsoil.

These are some of Roederer’s earliest ripening plots, giving the wines the requisite roundness and amplitude to be made into a brut nature style (wines without any addition of dosage).

Here, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay grow as a field blend and are co-harvested and co-fermented.

Over the past few years, cellar master Lécaillon has supplemented these plantings with Pinot Blanc, Arbane and Petite Meslier.

The newly launched 2018 wines are the first to contain ‘a touch of’ Pinot Blanc, which, according to Lécaillon, adds ‘a kind of sweetness, of roundness.’

Petit Meslier and Arbane, which will form part of future releases, will ‘stretch acidity.’

Malolactic conversion is avoided to retain and preserve freshness.

Lécaillon says that the rosé is achieved by harvesting the, ‘ripest, darkest Pinot Noir grapes’ five days ahead of the main harvest, destemming the fruit and giving it a cold-soak.

Its pink free-run juice is then co-fermented with the juice of the main harvest, adding colour.

Everything is amplified

The Brut Nature wines thus stand apart from Roederer’s usual modus operandi.

Lécaillon says he looks at these non-dosed wines ‘more as a still wine with bubbles’.

‘Everything is amplified,’ he says, ‘it is not addition but subtraction. It is not about creating a harmonious blend [as per the house’s usual blends], but about taking things away’.

This, he suggests, is in order to reveal the purest sense of that Cumières hillside, of fruit harvested, co-fermented, made sparkling and disgorged without dosage – as opposed to creating a blend of various sites.

Both wines, for now, seem embryonic, and will gain complexity with more time in bottle.

Louis Roederer first made a brut nature wine, inspired by Philippe Starck, in 2006, and again in 2009, both times only in white.

In 2012, 2015 and now 2018, both a white and a rosé wine were made.

The wines will initially retail exclusively at Harrods for £105 and £115 for white and rosé respectively from July until October, from when they will be more widely distributed.

They will also be poured at Raffles London.

Louis Roederer 2018s and 2015s tasted and rated:

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Dom Pérignon has released the highly anticipated P2 – or Plénitude 2 – edition of Dom Pérignon 2008.

The launch event in London in May was littered with a star-studded list of artistic collaborations, including actress Tilda Swinton, musicians Anderson .Paak and Iggy Pop, dancer Alexander Ekman, visual artist Takashi Murakami and chef Clare Smyth.

Away from the glitz, though, the wine itself stands as tall as any Dom Pérignon release of recent times.

Scroll down for Dom Pérignon P2 2008 tasted and rated

A true vineyard wine

Amid the glamour of the brand, it’s easy to lose track of Dom Pérignon’s grounding as a true vineyard estate, rather than as a wine assembled, as is the norm in the region, from a range of fruit both owned and purchased.

While technically difficult to define due to its incorporation into Moët Henessey’s considerable vineyard holding in Champagne, the core of the Dom Pérignon estate is around 300ha of grand and premier cru vineyards, which forms the basis for almost all Dom Pérignon releases.

This represents a grape-to-glass operation of mind-bending detail and scope, which today benefits from parent company LVMH’s considerable investments into soil health and sustainable viticulture.

It is also a brand which is not, as some might assume, defined by volume.

Chaperon says that in the extremely difficult 2017 vintage, Dom Pérignon was made in much, much smaller quantities than usual. Whereas in 2014 none was made at all, as the vintage didn’t meet the team’s quality expectations (despite being widely produced elsewhere in Champagne).

Chaperon took the reigns at Dom Pérignon after the release of the 2008 vintage made under Richard Geoffroy.

He successfully continues Geoffroy’s role as technician, artist and at times philosopher, presenting at the launch a series of figurative drawings made during the blending process for the 2024 vintage to represent the wines of various crus.

After all, the blend is the art here, given the vast number of possibilities imaginable each vintage from such a range of base wines.

The aim is what Chaperon calls ‘emotion through harmony’.

Grey skies of Champagne

Geoffroy’s blend for the 2008, equal parts Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, always seemed destined for a Plénitude release thanks to its pristine structure and drive, where a Dom Pérignon vintage is aged for an extended period on lees under a cork, rather than crown cap seal.

This means around seven years extra ageing for a P2, or around 15 years extra for the rare P3 releases.

The 2008 growing season was marked, in Chaperon’s words, by ‘the typical grey’ of Champagne skies. It was rather cool, cloudy and late maturing, yet finished with a perfectly timed period of dry, sunny weather which brought in ‘luminous and precise’ grapes.

The year’s sometimes forcibly high acidity is still markedly present in many wines today, although the best have stayed beautifully integrated.

P2 sees the textural plushness and reductive energy of lees ageing – bringing a bright, charry, toasted-nut richness – meet the vivid 2008 fruit in perfect harmony.

Is it better than the original release? Not necessarily. A side by side tasting would highlight the richer, caramelised tones that the original is developing on cork versus the superbly fresh, creamy decadence of the P2. Both, though, are unmissable.

Dom Pérignon P2 2008 tasted and rated

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A passionate freediver with over fifteen years experience, Panaïotis’ death during a training exercise in Rochefontaine, Belgium was reported by diving club Reims Palmes Apnée on Sunday. In a statement, Maison Ruinart remembered a ‘brilliant oenologist and a man of great warmth and attentiveness’, who ’embodied the spirit of Champagne with both elegance and humility worldwide’.

Panaïotis joined Ruinart as chef de cave in 2007 after 12 years in the winemaking team at Veuve Clicquot, before which he completed stints with the technical team at the CIVC (Champagne’s governing body) as well as in California. He quickly made a mark at Ruinart, honing the research the Maison was doing on cork tirage – or bottling long-ageing cuvées under cork rather than crown caps for the secondary fermentation – culminating in the first full bottling of a Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs under cork in 2010.

The resulting wine has widely been viewed as one of the most remarkable Champagne releases of the past decade; leading Champagne critic and author Essi Avellan MW wrote that Panaïotis ‘lifted this already superlative cuvée to the next level’, also reporting that he believed ‘the best Dom Ruinarts are still in the cellars’.

Panaïotis’ technical flair extended beyond the realms of the cellar, though. Visits to Ruinart would often delve into meticulous research on everything from vintage weather patterns to the effects of hedgerows and agroforestry on the grapes, soils and microclimate of Ruinart’s ‘laboratory’ vineyard in the village of Taissy. Ever the empiricist, Panaïotis was always clear-minded about his commitments: ‘We don’t do these things just to make better wine,’ he said during a visit to the estate in 2024. ‘We do it for the land of Champagne, and for the planet.’

His open-mindedness led to the development of Ruinart’s highly imaginative ‘Blanc Singulier’ which, in Panaïotis’ words, ‘tries to answer the question of what Blanc de Blancs might look like in the future’. Indeed it is Panaïotis’ mastery of Chardonnay, the grape of his grandparents’ village in Villers-Marmery on the Montagne de Reims, that many in the region will remember him for through his work on the ever-popular Ruinart Blanc de Blancs and Dom Ruinart cuvées.

‘Whatever the topic, he was inquisitive, open-minded, simple and modest despite his immense knowledge,’ said friend and fellow Chardonnay specialist Rodolphe Péters of Champagne Petérs in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, remembering ‘a sincere friend who many of us are mourning today’.

Panaïotis straddled the worlds of cellar technician and spokesperson with a rare adeptness, and was ‘one of Champagne’s all-time best communicators’ according to Avellan. Julia Scavo, winner of the Ruinart Sommelier Challenge in 2018, remembered Panaïotis as a ‘luminary and a guide’ in her discovery of the region, a ‘storyteller and mentor, rendering his work and research transparent to the mentees he shaped’.

‘Fred was brilliant, obviously,’ said Christian Holthausen of Westbrook Marketing Partners, who worked with Panaïotis at Veuve Clicquot before commencing a long personal and professional friendship. ‘He would organise these private tastings where some of the very best winemakers in Champagne would come to taste wines from other parts of the world. I was very lucky to be included, and I am not even a winemaker! Fred just wanted us to learn, and to be open to the outside world. That is rare in Champagne.’

Péters echoed the sentiment. ‘He combined the widest possible wine culture with a great analytical finesse’, paying tribute to ‘a great teacher and a marvellous standard bearer’ for Ruinart and Champagne as a whole.

‘But Fred was much more than that,’ Péters recalled. ‘Above all, he was a free soul.’

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Gaëlle Goossens, senior winemaker and research and development lead at Veuve Clicquot, took guests on a deep dive into the intricacies of Veuve Clicquot’s top Champagne, La Grande Dame.

As a self-proclaimed ‘geeky wine person’, Goossens was the perfect host for this in-depth masterclass, providing listeners with a rare behind-the-scenes look at the creation and evolution of an icon.

Scroll down for notes and scores for seven vintages of La Grande Dame

The wine line up consisted of four fairly recent La Grande Dame vintages (2018, 2015, 2012, 2008), followed by a selection of Grande Dame wines from the back vintage collection (1996, 1993, 1990).

‘They are very special, very rare, and they are completely different,’ said Goossens of the older vintages. ‘This is what we want to show today: that we have the same cuvée, but different expressions.’

Many will know that the DNA of Veuve Clicquot, thanks to the conviction of its founder Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin, is its extensive use of Pinot Noir across all the Champagnes in its range.

But Goossens took the audience beyond the house’s expertise with Pinot Noir, into the complexities and subtleties of creating the prestige cuvée of one of Champagne’s biggest houses.

The new 2018

The masterclass was also the perfect opportunity for guests to taste the new 2018 vintage of La Grande Dame, launched in April this year.

2018 was a warm vintage with an abundant crop of grapes. 2015 was also a very warm year. But, as guests discovered during the masterclass, the wines couldn’t be more different.

The key is soils and water. ‘In 2015 we lacked water, so the soils suffered from one of the worst droughts of Champagne,’ said Goossens. This lack of water caused the vines to stop maturing the grapes, which Goossens said gave the wines a minty, eucalyptus aftertaste.

Conversely, in 2018 ‘we had rain all year long, so the soils kept fresh and cold’. This is reflected in 2018’s superb balance of warm, sun-kissed fruit and a high-tension, mineral core.

Instead of the usual 10 years of ageing before release, ‘we deliberately released 2018 a bit earlier than what we’re used to’, said Goossens. And here’s the interesting part. She said this is because they realised they were losing the ‘terroir window’.

By releasing after 10 years of ageing, they would have passed the youthful, fresh, mineral, terroir-driven stage of the wine’s life, but it hadn’t quite reached its tertiary stage of development, so the wine would be sat somewhere in the middle phase.

Releasing it earlier allows the wine to show its youthful characters, as well as the influence of the terroir.

‘When we say the art of ageing, it’s not always pushing the boundaries of ageing in terms of length, it’s more mastering the ageing,’ said Goossens.

See our coverage of the 2018 launch here

The nitty gritty

The house’s use of micro-vinifications is one of the keys to its consistency, resulting in lots of small vats of wines with which to choose the final blend.

‘We’ll have a single vat from a single cru, from a single year, from a single variety,’ said Goossens.

To give an idea of scale, that means every year the winemaking team tastes 700 to 800 wines from a single harvest, plus 400 to 500 different reserve wines. ‘To elaborate our blend, we need to taste more than 1,000 wines over several months,’ she said.

The second key element that Goossens revealed is the blind tasting of these wines: ‘If you want to find the best wine, you have to blind taste.’

Creating a vintage of La Grande Dame is as much about strategic decision making as it is about the quality of the vintage.

Managing the stock of reserve wines plays a key role here; enough must be put aside each vintage to ensure there is enough to create the brand’s entry-level Yellow Label each year.

‘So La Grande Dame is only made when we have enough reserve wines in our winery, and when the Pinot Noir is really extraordinary,’ said Goossens.

The goal with La Grande Dame is to put the structure and texture of Pinot Noir alongside minerality and finesse. ‘But it’s extremely hard to find finesse with Pinot Noir, it’s easier to get bigger aromas than finesse,’ says Goossens.

Finding finesse, therefore, is also about where the grapes are sourced from, she said, and this is dependent on the vintage. In a warm year like 2018, grapes were sourced primarily from the cool north-facing slopes of the Montagne de Reims, notably Verzy and Verzenay.

‘What cellar master Didier Mariotti calls “the art of blending” is actually the art of finding the right crus for the right vintage,’ says Goossens.

La Grande Dame: One cuvée, myriad expressions

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 2018

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 2015

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 2012 (magnum)

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 2008 (magnum)

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 1996 (magnum)

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 1993 (magnum)

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 1990 (magnum)

Veuve Clicquot, La Grande Dame 1990 (jeroboam)

Guests had the rare opportunity to see just how different the same cuvée can taste, depending on the circumstance: from the vintage conditions, to how long it spent on lees, to when it was disgorged, to what format it was bottled in.

La Grande Dame through the ages

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Veuve Clicquot launched the 2018 vintage of its top-tier cuvée La Grande Dame at a luscious dinner event in the Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology in Paris.

The decadent yellow-drenched table arrangement, set for 100 guests and bedecked with a frothing, golden scene of daffodils, buttercups and dainty gypsophila, aptly reflected the streets of the city, dripping with spring blossom.

Scroll down for the tasting note and score of La Grande Dame 2018

A hotly anticipated vintage

2018 was a generous year in Champagne, sun-soaked and peaceful, with smiles and no sorting table drama – blessed relief after a disastrous 2017.

‘It was an easy harvest, in an organisational sense,’ says Veuve Clicquot cellar master Didier Mariotti, ‘we didn’t have to sort, there were no real problems, even during the growing season.’

Figuring out where such an abundant crop of grapes was going to fit in the winery was the only real issue.

The summer was hot with lots of sunny days, but significant rain over the winter had topped up the vines’ water reserves. They could draw this on throughout the dry growing season.

And arguably this is key to how the wine now tastes in the glass. ‘If we hadn’t had this rain in the winter, I think we’d have had a very different expression,’ says Mariotti.

Because despite the calm of the vintage, in the bottle La Grande Dame 2018 is far from lazy. It’s racy, mineral and tightly coiled.

The warmth comes through in its sun-kissed ripe stone and citrus fruit, yet it’s smart and precise. Delectable candied orange rind builds to a crescendo of yuzu and coconut cream.

A luminous and energetic iteration of La Grande Dame.

Terroir

As is the norm for La Grande Dame, 90% of the blend is Pinot Noir, sourced mostly from the Montagne de Reims.

But for Mariotti, contrary to many, ‘it’s not the provenance that matters most’.

‘We always taste blind,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to be influenced by the provenance. I don’t focus on one specific cru or terroir, I focus on the wine.’

Yet the year’s impeccable grapes from the Montagne de Reims, notably from Verzy and Verzenay, could well be the reason behind such clarity, precision and salinity – or as Mariotti calls it, positive bitterness – in the wine.

‘It’s still a teenager,’ says Mariotti, ‘but what I like about this wine is its energy and desire to discover the world.’

Who knows what sort of world this wine will discover in its future, but any future drinker of 2018 La Grande Dame will be richly rewarded.

Join us for a New York masterclass:

Date: Saturday 7 June 2025 from 11am to 5pm

Location: Bay Room at Manhatta, 28 Liberty Street, 60th Floor New York, NY 10005

Buy tickets here

A grand vintage for a Grande Dame:

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