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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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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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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As much of France reels from one of the toughest growing seasons of recent times, Champagne was still holding on to some quiet optimism as harvest continued through September.

Quiet, that is, because yields are low and maturity unpredictable. Optimistic, though, because outside of the Aube in Champagne’s south, Reims and the Marne Valley in the north have largely made it through with a modest yield on the vines, ripening through a much-needed dry spell in mid-September.

After the gigantic, botrytis-affected 2023 vintage, yields were always going to look smaller this year, even before the travails of the weather took their toll.

‘There were two to three bunches less per vine this year,’ said Louis Roederer’s cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon. ‘There was a lot of fruit to ripen in 2023, so maybe the vine directed its energy to last year, but not this year’.

Mother nature doubled down, handing out spring frosts that caused up to 80% loss in parts of the Côte des Bar in late April. At Alexandre Bonnet in Les Riceys, there will be no Rosé de Riceys made this year – the first time since 1991.

Hail hit the Marne Valley, home to much of Champagne’s Meunier, on 12 May, affecting around 500ha of vineyards.

The unifying story, however, is of downy mildew. ‘We weren’t hit so badly by the frost,’ said Hugo Drappier of Champagne Drappier in Urville in southern Champagne’s troubled Côte des Bar. We looked out over vineyards carrying barely a tenth of their usual yield. ‘But we were hit worse by the mildew,’ he said.

Downy mildew entered flowers and young grapes at the end of June and into July. Unlike for the leaves, which the vine can replace or partially save, this is terminal for affected bunches.

Although there was crop loss in the Marne Valley, the mildew was the worst in working memory for many in the Aube, with possible implications for the region as a whole; much of Champagne’s red wine destined for rosé production is made in Les Riceys, and there will be much less to go around this year.

Ordinarily, downy mildew is controlled either by copper-based sprays, used by organic producers and requiring constant re-treatments, or systemic fungicides used by non-organic producers. If organic viticulture is seen as more challenging, then the sheer pressure of the year has eventually landed everyone in the same boat. In fact organic viticulture, as it did in 2023, seems to be coping well in skilled hands: ‘Our organic trials were good this year, but if you missed a treatment in the vineyards then it’s gone!’ said Émilien Boutillat, cellar master at Piper-Heidsieck.

Surprisingly, Meunier in the Marne Valley was not the primary victim of rainfall, as Perrier-Jouët’s cellar master Séverine Frerson explained: ‘The Meunier in the Marne Valley is better than last year, the characteristic this year is fruitiness and freshness, we could have a very good vintage.’

Charles Philipponnat of Champagne Philipponnat agreed that it is a ‘healthier’ year than 2023, because while downy mildew can affect the yield, it does not necessarily affect quality.

Somewhat more predictably, Chardonnay, despite being later to ripen, seems to have yielded better, possibly missing the troublesome weather at flowering.

‘I’m confident for some beautiful Chardonnay this year,’ said Vitalie Taittinger of Champagne Taittinger, despite a little more reticence on the Pinots. A walk through the Côte des Blancs revealed limited mildew damage and moderate yields on Chardonnay, although maturity is extremely heterogeneous.

The damage in the Aube, together with lower yields overall, will have consequences that are slow to work their way through. Champagne’s unique réserve interprofessionnelle system (formerly known as a réserve individuelle) – whereby a certain amount of wine can be held back from the previous harvest in case of low yields, blocked from being bottled as Champagne by the authorities and kept at a rolling maximum of the equivalent of 10 tonnes per hectare – will be important this year.

Those with almost no grapes will be forced to use almost all of these reserves to make their wines, meaning there will be little in reserve for next year should the weather gods prove equally unkind. Those who put their inferior wines from 2023 into reserve, hoping to swap them out for better ones this year, will face a tough choice as to whether to use them or take the hit and sell them on.

After the sting in the tail of 2023, however, the mood in most of Champagne remains upbeat – even if growers will be hoping that 2025 gives them an easier ride.

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Andy Howard MW, Christine Allen and Eugenio Egorov tasted 131 wines, with 3 Outstanding and 71 Highly Recommended.

Sparkling wines of the Americas: Panel tasting scores

131 wines tasted

Exceptional 0

Outstanding 3

Highly recommended 71

Recommended 55

Commended 2

Fair 0

Poor 0

Entry criteria: producers and UK agents were invited to submit current-release sparkling wines from any recognised appellation in the Americas, north or south – vintage or non-vintage, of any colour white, rosé or red, and produced according to the traditional or ancestral methods (ie, respectively, secondary fermentation in bottle or a single fermentation in bottle.

The judging panel were impressed by the outright quality on show in this tasting, from areas as diverse as the Niagara Peninsula and Nova Scotia in Canada down to the southerly extremes of Patagonia. At the end, Eugenio Egorov enthused about ‘the rise of American sparkling wine – a New World of bubbles’.

He observed: ‘A quiet revolution is underway across the Americas, and the results are nothing short of impressive.’ Andy Howard MW agreed: ‘The quality came as a surprise, with fantastic balance and precision in the top-scoring wines.’

Scroll down to see the top results from the sparkling wines of the Americas panel tasting

Six nation tasting

This six-nation tasting traversed Canada, the US, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. It was no great shock that many US wines did well, with the long-established Chandon performing strongly.

And no surprise, either, that the Racines Grand Reserve Chardonnay gained a score of 94, given the involvement of Rodolphe Péters (of Champagne Pierre Péters) and Etienne de Montille and Brian Sieve (Domaine de Montille in Burgundy).

What did bowl the panel over was the quantity and quality of wines from Canada. Of the 79 Canadian wines tasted, three were deemed Outstanding, 37 Highly recommended.

Availability may be a challenge in the UK, but those in North America should celebrate the quality on offer in their backyard.

Ultra-cool climate Nova Scotia performed well (with the highly distinctive hybrid L’Acadie Blanc grape displaying its benchmark acidity in one of Blomidon’s wines.

But it was Ontario that provided the greatest excitement.

Two Niagara estates took top honours, with York Vineyards a particular shock as its first releases were yet to hit the market (due July/August 2024) at the time of tasting. These wines show the potential of this region.

York Vineyards is currently the only estate in Ontario (and perhaps in Canada) known to be focusing entirely on traditional method sparkling wine; barrel fermentation/ maturation and extended lees ageing here have resulted in some excellent wines.

See all the wines from the sparkling wines of the Americas panel tasting

Bright future

South America didn’t perform quite as strongly, perhaps a reflection of the market driven, sharper price limitations on producers in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil.

Many of the wines are Recommended (86-89pts), but fewer shone as brightly as those from the US and Canada.

The developing ‘frontier’ regions of Limarí (Chile) and Chubut (Argentinian Patagonia) did show great potential.

The Otronia estate in Chubut was a great discovery. In the extreme south of Argentina (45’33’’) where the climate is cold and hostile, the first vines were planted in 2010.

The results for such youthful wines are impressive – great focus, purity and energy.

Egorov summarised the potential for the sparkling wines of the Americas: ‘As the global demand for sparkling wine continues to rise, and prices in traditional regions like Champagne and Italy climb ever higher, American producers are stepping up to offer exciting alternatives with more accessible price-tags.’

He concluded: ‘The future of fizz is looking bright on this side of the Atlantic.’

Sparkling wines of the Americas panel tasting scores

Wines were tasted blind

The judges

Andy Howard MW is a Decanter contributing editor and DWWA Regional Chair. A former retail wine buyer for more than 30 years, he now runs his own consultancy Vinetrades, focusing on wine education, judging, investment and sourcing.

Christine Allen is marketing director for distributor Maisons Marques et Domaines, particularly focusing on Old World regions, Champagne and sparkling wine. She has years of experience across sales, marketing and buying in the fine wine market, and is a DWWA judge.

Eugenio Egorov is head sommelier at AA five-star The Stafford in London. Born in Ukraine, he began his hospitality career in restaurants in Italy and Florida, USA, before moving to London in 2014, where he rose as a sommelier at the likes of 45 Park Lane and The Dorchester.

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‘2004 is stunning,’ says Ruinart’s cellar master Frédéric Panaïotis. ‘It’s a lesson in being humble about our statements, nuanced in the way we talk about vintages.’

The ‘sleeper vintage’ is a recurring trope in wine discussions: a vintage that pulls the ultimate tortoise-and-hare trick, holding steady in the long-haul to overtake its showier neighbours despite long odds at the starting line.

It’s impossible, then, to understand the current interest in Champagne’s 2004 vintage 20 years on without seeing the hare: 2002.

Scroll down to see notes and scores for 23 Champagnes from the excellent 2004 vintage

Vintage comparisons

2002 was so good that it seemed as though every Champagne producer made a full range of vintages and prestige cuvées, whether led by Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. Coming after an uneven millennium vintage and a miserable 2001, 2002’s exceptional maturity and aromatic opulence caused a great deal of excitement.

2003 – a year of frost, extreme heat and therefore challenging grapes – came and went. 2004 arrived with an extraordinary early summer flowering period that allowed what was then the largest ever crop of grapes to set on Champagne’s vines. It was so large – just short of 14,000kg per hectare on average, according to official statistics from Champagne’s regional body the Comité Champagne – that fears of dilution abounded.

‘2002 seemed so luscious, everybody was going for it – but 2004 seemed too lean and diluted,’ says Panaïtois. ‘But today, 2002 is heavy wool and 2004 is lace; sometimes we just have to wait.’

Krug’s cellar master Julie Cavil points out that the house chose the phrase ‘luminous freshness’ to sum up its 2004 vintage, which contained a little more Chardonnay than usual to ‘tell the story of that freshness and length’.

‘2004 was very, very fresh, with a lot of rain – big bunches, and big grapes,’ says Cavil.

There are echoes, too, of the vintage which is currently sitting in Champagne producers’ cellars: 2023

Where 2023 finished with a sting in the tail of heat and exploding rot pressure, though, 2004 was a calmer affair with a dry and warm September providing a perfect final stretch after a mixed mid-summer, allowing the grapes to ripen fully without the risk of rot.

Harvest commenced on the 18 September with an average potential alcohol level of 9.8% (0.5% lower than 2002) and acidity levels of 7.3 g/L (0.3g/L higher than 2002).

The vintage is a fine example, too, of Champagne’s very particular relationship with yield. While much of the wine world tends to associate high yields with lower quality (and vice versa), many in Champagne quietly believe that high yielding years can be remarkably successful – the fêted 2008 provided natural yields over 14,000kg per hectare, for example.

The human factor

Twenty years is a long time not only in the life of a wine, but also in the life of a Champagne house. As London wine retailer Bordeaux Index lined up an extraordinary set of perfectly matured 2004s for tasting in May 2024, it would be easy to assume that behind the decades and sometimes centuries-deep reputations on show, there are styles and approaches which were set in stone.

Does Cristal still taste how Cristal used to taste? Would a fantasy dinner party of illustrious guests Doms Ruinart and Pérignon, the Comtes de Champagne and Churchill be able to sit together and recognise today’s wines made in their names?

The truth is that ethos, approach and bias shift, albeit subtly, with every administration that makes them. Grape growing and sourcing, cellar work, even commercial realities that force decisions on how long to age wines and when to release them, all ebb and flow.

For some producers, 2004 comes in a real purple patch, every bit as strong as modern wines – Krug and Charles Heidsieck come to mind – but there are also plenty of producers whose standards in both the vineyards and cellar today are arguably even higher than they were back in 2004 (take Bollinger and Roederer, for example).

Indeed the turn of the millennium was a transitional stage for many maisons. Cristal 2004 dates from the very beginning of current cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon’s trials with organics and biodynamics.

Bollinger’s Mathieu Kauffmann, Pol Roger’s Dominique Petit, Charles Heidsieck’s Régis Camus and Taittinger’s Loïc Dupont were all within the first five years of their time at the helms of their respective houses.

It was a time of transition in the vineyards too, as the region was left in shock by the heatwave of 2003 – a vintage where ‘everybody was on the beach’ when the grapes suddenly needed harvesting, according to Dom Pérignon’s Vincent Chaperon.

After 2003, there would be August harvests in 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2018, and 2004’s cooler, later-ripening profile would become increasingly rare. Reason enough, perhaps, to treasure the 2004s still in circulation. Only 2013 (and the tricky 2017, whose best wines have largely been blanc de blancs), have had later harvest start dates.

In the end, this was a tasting which cemented 2004’s place as a contender for 2002’s (and perhaps even 2008’s) long-assumed crown among the Champagne vintages of the 2000s and 2010s.

Perhaps other vintages are marked more strongly, more deeply – the tension and coolness of 2008 and 2013, the intensity of 2012 and 2002, the sunny abandon of 2006 and 2009 – but 2004’s quiet, serene beauty has never been more evident and deliciously poised, 20 years on, between freshness and maturity.

It’s a year worthy of a much-overused word: classic.

20 years on: top wines from Champagne’s 2004 vintage

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Charles Heidsieck, Blanc des Millénaires 2014

Charles Heidsieck has released only the fifth vintage of its blanc de blancs prestige cuvée Blanc des Millénaires since the celebrated 1995. The 2014 vintage, which follows on from the 2007, marks a subtle shift.

While the blend still hails from the Côte des Blancs villages of Cramant, Avize, Oger, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger and Vertus, this vintage is a little younger upon release than previous editions, having seen just under nine years on lees.

If fans of previous, extremely long lees-aged editions of this cuvée might see this as cause for alarm, then their fears are misplaced; this is a beautifully pure, pristine Blanc des Millénaires that promises to be one of the region’s highlights from this cool, delicate vintage.

Henriot 2014

The same vintage character is certainly present in Henriot’s 2014 vintage, which is in some ways even more reserved upon release. This is a smart, well-priced vintage offering for those with a little patience, made in Henriot’s naturally crisp, controlled and reductive style.

Devaux, Cuvée D 2014

Devaux, in the Côte des Bar, has turned out an approachable and charming Cuvée D 2014 alongside the latest release of the ambitious oak-embracing Stenopé from 2013, made in collaboration with Rhône winemaker Michel Chapoutier.

Scroll down to see Tom Hewson’s notes and scores for the new Champagne releases

Gosset, Grand Millésime 2016

Moving on to more recent vintages,Gosset, based in Aÿ, becomes the latest house to add an offering from 2016 – a vintage whose reputation appears to be surpassing initial expectations after what seemed like a season split between extreme rain and extreme sun.

Grand Millésime is a creative blend led by Chardonnay, featuring wines not only from the premiers and grands crus of the Montagne de Reims and Côte des Blancs, but from the Petite Montagne and Coteaux Sud d’Épernay, too.

This is a release that trades on the year’s approachability, even if Gosset is known for its tense, pared-back style.

Piper-Heidsieck 2018

Piper-Heidsieck continues a strong run of vintage releases with the 2018, one of the first major houses to release a vintage cuvée from what was an extraordinary vintage in terms of generosity of yield and clean, healthy, ripe grapes.

Accordingly this is a more overt vintage than the pristine 2014, and less concentrated than 2012; however there is an impressive structure and length for 2018 in this fine, polished blend from the first vintage since current cellar master Émilien Boutillat joined the winemaking team.

A cuvée which continues to punch above its weight.

Ayala, Le Blanc de Blancs A/18

In a similar vein, Ayala, neighbours and sister house to Bollinger in Aÿ, has relaunched its vintage-dated blanc de blancs as A/18 from the 2018 vintage, including fruit not only from the Côte des Blancs but from chalky Bisseuil in the Montagne de Reims.

Ayala has made it its mission to embrace Champagne’s Chardonnay over the last decade, with a larger percentage of Chardonnay in its NV Brut Majeur than any of the other Grande Marque houses.

With 2018’s solar, approachable character, this is a slightly more immediate release than the excellent 2016 vintage.

Pol Roger 2018

Pol Roger also enters the fold with 2018 as the first vintage release made under cellar master Damien Cambres. Cambres pointed out that 2018’s enormous yields risked ‘some dilution’.

They also meant that the team could be ‘more selective’ for the vintage cuvée, which follows tradition at Pol Roger in being 60% Pinot Noir and 40% Chardonnay.

Cambres is keen to point out that, despite the heat of the year and lower-than-average acidities, this was not ‘a year of extremely high maturity – we were able to pick with a lot of freshness.’

Ruinart, Blanc Singulier Édition 19

The following vintage, 2019, is one where the power and ripeness really ramped up in Champagne – exactly the sort of conditions Ruinart is looking to experiment with in its new cuvée Blanc Singulier, which tries to imagine ‘the future of blanc de blancs’ in the new climate era, according to cellar master Frédéric Panaïotis.

This imaginative blanc de blancs looks to celebrate, rather than hide, the exuberance of ripe, expressive Chardonnay, bringing together an unusual series of crus mostly outside the Côte des Blancs.

Despite 2019’s heatwaves and powerful ripeness, it was ‘overall not as hot’ as 2018, according to Panaïotis, pointing to a cooler spring and a later harvest, with livelier acidity in the wines.

Telmont, Réserve de la Terre

Finally, Telmont, in Damery, has been on the front foot when it comes to environmental commitments since its acquisition by Remy Cointreau (and the addition of a high profile shareholder in Leonardo di Caprio) in 2020.

Two commitments in particular makes Telmont stand out; one is converting both its own and its grape suppliers’ vineyards to certified organic production by 2031, and the other is becoming ‘climate positive’ by 2030.

At a time when Champagne is in need of houses willing to raise the bar when it comes to the transparency of their grape supply (and despite the cynicism that sometimes comes with a celebrity endorsement), these are sincere and meaningful efforts, marked by the release of 64,800 bottles of Réserve de la Terre, based on the 2020 vintage.

This fully organic release, although youthful, is the most promising yet in the current era.

Spring & summer 2024 round-up

See all of the new Champagne releases from 2024 that Tom Hewson has tasted and rated:

Ayala, Le Blanc de Blancs A/18

Billecart-Salmon, Louis Salmon Blanc de Blancs 2012

Billecart-Salmon, Elisabeth Salmon Rosé 2012

Billecart-Salmon 2016

Billecart-Salmon, Le Clos St-Hilaire 2007

Bollinger, La Grande Année 2015

Bollinger, La Grande Année Rosé 2015

Bollinger, PN VZ 19

Lallier, Réflexion R.020

Devaux, D Millésimé 2014

Gosset, Grand Millésime 2016

Henriot 2014

Krug 2011

Lanson, Le Rosé Création 67

Piper-Heidsieck 2018

Pol Roger, Brut Vintage 2018

Ruinart, Blanc Singulier Édition 19

Ruinart, Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs 2013

Telmont, Réserve de la Terre

Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame Rosé 2015

11 new Champagne releases from spring & summer 2024:

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• First taste: Bollinger’s La Grande Année 2015
• First taste: Champagne Lallier’s Réflexion R.020

Blue strobe lighting bounces off a blood-red Gibson guitar as a swish of shoulder-length silver hair motions towards the drum kit. The bassist, clad head-to-toe in black, stands wide-stanced, a low-slung bass hanging above steam-punk work boots. The crowd is cheering. Somewhere near the back, there’s a ‘pop’.

On stage is the Bulles Bio band – a group of organic Champagne producers, playing two sets of classic rock at Le Cirque in Reims. It’s the evening after a day of tasting at Le Printemps des Champagnes 2024, the four-day trade-only bonanza focused on independent and grower Champagne in Reims. The silver-haired guitarist? Pascal Doquet of the eponymous Côte des Blancs domaine, having swapped the day’s spittoons and samples for six strings.

Doquet is no slouch on the guitar, marshalling a band that includes Jérôme Bourgeois, from Champagne Bourgeois-Diaz in the Marne Valley, on the vocals, and Olivier Horiot from the Aube on drums. The Rolling Stones, Placebo and Radiohead are rolled out, and more than a few vignerons – most of whom had been standing still pouring their wares for the world’s trade and press in the very same room all day – start busting out moves not normally seen during cellar visits.

Organic Champagne on the rise

The Association des Champagnes Biologiques (or Organic Champagne Association) now counts over 60 producers in its ranks. Some of these are well-established names, such as David Léclapart and Pascal Doquet. There are also 19 new estates, whose organic certification is so recent that they were only able to share their vins clairs (still base wines) at the Printemps tastings, rather than finished Champagnes. It’s perhaps the most dynamic and surprising tasting of the whole weekend.

Historically, the whole point of Printemps was to taste the vins clairs. It began with the group Terres et Vins de Champagne in 2009 as a response to Bordeaux’s ability to gather the trade and press to taste the region’s latest vintage en primeur. Nowadays, although of academic interest to Champagne insiders, tasting vins clairs is of less interest to most attendees, because they are a long way from the finished article.

Valuable insight into the 2023 vintage

Tasting vins clairs is, however, an opportunity to put a positive spin even on the hardest vintages. Chardonnay, the eternal escape artist of Champagne, came away from the highly volatile, one-off season that was 2023 looking very smart; even growers with only a tiny amount of Chardonnay in their plantations made sure they wheeled out at least one. Most, despite enormous yields at times, were true and fine, if a little easy going.

Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt of Laurent-Perrier expressed slight disappointment that the normal ‘intensity’ of Chardonnay was not present enough for them to declare a vintage.

There will certainly be many happy growers in the Côte des Blancs, however, and it’s safe to assume that most vintage and prestige blanc de blancs will be made in 2023.

It’s a different story for Pinot Noir and Meunier however, as our 2023 harvest report suggests. The general mood seems to be one of slight resignation, despite pockets of optimism. Lack of aromatic maturity in the Pinot Noir that did escape botrytis is an issue, although the flavours and the concentration found in the Meunier have been a pleasant surprise for those that escaped disease, despite the lower potential alcohol levels.

‘9.5% natural alcohol was good for Meunier,’ says Meunier specialist Benoît Déhu, presenting a spicy, relatively fulsome version of his La Rue des Noyers vin clair, made from Meunier in Fossoy.

Some base wines did appear to be alarmingly open, easy and advanced, and one or two showed botrytis or volatile notes. Perhaps unsurprisingly it was the drier grand cru terroirs for Pinot Noir which seemed to show well: there were good wines from Bouzy and Ambonnay (from Maurice Vesselle and Georges Remy), although how clean and concentrated the crop was has as much to do with individual approaches to viticulture and harvesting, too.

Overall, 2023 looks like it could be quite simply the most variable vintage in Champagne’s recent history, with neither quality, concentration, rot or underripeness easy to predict.

Five trends in independent Champagne to look out for this year:

The 2020 vintage: reasons to be cheerful

With 2021 also showing highly variably, it was cheering to see a raft of 2020-based non-vintage and vintage Champagnes (which will be ready from summer 2024) show the best face of what was a year of unprecedented heat and drought. These are compact, powerful wines, but they don’t seem heavy, grippy or too angular; in fact the best would seem to put to bed the widely held fears that 2020 would echo 2015’s difficulties with vegetal flavours. At Billecart-Salmon, cellar master Florent Nys went one step further, voicing his slight preference for 2020 over the much-vaunted 2019 (in the much-discussed trilogy of 2018, 2019 and 2020).

2021: caution needed

2023 came only two years after another highly complex vintage in Champagne: 2021. With an explosion of downy mildew early in the season, the challenge was less about sanitary conditions at harvest (as it was in 2017 and 2023), and more about low yields and low levels of maturity caused by the cool, wet summer. As the first Champagnes (non-vintage) emerge it appears to be a year that may be marked by, at best, crisp, taut but essentially ripe Champagnes and, at worst, green or under-mature characters.

Stalemate in the ecological divide

After a wet winter and accelerated weed growth, Champagne’s vineyard was visibly brown in the spring of 2023, with widespread herbicide usage. After 125 growers signed a letter to the French newspaper Le Monde in 2022 calling for Champagne to ban herbicides, the debate has hit a stalemate.

On the one hand, Champagne’s organic vineyard area continues to increase, now approaching 10% of total hectarage according to Jérôme Bourgeois (president of the Association des Champagnes Biologiques), and many of the larger houses (Louis Roederer, Bollinger, Taittinger, Charles Heidsieck, Piper Heidsieck and the LVMH vineyard holdings, among others) work their own vineyards either organically or above the basic standards required of HVE (Haute Valeur Environnementale) or VDC (Viticulture Durable en Champagne) certification.

On the other hand, the region has yet to solve the issue of how to persuade more growers who simply sell their grapes to certify as sustainable, despite its aim (rather than promise) to achieve 100% certification by 2030. A 2022 report by Union Champagne, the group of 15 cooperatives in Champagne, representing one of the largest forces in the region (covering over 1,500ha, just short of the 1,700ha owned by LVMH), states that less than half of the vineyard surface controlled is under sustainable certification.

Coteaux on the rise

Champagne’s still wines put on their best showing yet, perhaps helped by the naturally ripe and hot 2019, 2020 and 2022 vintages. What was once a niche product appears to be fully assimilated into the output of many Champagne producers.

At Chamery Cirus, the tasting dedicated solely to Coteaux Champenois wines from the village of Chamery, few producers were making more than 1,000 bottles of any one cuvée. Style is more diverse than straight, quasi-Burgundian approaches: there’s everything from skin-fermented Chardonnay and Petit Meslier to carbonic maceration (Beaujolais-style) Meunier. Look out for more coverage of Coteaux Champenois on Decanter Premium later this year.

The Petite Montagne: a hotbed?

The Petite Montagne de Reims, just west of Reims, continues to shine as a region for independent Champagne growers as the potential of the sandy slopes in villages such as Éceuil, Chamery, Sacy and Ville-Dommange for all three grape varieties becomes clearer. Champagnes Louis Brochet, Gaspard Brochet, Nicolas Maillart, Émilien Allouchery, Bonnet-Ponson and Perseval-Farge in particular are worth following.

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• Regional profile: Champagne’s Marne Valley

It is September 2023 in the vineyards of Champagne Christophe Mignon in the village of Leuvrigny. As an early autumn heatwave takes hold, a harvester stops to pick an enormous bunch of grapes, dark purple and pristine.

Snipping the bunch in two, he looks up at me and shrugs his shoulders; beneath the purple exterior is a layer of green, unripe berries. ‘This is 2023!’ he says, with more than a dash of exasperation.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for Tom Hewson’s top picks of Marne Valley Champagnes

The small picking team works its way up the rows, hunting for ripeness among a fast-moving explosion of rot and shrivelling berries. Only two harvests previously, many growers lost everything to downy mildew and incessant rainfall. Meunier yields were significantly reduced for Jérôme Bourgeois of Champagne Bourgeois-Diaz in Crouttes-sur-Marne, at the western extremity of the Champagne appellation, where the majority of Meunier was lost. ‘I was glad to have a little Pinot Noir and Chardonnay,’ he says.

In Cuisles, further east towards Champagne’s centre, things were little better: Famille Moussé lost 90% of production. ‘It was a hard vintage, psychologically,’ says the estate’s export manager Julie Daviaux, ‘There was a lot of depression in the community.’

The Marne Valley is not the easiest place to grow grapes in Champagne. It is, however, home to Champagne’s true local speciality, without which it would be impossible to imagine either the approachable blends of the Grandes Marques, or the modern, terroir-specific grower Champagne movement: the Meunier grape.

The Marne Valley: The facts

The Marne Valley (including the Grande Vallée and Coteaux Sud d’Epernay) is Champagne’s largest sub-region, with over 12,000ha of vines across 121 villages.

There are 5,500 growers (most of which sell their grapes).

Champagne has by far the largest plantation of Meunier in the world with just over 30% of its 34,000ha planted to the variety (70% of which is in the Marne Valley). Only England, with its focus on cool-climate sparkling, embraces the grape in a similar way, where is totals 9% of all plantings.

The Marne Valley is known more for its clays, sands and limestone soils than the chalk found in Champagne’s centre.

Source – Union des Maisons de Champagne

Meunier

Meunier is a chimeric mutation of the Pinot family, meaning that it is almost genetically identical save for mutations that lead, among a handful of subtle differences, to its distinctive silvery leaves. Its buds also emerge later than Pinot Noir, a key advantage in this cooler part of Champagne where the risk of frost damage is heightened.

Notions of Meunier’s modest quality are set into the story of Champagne; André Simon’s 1962 book The History Of Champagne dedicates one sentence alone to the ‘poor relation’ Meunier, calling it ‘a more generous but commoner species, giving more gallons per acre of a less distinguished wine.’

Today this attitude is widely disregarded. Meunier’s heritage may be that of a blending variety, used for its fruity, fleshy character to wrap around the more structured, tense Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Champagne’s chalky heart, yet ever since the idea of showcasing it alone emerged in the 1990s – when François Egly (and later Jérôme Prévost) began producing single-vineyard Meunier not from the Marne Valley but vineyards near Reims – Meunier’s reputation has undergone a revival.

See also: A guide to Pinot Meunier Champagne

The Marne Valley as a whole can be separated into three distinct areas: the Grande Vallée, the Marne Valley and Coteaux Sud d’Epernay:

The Grande Vallée – a Pinot Noir enclave

With its source in the Langres plain to the southeast of the Côte des Bar, the Marne river splits Champagne’s winegrowing area in two: to the north, the city of Reims and the Montagne de Reims, and Epernay and the Côte des Blancs to the south.

As the river runs west towards Paris, a shallow valley forms. At its eastern end, before the sand and clay lands of Meunier begin, a small string of villages cling to the chalky hillsides looking south towards Epernay; this is the Grande Vallée of the Marne river, home to some of Champagne’s most revered Pinot Noir vineyards.

The grandiose villas of Aÿ and the imposing, south-facing slopes between Mareuil-sur-Aÿ and Hautvillers tell their own story: wines from this area have been famed for centuries, even before Champagne had its bubbles. Patrick Forbes, in his 1967 book Champagne, reports that ‘Henry VIII of England kept a special commissioner at Aÿ to provide him with wine,’ and that the famous Léon vineyard site is believed to be ‘the one from which Pope Leo the Magnificent – the patron of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci – drew his wine.’

The Union des Maisons de Champagne reports that 67% of the main body of the Marne Valley is planted with Meunier, versus 16% for Pinot Noir. These percentages are almost exactly reversed in the warm, chalky slopes of the Grande Vallée. The villages by the river between Mareuil-sur-Aÿ and Damery arguably have more in common, then, with the villages in the southern Montagne de Reims such as Ambonnay and Bouzy to the east, than to the valley heading out westwards.

As the Marne river flows west though, past the town of Damery, the chalk subsoil so famous in Champagne descends beneath clays and sands of the later Tertiary period, and the landscape morphs from the imposing, hard, white hillsides into something a little more bucolic, which sees pretty villages, mixed farmland and woodland dotted between patches of vineyard.

The Marne Valley

‘There is a huge difference between the Grande Vallée and the Marne Valley in terms of climate, soil and exposition,’ says Jean-Paul Hébrart of Champagne Marc Hébrart in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ. Indeed, if the Pinot Noir enclave of the Grande Vallée feels compact and strait-laced, the Marne Valley itself is a more drawn-out, leisurely affair.

There’s little of the glitz and glamour of Epernay’s grand Avenue de Champagne here. As Jérôme Bourgeois and I watch the slow train from Epernay to Paris chug by, he says: ‘We don’t have as many party invitations out here, or as many visitors.’

Climate

In and around the town of Château-Thierry, the climate is more humid than in Champagne’s heart. ‘Elsewhere they have fewer problems with mildew – the premier and grand cru vineyards (in central Champagne) are rated that way because they resist disease better,’ Bourgeois explains, ‘our clay and limestone soil gives us a good combination of fruitiness, suppleness and freshness; good for drinking young.’

Despite the climatic challenges, Bourgeois is one of an increasing number of vignerons here working organically and biodynamically, and we find – perhaps a little surprisingly – what might be, according to Jean-Marc Charpentier, Champagne’s single largest certified biodynamic vineyard holding at Champagne Charpentier in Charly-sur-Marne.

Charpentier points out that the north bank of the Marne river varies hugely from village to village: as the river bends, the expositions change and the soils dip in and out of complex deposits. He has planted a surprisingly large amount of Chardonnay on the calcareous soils of the south-facing sun bowl of Charly-sur-Marne. ‘A lot of Chardonnay in the Marne Valley is picked too early, and doesn’t taste mature – here we are able to wait,’ he explains.

But the cooler sites with heavier soils far out in the Marne Valley are facing more challenges. ‘Meunier from cooler sites on clay does not always suit our fermentation,’ explains Billecart-Salmon’s cellar master Florent Nys. He has been shifting the house’s focus to the villages of Leuvrigny, Damery and Venteuil, closer to Épernay, rather than the cooler, more humid terroirs further west, in search of ‘more concentration, and more pristine, mineral sensations,’ he says.

At Champagne Telmont in Damery, a similar thought process is underway: ‘We are very proud of our Meunier,’ explains cellar master Bertrand Lhopital. ‘We are not changing the percentage in our blends, but we are changing the source – we’re looking for more minerality, and less power.’

Rive gauche and rive droite

As the Marne continues westwards, vineyards are planted on both sides of the river. The vineyards on the south side, or the rive gauche, tend to face north so the wines show cooler, brighter characters, while the vineyards on the north bank often face south, catching more intense sunlight and producing a riper, sunnier style of wine.

Alexis Leconte of Champagne Alexis in Troissy farms vineyards on both sides. He says: ‘We need five more days to reach the same sugar levels here [in Troissy, on the south bank of the river], than we do in Vandières [on the north bank].’ Tasting Leconte’s cuvée Arietis from Vandières reveals an obvious power and maturity next to the crisper fruit in La Terre Mère from Troissy.

There’s more to it though: on both sides of the river, side valleys emerge from the north and south, offering a variety of aspects, soils and even shelter from some of the vagaries of the Marne’s weather patterns.

The village of Festigny boasts one of the Marne’s more dramatic vineyards on the imposing hill of Châtaigniers, rising out of the otherwise gently rolling landscape, producing a series of rare south-facing vineyards on the left bank.

On the right bank, the area near Cuisles is home to well-regarded, sheltered sites that Famille Moussé farms organically, making use of the area’s argile vert – a unique, water-retentive green clay – that, according to Daviaux, ‘acts like a sponge, soaking up water during the rain yet allowing the vines to access it during hot, dry summers.’

Many of the Marne’s soils are not especially drought-proof compared to chalk, with its capacity to store huge volumes of water, so small advantages such as these can protect the crop in years such as 2020 and 2022 where drought stress meant highly unpredictable ripening.

An in-betweener: Coteaux Sud d’Epernay

Sandwiched in between the south bank of the Marne Valley, Epernay and the Côte des Blancs, the Coteaux Sud d’Epernay – meaning the hills south of Epernay – is a string of villages that have an intriguing mix of soils.

Here we find Meunier on sands and clays (like in the rest of the Marne Valley), Chardonnay on chalk (like in the Côte des Blancs), and even some Pinot Noir. This yields a great variety of wine styles, characterising one of the more dynamic sub-regions for independent Champagne. The split between Chardonnay and Meunier is more even here, at 43% each.

The future

There’s some irony, perhaps, that what was once regarded as Champagne’s engine room for fruity, reliable, accessible blending material has become one of its more unpredictable vine growing areas in the age of climate change.

Vignerons in the Marne Valley deserve every ounce of credit for turning out fine Champagne. For all those times when chalky, mineral strictness and intensity isn’t quite what’s called for, these wines, with their open charm and ready-to-please nature, step into the limelight.

The Marne Valley: 10 key names to know

Grande Vallée

Geoffroy (Aÿ, Cumières) Exemplary intensity and elegance from one of the underrated masters of sunny Cumières.

Philipponnat (Mareuil-sur-Aÿ) This fine small house specialises in Grande Vallée Pinot Noir in everything from its entry-level wines to the stunning Clos des Goisses single-vineyard cuvée.

Marc Hébrart (Mareuil-sur-Aÿ) Restrained power and class mark the wines of the Grande Vallée from the experienced Jean-Paul Hébrart.

Marne Valley

Cazé-Thibaut (Châtillon-sur-Marne) Fabien Cazé’s estate is on the rise, with beautifully refined and supple Meunier from the rive droite.

Champagne Alexis (Troissy). Alexis Leconte makes intense, spicy and food-friendly Meunier in a modern, ripe style.

Tarlant (Oeuilly) One of the most famous names in the Marne valley, Tarlant specialises in complex, long lees-aged Meunier-led cuvées with plenty of character.

Moussé Fils (Cuisles) Rapidly establishing itself as a leading independent estate in Champagne, Cedric Moussé’s wines are full of natural vibrancy and precision.

Benoît Déhu (Fossoy) Fast becoming a cult name, Dehu produces intense, dramatic and aromatic oak-aged Meunier from a small estate towards the western edge of Champagne.

Famille Delouvin (Vandières) Geoffroy Delouvin’s wines have a sense of outgoing, fun and immediate Meunier pleasure, but increasing refinement too – an estate going from strength to strength.

Coteaux Sud d’Épernay

Laherte Frères (Chavot-Courcourt) The most prominent estate in the Coteaux Sud remains one of the leading exponents of natural and low-intervention Champagne, with vivid, open-stanced and imaginative wines.

Tom Hewson’s picks of the best Champagnes from the Marne Valley

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• Regional profile: Champagne’s Côte des Bar
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The vineyards in the northern part of the Champagne region are often sliced into three distinct areas: the Côte des Blancs for Chardonnay, the Marne Valley for Meunier and the Montagne de Reims for Pinot Noir.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for Tom Hewson’s top picks of Montagne de Reims Champagnes

The first two can be neatly surmised: the Côte des Blancs is a single, chalky cuesta – a hill with a steep face on one side and a gentle slope on the other – that can be driven north to south in 20 minutes. The Marne Valley is a winding valley planted with an overwhelming majority of one grape variety and with hardly a grain of chalk to play with. The Montagne de Reims, though, is different.

‘With its sheer size and numerous variations in terroir, it’s difficult to talk about the viticultural areas of the Montagne de Reims as a unified entity’, writes Peter Liem in his 2017 book Champagne.

The Montagne de Reims can be divided into roughly four sub-zones: the north face of the Grande Montagne; the eastern edge of the Grande Montagne (the Perle Blanche); the southern slopes of the Grande Montagne and the west; and the Petite Montagne and the northwest.

This area of Champagne has it all: cool north-facing slopes, known as far back as the 10th century for their still reds (historically referred to as Vins de la Montagne); sun-soaked southerlies (whose wines were known as Vins de la Rivière); sweeping chalky slopes and folds of clay and sand; irreplaceable Pinot Noir and sought-after Chardonnay.

If you had to pick one of Champagne’s subregions to survive on, the Montagne would promise the most varied diet.

Montagne de Reims: The facts

The Grande Montagne is home to all but one of Champagne’s grand cru villages for Pinot Noir, which constitutes 56% of its plantings. These are split between the north and south faces

Chardonnay makes up 30% of plantings, mainly in the Perle Blanche area facing east

Meunier, which makes up 14% of plantings in Champagne overall, is mainly focused in the Petite Montagne, Vesle and Ardre, where it makes up between 50%-60% of plantings

The Grande Montagne is on Cretaceous chalk, with topsoils of varying depth, whereas the Petite Montagne and the northwest area are on younger soils of sand, clay and limestone

8,000 hectares of vines are planted in the Montagne de Reims in total

Source: Union des Maisons de Champagne

Cool-School: The north face

To this day there exists some uncertainty as to why the north-facing villages of the Montagne de Reims have been able to make such fine wine not just recently, but over centuries. North-facing slopes intercept less sunlight than those that face south, which slows down the ripening of the grapes. Quentin Paillard, who makes wine at Pierre Paillard from both the north-facing slopes of Verzenay and the south-facing vineyards of Bouzy, illustrates this: ‘In 2018 the difference was huge. We started harvesting eight days later in Verzenay for the same level of ripeness. Budburst is not much later, it’s really just a longer time on the vine.’

What does this slower ripening mean for the wines? ‘Don’t play with these grapes unless you have time,’ says Remi Vervier of Champagne Palmer & Co, a fine cooperative of growers based on the northern slopes of the Montagne de Reims. For Vervier the main difference is that the Pinots here need age to shine. ‘The south is not the same: the Pinot Noir is more fruity in Bouzy and Ambonnay,’ he says, ‘in the north, if you rush you will never achieve much.’

The grapes of the grands crus around the northern edge of the Montagne are an essential Pinot Noir backbone of many of Champagne’s vintage and prestige-level wines. Among the larger producers, Louis Roederer’s vintage cuvée is almost entirely from the northern Montagne de Reims, as are the wines of Palmer & Co above the entry level (which is often blended with Chardonnay from the east of the Montagne de Reims). Wines from the village of Mailly are almost entirely swallowed up into the village’s high quality co-op, Mailly Grand Cru.

West of Mailly there’s still plenty of fine Pinot Noir, as well as Meunier and a little Chardonnay, in the premiers crus of Ludes, Chigny-les-Roses, Rilly-la-Montagne and Villers-Allerand, as well as the lower-sited grands crus of Beaumont-sur-Vesle, Puisieulx and Sillery, whose reputation is more modest (Tom Stevenson points out in his 1986 book Champagne that the region has a few grands crus that achieved their ‘misplaced status’ thanks to their wines being commonly blended with Verzenay). Growers in these grands crus would surely have grounds to protest, but there are few estate-bottled wines here.

Top terroir-specific producers:

• Bérêche & Fils
• François Secondé
• Hugues Godmé
• J Lassalle
• Louis Roederer (vintage)
• Mailly Grand Cru
• Mouzon-Leroux & Fils
• Palmer & Co
• Vilmart & Cie
  

The Perle Blanche: Villers-Marmery and Trépail

The slopes turn eastwards around the Grand Montagne, from Verzenay round to Villers-Marmery, toward the morning sun. In the minds of the Champenois, the slopes facing east means one thing: Chardonnay.

Chardonnay is the earliest-budding grape variety in Champagne, which leaves it vulnerable to spring frost. Facing east not only avoids the worst of the afternoon heat spikes, but also means that the vineyards warm up fastest with the rising sun, reducing the risk of early morning cold snaps nipping the emerging buds.

Is this a similar terroir to the chalky, east-facing slopes of the Côte des Blancs, then? Arnaud Margaine of A Margaine in Villers-Marmery doesn’t think so: ‘we have soils which are much deeper here’, he says, pointing out that chalk bedrock is more prominent in the Côte des Blancs. ‘I’d say our Chardonnay is rounder, whereas the Côte des Blancs is more mineral.’

Chardonnay from the Perle Blanche forms an important part of prestige cuvées such as Rare and Dom Ruinart, and finds its way in smaller quantities into a great deal of non-vintage Blanc de Blancs.

Top terroir-specific producers

• Palmer & Co
• A Margaine
• Sadi Malot
• Henriet-Bazin
• David Leclapart
  

The sunbathers: Ambonnay, Bouzy and the west

Turning the corner round the Grande Montagne’s southeastern edge, past Trépail, sees the slopes slanting towards the south. Here, two of Champagne’s great powerhouses of Pinot Noir bask in the sun: the grands crus of Ambonnay and Bouzy.

‘Bouzy tends to be around one degree warmer than our other sites,’ says Paillard, pointing out that red fruit aromas tend to come from the southern villages while the northern villages show more citrus.

Nicolas Maillart makes small amounts of wine from Bouzy, which offer a contrast to his Pinot Noirs from Éceuil in the Petite Montagne: ‘Pinot Noirs from Bouzy mature with power, and the chalky soils contribute to a long finish. Éceuil is more accessible young, but Bouzy is better for ageing’ he says.

It is here that many of Champagne’s still reds are made, either as wines to be bottled and sold as Coteaux Champenois (the appellation for Champagne’s still wine production), or as red wines designed to be blended into Champagne rosés.

Ambonnay has a long-standing reputation for being ‘more delicate’, according to Patrick Forbes in his 1967 book Champagne – the Wine, The Land, The People, a fact which Peter Liem attributes to the more easterly aspect enjoyed by at least part of the village.

Down by the river in Tours-sur-Marne and folded up into the cooler hills in Tauxières and Louvois, Pinot Noir continues its dominance in villages less often seen bottled in isolation – although this is starting to change.

Top terroir-specific producers

• Brice
• Egly-Ouriet
• Eric Rodez
• Marguet
• Paul Bara
• Paul Déthune
• Pierre Paillard
  

The Petite Montagne and the northwest

West of Reims, the vineyard slopes sit on younger soils of sand, marl and clay, the chalk buried too deep for vines to reach. ‘Villers-Allerand is the turning point,’ says Maillart, ‘there the topsoil is one metre deep. Whereas in Éceuil it is 10.’

The Petite Montagne, so-called because of its more modest elevation rather than because of the quality of the wines, extends northwards from the northwestern corner of the Grande Montagne. Despite the historical premier cru status of many of the villages here, it has always flown somewhat under the radar: André Simon’s influential 1962 book, The History of Champagne, sidelined the wines as ‘undistinguished’. The truth, though, is that few high-quality independent growers were championing the region until fairly recently. Today, it is a hotbed for them.

While Éceuil is celebrated for Pinot Noir on clay and limestone, much of the Petite Montagne is planted to Meunier on sand. Producers such as Jérôme Prévost and Egly-Ouriet (with the cuvée Les Vignes de Vrigny) highlight just how fine, fragrant and surprisingly persistent Meunier can be on these sandy, largely eastfacing slopes. Today, the number of producers taking up the mantle in this area is ever growing.

Heading west and north to the valleys of the Vesle and Ardre, the vine-covered slopes give way to a more undulating landscape where the sands and clays are widely planted to Meunier (although a handful of producers, such as Yann Alexandre, find good homes for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay too). It’s a little cooler and more humid here, but in the age of climate change later ripening is not necessarily a disadvantage.

At Champagne’s northern frontier, near the Massif de St Thierry, a handful of producers such as Chartogne-Taillet in Merfy and Minère F&R in Hermonville are challenging the region’s long-held reputation as autre cru – or below the premier and grand cru rating system.

Top terroir-specific producers

• Chartogne-Taillet
• Egly-Ouriet
• La Closerie
• Lacourte-Godbillon
• Louis Brochet
• Minière F&R
• Nicolas Maillart
• Roger Coulon
• Yann Alexandre
  

Vintages in the Montagne de Reims

With such a varying landscape, vintages here are rarely uniform: the cooler northern slopes may prevail in hot vintages, and vice versa in cool, difficult vintages. Pinot Noir is slightly sturdier than Pinot Meunier, but both show the effects of difficult vintages more clearly than Chardonnay (meaning that the Perle Blanche sees slightly less vintage variation). Accordingly, it’s best to proceed with caution for 2011 and 2017, when all but the very top echelon of growers were touched.

Champagne’s perennial headaches – botrytis and downy mildew – strike unpredictably on the Montagne. 2021’s humidity was more challenging in sectors with damper, deeper soils and northerly exposures, such as Ludes, than it was in the southern exposures where chalk was near the surface and vines dried off quickly. The same dynamic meant that much of south-facing Bouzy and Ambonnay escaped the worst of the botrytis pressures in 2017.

Otherwise, 2012’s ripeness and bright concentration, 2013’s energy and longevity and 2019’s full-bodied yet refined ripeness are widely considered top vintages, with good but more mixed pictures in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Whatever the weather, though, there are good wines somewhere on the Montagne; 10 centuries of vine growing goes some way to prove it.

Montagne de Reims: Key names to know

• A Margaine
• Chartogne-Taillet
• Egly-Ouriet
• Eric Rodez
• Hugues Godmé
• Marguet
• Nicolas Maillart
• Palmer & Co
• Pierre Paillard
• Yann Alexandre
  

Tom Hewson’s picks of the best Champagnes from the Montagne de Reims

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Next to Champagne’s rare treasures, the humble term non-vintage doesn’t exactly stir the passions. Defining something by what isn’t there seems a strange approach. Even the French term ‘brut sans année’ (literally, ‘brut without vintage’) sounds a little apologetic. But these are wines that are worth talking about.

Changes are afoot in the region, and it’s time to re-examine Champagne’s entry level. Non-vintage is the bread and butter of Champagne, accounting for some four-fifths of all Champagne sold, according to the most recent figures from the region’s governing body. The term refers to Champagnes made by blending wines from a base year – the most recent harvest – with reserve wines held back from previous years. The wine must spend a minimum 15 months in bottle for the second fermentation and ageing on lees, in contrast to three years for vintage wines.

Scroll down to see notes and scores for 15 non-vintage Champagnes

Consistently inconsistent

The long-held line about non-vintage wines is that this blending process renders them consistent, year after year. In André Simon’s The History of Champagne (1962), the celebrated late author writes: ‘The non-vintage cuvées… are, and are always meant to be, as much as possible the same in type and style, whereas the vintage cuvées of the same firms vary from vintage to vintage.’ Champagne, though, has changed.

‘The idea of non-vintage is consistency in taste,’ explains Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, cellar master at Louis Roederer, adding that non-vintage was made to ‘correct poor years’ in an era when Champagne frequently struggled to ripen its grapes. ‘I think it’s a mistake… this is making Coca-Cola,’ he says.

Coca-Cola always tastes the same. The problem, though, is that non-vintage Champagne doesn’t; how could it, when climate change has brought even more unpredictability to the region’s wines? Faced with the extreme rain of 2021, when at Bérêche et Fils it was reported ‘June had only eight days of dry weather’, followed by 2022’s prolonged and troubling drought, how could those base vintages be remotely consistent? ‘Non-vintage is the most difficult wine to make,’ confirms Ruinart winemaker Louise Bryden. ‘Every vintage is so different right now that we have to adapt our vinifications every year; it’s the trickiest part of our job.’

One solution is to make more information available to inquisitive drinkers by allowing them to track which base year their non-vintage is coming from. ‘We want to talk with more transparency, so in the last five years we have had a very complete back label and a QR code that lists harvest base, reserve wines, disgorgement – lots of information,’ explains Lanson cellar master Hervé Dantan.

Champagnes Philipponnat and Charles Heidsieck also print their base vintages on the back label (although, slightly confusingly, Charles Heidsieck states ‘Laid in Chalk Cellars’ – always the year after the harvest base), whereas the practice has almost become standard for small, quality-conscious producers.

For some, though, this is not enough. Louis Roederer, and now Lanson, are going a stage further and giving each year’s blend its own unique number on the front label, for all to see. This, then, is the sign of a new mindset in the region: multi-vintage, or MV.

‘Vintage is a positive word,’ says Lécaillon. ‘I use the power of the vintage to make a multi-vintage that has something extra, adding complexity, adding age, generosity, precision.’ It’s not just a rebrand, though; giving each blend its own identity is a liberation from the constraints of non-vintage. ‘I no longer have an obligation to reach the same taste every year. I can take the best of every year,’ he adds. No more worrying, then, that the hot, dry 2022 base won’t taste like the tricky, tense 2021. Instead, an opportunity to celebrate the difference.

At Lanson, Dantan is keen to point out that the Black Label cuvée’s metamorphosis into Le Black Création series – a subtle rebranding that was officially announced with relatively little fanfare this summer – won’t see a dramatic change in the wines themselves: ‘It is a slight evolution, but the style will be the same.’

For Roederer, though, the change from the old Brut Premier to the new Collection series has meant a complete rebuild from the bottom up. Where to start? With the reserves…

Reserve wines

Crucial to all great non- and multi-vintage Champagnes are the reserve wines – these are added to the base vintage at a rate normally between 20% and 50%. Some Champagne houses choose to keep all their reserve wines separated by variety and vintage; some are all in oak, some even aged in magnum format (as at Bollinger). Depth and complexity can be added by using older reserve wines, such as the 40% of up to 20-year-old reserve wine found in Charles Heidsieck’s Brut Réserve, whereas more youthful or smaller additions, such as in Ayala’s Brut Majeur, will emphasise freshness.

Increasingly common in Champagne is the ‘réserve perpétuelle’ – a way of storing reserve wines, sometimes mistakenly referred to as a solera [the multi-layered barrel-ageing system used in Sherry production], whereby each year a single tank has wines from the new harvest added to it, and then wines drawn from it for addition into the blends. The end result is a reserve tank that, as it ages, contains diminishing amounts of every single harvest since the system began: a treasure trove of complexity. For Lécaillon, it is this – rather than the base year – that is the foundation of the Collection series.

Rodolphe Péters, winemaker at Champagne Pierre Péters in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, highlights one of Champagne’s most distinctive perpetual reserves, which makes up to a remarkable 50% of the entry-level Cuvée de Réserve Blanc de Blancs. ‘Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs is not a crowd-pleasing wine when it’s young,’ Péters says. ‘I like to keep the crispness, the freshness, the purity, but 50% reserve wine helps to smooth it out, to create a creamy base with a good texture.’

Spotlight on terroir

What about smaller and independent producers without such a library of reserve wines? How do they create a great non-vintage? The emerging estate Pertois-Lebrun in Cramant tells a familiar story: ‘At the beginning we didn’t have many reserve wines – only 25hl,’ explains Antoine Bouret, who manages the estate with his brother Clément. The cellar is small, tucked into what appears to be a medium-sized residential property in the village – no space for rows of reserve tanks, then. Once again a perpetual reserve offers maximum complexity with minimum footprint. ‘We purchased three oak foudres, and now they contain our perpetual reserve, started in 2013,’ says Bouret. Each new non-vintage bottling promises more and more complexity as the reserve grows in age.

In general, with smaller producers looking to showcase specific villages and vineyards, perhaps it makes sense that reserve wines play more of a back-up role than they do for the larger houses. It’s logical, then, that the smaller the footprint of a producer, the more its non-vintage wines are going to vary year on year; depending on your outlook, either a disadvantage, or part of the fun of discovering small Champagne producers.

It’s not only small producers making non-vintage Champagnes from individual terroirs, though; increasingly the Champagne houses are tuning their skills to make super-NVs – wines that focus on particularly interesting terroirs, single grape varieties or styles. Emilien Boutillat, cellar master of Piper-Heidsieck, is debuting the house’s Essentiel Blanc de Noirs in autumn 2023, made from a creative, and at times unusual, selection of Pinot Noir and Meunier vineyards that focus on ‘vibrancy of fruit’, says Boutillat, and it will, naturally, be backed up by a perpetual reserve system. Essentiel Blanc de Noirs will be one of the first regular non-vintage blanc de noirs among the well-known houses, which typically opt only for all-Chardonnay blanc de blancs: ‘It’s still niche, still connoisseur – but I really believe that it can grow,’ he says.

Insider tips

Even with the basic non-vintage wines, one way to boost quality is to trade up to magnums. Not only do the wines age ‘more gracefully’ pre-release, according to Palmer & Co’s François Demouy at the launch in June of its Grands Terroirs 2015 vintage in magnum, but producers tend to age the same wines for longer in magnum than in standard bottle. Charles Heidsieck Brut Réserve is currently released as a 2018 base in 75cl, whereas the current magnum release is still 2016.

The world of non-vintage reaches its most weird and wonderful point, though, with those that are actually covert vintage wines. Sometimes this isn’t really an upgrade, for example with small or young producers bottling entry-level wines made without reserves.

Other times – as noted by Essi Avellan in her book Champagne (AvelVino Media, 2017) – it is. At Palmer & Co in Reims, the current non-vintage blanc de blancs in magnum is, in fact, a single-vintage wine of considerable repute (it won World Champion Classic Blanc de Blancs at the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships in 2022), made entirely from the 2013 vintage, as I learned during a tasting with the producers. A far cry from entry level, and it’s something of a ‘formerly well-kept secret’.

Things get a little more surprising when larger formats actually contain a different wine from that offered in 75cl. During my recent visit, when asked about the formidable quality of his entry-level blanc de blancs grand cru in magnum, a twinkle appeared in the eye of Rodolphe Péters. ‘These are actually vintage – from the cuvée l’Esprit,’ he conceded. Magnums of what appear to be entry-level Cuvée de Réserve Blanc de Blancs actually contain the (much more expensive) vintage wine. Palmer & Co offers the same supersize bonus from jeroboam upwards; an insider’s treat for the intrepid Champagne fan with more than a handful of glasses to fill.

Getting the most from Champagne’s entry-level offerings can involve a little sleuthing. It can also mean accepting that, in the search to refine grape sourcing, increase ageing and build complexity, the good wines have crept upwards in price. Many still think of Champagne territory starting at around £20 a bottle. The truth, unfortunately, is that what £20 will get you in today’s Champagne will be little more than a jumble of cheaply assembled parts and dosage.

The wines presented below, though, come from producers whose wines are anything but a compromise. Wines that celebrate what is there – and not what isn’t.

New approach: Hewson’s characterful 15 non-vintage Champagnes to know

All wines recommended are non-vintage or ‘multi-vintage’ blends

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‘In July we expected bunches of 140g,’ said Bollinger cellar master Denis Bunner, ‘but at harvest they were averaging 200g – the record bunch is 1.2kg!’

Champagne’s system of supply management means that only the official yield – 11,400kg per hectare in 2023 – will be allowed to be turned into Champagne this year. However the amount that producers can hold in reserve ( used to boost future harvests if they are less generous ) has been raised by 2,000kg per hectare to make use of the generous crop. What is actually on the vines this year, though, is often much higher, with one producer admitting to 32,000kg per hectare in a plot of old Chardonnay vine .

Why is the yield so generous?

Firstly, there was little to no spring frost damage. Secondly, there was an exceptional flowering period at the beginning of June. ‘The Comité Champagne measures the pollen in the vineyards, and it was so high they thought there was an error,’ said Bunner.

A mixed July was followed by an August that proved somewhat cool and rainy, swelling the berries. ‘Normally the sugar is supposed to accumulate in August, but that didn’t happen as the grapes just kept growing,’ said Alice Paillard of Champagne Bruno Paillard. ‘Some small berries got squeezed, and at the end of August the botrytis started,’ she said.

Bunner added, ‘Nature was very generous at the beginning, but capricious at the end.’

Chardonnay – the star of the vintage?

Drier conditions in the Côte des Blancs , together with Chardonnay’s thicker skins, meant this area escaped the worst of the disease pressure (as it did in 2011 and 2017). The signs are good, with growers widely reporting sugar levels between 10 and 11 degrees potential alcohol, clean grapes and moderate but not abnormally low acids.

For Jérôme Legras of Champagne Legras & Haas in Chouilly, the year has echoes of 2004 for Chardonnay, a vintage still showing well today (and a vintage with similar – if not quite as exceptional – generosity of yield). Bunner also said he is ‘very confident’ about the quality of Chardonnay this year.

Pinot Noir and Meunier – more uneven

The beginning of September saw a rapid increase in temperature, quick veraison (when berries turn from green to red) and, finally, rising sugar levels. ‘We were lucky that the botrytis mostly dried out,’ said Paillard, who remains optimistic despite having to reject one press load of Pinot Noir from a cooler, more humid zone in the Montagne de Reims at the beginning of the harvest.

Much of the Grande Vallée and the drier terroirs of the Montagne de Reims appear to have fared relatively well, though. Bollinger’s Côte aux Enfants vineyard, which provides red wine for the house’s rosés, was ‘fully ripe, with brown seeds,’ according to Bunner.

The Pinot Noir from earlier-ripening sites in the northern Montagne area was reaching maturity by the 14 or 15 September, though many producers are wary of what Bunner calls the ‘shrivelling’ of berries that was widely seen due to the heatwave during the first week of September.

‘The heatwave degraded the sanitary state of the grapes, but it’s less dangerous than the rain,’ said Rémi Leroy of his eponymous domaine in Meurville in the Côte des Bar , where the Chardonnay was ‘magnificent’ and the Pinot Noir had ‘no mouldy or vinegary tastes’ despite an ‘average sanitary state,’ he said.

It is Meunier , though, that is the most delicate of Champagne’s grapes – yet also the one planted in some of its more humid terroirs. At Champagne Christophe Mignon in Festigny, Loann Mignon was making sure only healthy grapes were picked, and that pickers were selecting for ripeness, too. Cutting open a dark purple bunch of Meunier grapes, he noted how the inside was still partially green, and how the bottom of the bunch was not as ripe as the top: ‘a peculiarity of this year,’ he said.

Sorting – essential for quality in 2023

In Champagne, all grapes are harvested as whole bunches. Sorting out the good from the bad, then, almost always has to happen in the vineyard, rather than after destemming – as is common for top red wine production.

This is a laborious process that requires tight management of picking crews. Around 120,000 seasonal workers descend on Champagne for the harvest, according to the Comité Champagne, and most are paid by the kilogram, not by the hour. Persuading them to sort the grapes by quality, therefore, can be complex. ‘When they’re paid by weight, you cannot ask them to sort in the vineyard, and most growers are too small to have sorting tables,’ said Legras. The solution for some, including Legras & Haas, is to ‘pay your in-house team to sort out the detritus’ before the harvesters come through, allowing the subsequent picking teams to harvest everything on the vines.

At one commercial pressing facility in Aÿ, crates of immaculate, ripe grand cru Pinot Noir grapes sat destined for a well-known prestige cuvée. In the press, though, were some less well-sorted Pinots, pressed under contract for another producer. This juice could end up being rejected later in the process if of poor quality, but, as happened in 2017 (one of the worst-affected vintages in recent memory), there are usually buyers if the price is right. Around the corner, though, Louis Roederer’s press house was full of clean Pinot Noir; even the very last pressings tasted ripe and pristine.

2023 may not prove a year to remember for Champagne’s most economical wines.

Large or small, organic or not, some very good wines will be made by those with enough control of the process: ‘Some people will say it’s the year of the vigneron, not the winemaker,’ said Paillard, ‘but it’s not only that . It’s a year when we will do well if we have perfect continuity of information between the vineyard, the press and the cellar.’

The full spectrum

Phillipe Brun of Champagne Roger Brun offered a pithy take on the year: ‘Of course, I can’t tell you how the harvest is until after the vinifications,’ he said with a wink.

When it comes to harvest, easy is not good, and hard is not bad; in the right hands, and in the right places, 2023 promises plenty to look forward to.

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‘We are Champagne because of our terroir, yes…but also because of our patience’, explained Mathieu Roland-Billecart at the launch of the new 2008 vintage of Billecart-Salmon’s prestige cuvée, Nicolas François. ‘I worry for the reputation of the region when people forget that.’

The family-owned Champagne house has been pushing back against a tide of younger and younger releases in Champagne by guaranteeing at least three years of ageing for its non-vintage brut, and only now releasing, 15 years on, what is perhaps the very last of the headline 2008 Champagnes.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for four vintages of Cuvée Nicolas François

The 2008 vintage has a towering reputation in Champagne, although many of the wines are still fairly austere. Indeed, Roland-Billecart describes 2008 as a ‘mineral and lean’ expression of Nicolas François.

For Roland-Billecart, it was key to hold back this vintage until now: ‘I think we learnt from what happened in 1996. It’s very important that the wine gets enough body and enough expression before it is released. If you cheat with time, you’ll end up with wines that will never grow into something,’ he says.

Despite the house’s location in Mareuil-sur-Ay, in the Marne Valley where Pinot Meunier grapes flourish, Billecart-Salmon’s prestige releases continue to reflect a focus on grand cru Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. ‘Some of the work we’ve done with the micro-cuvée Les Rendez-Vous is showing us that Meunier’s ageing potential is a lot stronger than we thought. But can it go 30 years? That is the question. So we’re still seeking only Pinot Noir for the black grapes.’

In order to find the perfect blend, a tasting committee – made up of both family members and staff – tastes six potential blends blind, searching for the one that ‘represents what we want in terms of finesse, elegance, balance and expression of the vintage,’ says Roland-Billecart.

2008 has produced a string of long-lived, tense wines of sometimes dazzling vibrancy and tension. Few, though, have offered maximum drinking pleasure upon release and, despite the extra time in the cellars, the Nicolas François 2008 is no different. Its stylistic singularity was clear as we tasted the 2002, 1998 and 1986 beside it; 2008 is a vintage in which Nicolas François puts on a steely, long-distance gaze. The quality is evident, but buyers will benefit from more than a dash of Champenois patience themselves.

The Billecart-Salmon Cuvée Nicolas François 2008 is available in the UK at £180 per 75cl bottle and in the US at $230 per 75cl bottle.

Four vintages of Cuvée Nicolas François:

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The Champagne 2022 harvest has begun and picking start dates have been set for the majority of villages, the Comité Champagne has announced.

Individual harvest start dates are set for each village and grape variety in the entire Champagne region. This year, dates range between 20 August (Montgueux in the Côte des Blancs) and 6 September (Dormans Soilly in the Vallée de la Marne).

The Réseau Matu, a network of hundreds of vineyard control plots, is used to observe the ripening of grapes across the region and to help decide optimal picking dates for each area and variety.

Dates aren’t prescriptive; producers may choose to harvest after the start date indicated.

Grower-producer Champagne Pouillon, based in Mareuil-sur-Ay and Aÿ, said the team won’t likely start picking until 6 September, despite being able to harvest from the 26 August. ‘We want optimal phenolic and aromatic maturity,’ it said.

A lack of disease pressure and the good health of grapes is ‘encouraging people to be patient,’ said Alice Paillard, of Champagne Bruno Paillard.

Producers can also seek permission to harvest earlier than the official dates set.

Mathieu Roland-Billart, CEO of Billecart-Salmon, said the house requested an earlier harvest date for Chardonnay vineyards in some of its most southern parcels near Vitry-le-François, ‘as the maturity profile in these parcels showed high natural sugar (in excess of 11 degrees) and a fast decreasing acidity.’

Commenting on the harvest start dates across the region, Denis Bunner, deputy cellar master at Champagne Bollinger, said, ‘We expected big differences between the villages, but the closer to the harvest we are, the less differences we see.’

Is the Champagne 2022 harvest arriving particularly early?

‘Yes, it is an early harvest, but not as much as was anticipated,’ said Paillard.

The start of the picking period is particularly early this year, but it’s not unheard of, and it reflects the observation that harvests are generally starting earlier and earlier as a result of climate change.

Bunner said it is the sixth time that harvest has begun in August in the last 20 years, and Roland-Billecart said this isn’t a particularly novel phenomenon – in 2018 the team started on 20 August, for example.

Charline and Hugo Drappier, of Champagne Drappier, noted that this timing has become the average over the past five years. ‘It is 3 weeks earlier than the typical start date of our father’s time, when harvests never used to start in August.’

What is apparent is that if early harvests like this one are likely to become more frequent, producers will need to be prepared.

Champagne Pouillon said harvest was increasingly beginning earlier; five days earlier compared to their average. ‘In the years to come, we will encounter more and more early vintages to which we will have to adapt,’ said Fabrice Pouillon.

It brings forward the question of what happens to ripeness and the development of flavour in the grapes over an increasingly short growing period.

High hopes for quality

The quality of the vintage will become more apparent as harvest continues over the next two weeks, but feelings are positive so far.

‘Twenty years after the famous 2002, we are going to have another great vintage,’ said Bunner. ‘Very ripe, well balanced in acidity, and perfectly clean with no disease, on the three grape varieties. We are looking forward to seeing the final result after the fermentations.’

A yield of 12,000kg per hectare was set by the Comité Champagne for the 2022 harvest – the highest in more than a decade.

The Comité attributed this increase to ‘minimal losses from spring frosts and hailstorms and the excellent health of the Champagne vineyard as a whole’.

Roland-Billecart said the growing season has been ideal. ‘We have had very long sunny spells and the ground benefited from water reserves from 2021. We have hardly had any diseases to worry about and no large scale natural disasters like frost or hailstorms. As good as it gets really,’ he told Decanter.

Grower-producer Benoît Lahaye said the sanitary state of his grapes is perfect, and the sugar-acidity balance is worthy of a future great vintage. ‘The 2022 growing season is strongly reminiscent of the great vintages of 1947, 1959 and 1976,’ he said.

Drappier is known for championing Champagne’s lesser-known heirloom varieties, and the team has noticed these are in exceptional shape this year.

‘Arbane and Petit Meslier are very ripe and healthy,’ said Charline and Hugo Drappier. ‘These fragile varieties used to be more complicated to grow during our grandfather’s time. 2022 proves once more that these late-ripening heirloom grapes behave well under the new weather patterns.’

Producers aren’t out of the woods yet; things can change quickly. But a year with such healthy grapes means they can have some confidence in waiting for perfect maturity levels, and the parameters are there for producing excellent quality wines.

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Champagne Palmer has released two separate vintages of its premium cuvée Grands Terroirs in different bottle sizes.

These follow on from the original release in 2018 of the very particular 2003 vintage – at the time the earliest and hottest ever harvest in Champagne – which was only made available in magnum.

The first of this new pair, the 2015 vintage, is released in bottle (75cl), while the highly-regarded and widely-declared 2012 vintage of Grands Terroirs is only available in magnum.

Larger format bottles like this are a particular speciality of this Champagne house, which is based near the centre of Reims. In deference to the longer ageing which magnums need to reach similar levels of maturity to 75cl bottles, they typically see two to three years further ageing in the cellars before release.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for Grands Terroirs 2015 and 2012

Palmer & Co is one of the few houses not using transavage for its larger formats – whereby wines from 6-litre Methusalem right up to the giant 15-litre Nebuchadnezzar are fermented in the bottle in which they are sold, restricting loss of pressure and maintaining freshness.

Why ‘Grands Terroirs’?

The name Grands Terroirs is a reference to the vineyards owned by the original group of growers that set up the Société des Grands Crus de la Champagne. This was the name of the cooperative which produced the Champagne Palmer brand back in 1947 when it was based in Avize.

Palmer then moved to Rue Jacquart near the centre of Reims in 1959. This location better reflects the importance of the nearby Montagne de Reims grand and premier cru vineyards, which form the heart of most of the cuvées in the range.

These vineyards are mainly located on the north-facing slopes of the Montagne de Reims in the grands crus of Mailly and Verzenay, renowned for their super fresh Pinot Noir that ages gracefully over time.

Top premier cru sites Villers-Marmery and Trépail also feature, where Chardonnay is the most widely planted grape. Pinor Noir dominates the rest of the Montagne de Reims. Villers-Marmery is also a village favoured by Ruinart in its top cuvées, and by Rare Champagne.

‘A tribute to the founders of the brand’

Palmer has been producing vintage Champagne since the outset, releasing 60 different vintages since 1947.

The Grands Terroirs cuvée, which closely follows the original recipe for its vintage blends, is seen as a ‘tribute to the founders of the brand,’ says marketing director François Demouy.

‘They will only be made in years where the quality is exceptional. We started with the 2003, a very specific year that few houses vintaged, partly because the crop was so small.’

Overall production of Grands Terroirs is very small scale, particularly for the small 2012 vintage.

The 2015 Grands Terroirs is to be released in magnum in two years’ time (Palmer thinks that magnums need a minimum of nine years lees ageing). It is from a hot, dry year where the cool nights in the second half of August nonetheless allowed grapes to ripen perfectly. The assemblage here is more Chardonnay dominant, with Trépail and Villers-Marmery villages accounting for 50% of the blend. There’s less Pinot Noir than the 2012, at 38%, while there’s more Meunier (12%) from Ludes, Chigny-Les-Roses and Rilly-la-Montagne villages.

The blend for the 2012 magnum, with 49% Pinot Noir, bears more of the fingerprint of Mailly and Verzenay. The Pinot Noir from these north-facing crus is tinged with the yuzu flavours of lemon, grapefruit and mandarin orange, plus a ginger-spiced generosity.

See tasting notes and scores for Grands Terroirs 2015 and 2012:

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Champagne Collet: 100 years of Champagne’s first cooperative

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There’s no doubt that Champagne conjures up what the French call joie de vivre, which always sounds racier than just ‘fun’. And there was certainly fun to be had when Champagne Collet celebrated their centennial anniversary at London’s Lansdowne Club in April 2022. At the 100th birthday dinner, guests were served five Collet cuvées alongside elegant canapés and food.

Collet may not be one of Champagne’s giant brand names, but claims an impressive tradition as the oldest Champagne cooperative.

Founded in 1921, Collet is based in the famed grand cru village of Aÿ and was originally called Champagne Raoul Collet, after the founder.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for five Champagne Collet wines

The beginnings of Champagne cooperatives

The cooperative movement emerged after World War I, when Champagne’s vineyards were hit with multiple blights: the microscopic aphid phylloxera had devastated harvests, and it took time to renew vineyards by replanting vines with resistant rootstocks; vineyard areas shrank as a result of shelling as war waged across them; and the war’s aftermath saw demand for Champagne plummet, meaning the region’s grape farmers struggled to sell their grapes.

The answer for many growers, instead of selling grapes to the houses, was to form a cooperative, pool their grapes, and make and sell Champagne as a team effort under a cooperative label.

Collet flourished, with its leader Raoul Collet eventually awarded France’s Legion d’Honneur.

By 1930, more cooperatives had emerged. Fast forward to 2022 and there are now 130 cooperatives making 9% of all Champagne, both own brand labels or wines sold as private labels to many of Europe’s supermarkets.

Cooperatives’ clever tentacles cover bottles their growers sell, still wines for the big houses to turn into Champagne, grapes, and pressed juice.

The biggest cooperatives make a range of flagship Champagnes, and many of these will be familiar names. The biggest of them all, Nicolas Feuillatte, is now number one for sales in France, and number three for sales worldwide.

But Collet had more to celebrate at the recent tasting and dinner than its 100-year roots in Champagne history. In 2020, it broke ties with Alliance Champagne – the vast cooperative federation of Champagnes Jacquart, Pannier and Devaux – wanting to be independent once more.

It boasts 800 grower members, with 150ha of vineyards. The crown jewels are the four-fifths of its Champagne made from grand and premier cru fruit – the top ranking of potential quality in Champagne, from within a 30km radius of Epernay, Champagne’s heartland.

The tasting

Guests arrived for a pre-dinner overture in which the Lansdowne Club’s Art Deco lounge and the ideal canapé cuvée, Art Deco 1er Cru NV, uncannily chimed with the acumen of party planners. There’s a luxurious feel of cream and exotic fruit about this beginner wine in the range, with a flattering sweet note to finish that guests clearly loved.

The smash hit of the dinner came before the starter: Cuvée No21 NV. As the name suggests, this is a limited edition to mark Collet’s 100 year anniversary. Just over 5000 bottles were made. It’s a blend of 21 vintages from 1961 to 2012, and with seven years on lees; this has taken 58 years to make! It had a silky texture and refinement. The sophisticated, svelte weight and gentle persistence was convincing evidence of its sourcing from eight grands crus and several premiers crus too.

With such aged wines in the blend I expected maybe something a little wilting, but the lemon-butter zestiness suggested remarkably well-kept reserve wines, and quite an achievement.

The other wines showed well too. The beautifully nervy and mineral Blanc de Blancs 1er Cru NV matched a smoked trout starter very neatly, and its reined in, modest dosage of 7g/L seemed correct and elegant.

The Millésime 2008 showed the power and youthful finesse of this great year, an almost 50/50 blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, giving a restrained and slightly closed impression, maybe because of the as yet steely and lissom Chardonnay component.

I felt the Demi-Sec NV, lushly-dosed at 40g/L, was too sweet for the baked tart and poached plum dessert, but for those that love old-fashioned, confectionery Champagne this will have fans.

See tasting notes and scores for five Champagne Collet wines:

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Krug Grande Cuvée: new 170th edition and vertical tasting

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Champagne Krug will release the 170th edition of its flagship Grande Cuvée, as well as the 26th edition of Krug Rosé, at the end of May 2022.

To celebrate the launch, the high end house organised a preview tasting in London for the UK wine trade and press.

To put the new cuvée in context, five previous editions of Grande Cuvée were also shown at the tasting – 169th, 166th, 164th, 163rd, 160th – as well as three editions of Krug Rosé: 26th, 25th and 20th.

Scroll down for notes and scores for the new Krug Grande Cuvée 170th edition

Buy Krug masterclass tickets at the Decanter Fine Wine Encounter NYC

An introduction to Grande Cuvée

Beginning in 2016 with the 163rd edition, based on the 2007 harvest, Krug decided that its non-vintage prestige wine (which it calls multi-vintage) would be shaped more by the character of the main harvest, reflected by the majority of the wine from that year in the blend.

It marked a turn from annual releases built only to show the Krug house style. From then on, each Grande Cuvée would be an interpretation of a year as well as the blending of reserve wines from prior years to lend the inimitable Krug stamp.

Grande Cuvée is Krug’s main offering. But unlike other Champagne houses’ main non-vintage wine, Grande Cuvée has always been a prestige cuvée, priced accordingly and aiming to be the best.

Each edition contains over 60% of the base year’s harvest, and the blend consists of about 35% Chardonnay, 45% Pinot Noir and 20% Meunier, but the blend can yo-yo each year.

The high percentage of Meunier used by Krug is striking; most houses exclude it from their prestige blends. Krug values its roundness, and has coaxed exceptional longevity from its Meunier.

Krug makes vintage wines too, and two famed single-vineyard wines: Clos du Mesnil and Clos d’Ambonnay; but Grande Cuvée dominates the house’s production.

Krug Rosé

Krug’s rosé, first released in 1983, has been an annual ‘edition’ wine since the 2008 base year came out in 2017. It has always been a paragon of blended rosé, showing a silky finesse. It tends to show a little less Chardonnay and a touch more fruity Meunier than the white Grande Cuvée, and has about 10% of the blend as still red wine.

Krug says it’s a food wine, but nowadays consumers around the world seem agog for rosé to suit many moments.

What typifies Krug’s style?

Over the years Krug has had many fans, such as Hemingway, the late Queen Mother, Brigitte Bardot, and even English cricket pundit John Arlott, who served Krug with kippers. This Champagne house calls its cultish followers ‘Krugists’.

Krug has close relationships with growers who supply grapes beyond the 21ha owned by the house.

The base wines for both Grande Cuvée and the vintage wines are oak-fermented plot-by-plot. Many of these go into a vast library of reserves, kept in stainless steel.

Freshness laces the rich, savoury, dry butteriness of the Krug style because most of the juice’s precious malic acid is cleverly retained by avoiding malolactic fermentation of the base wine.

Since 2016, the edition number on the label indicates the vintage that provides most of the wine in each bottle, and since 2011 an ID code on the label indicates, via an app, when each bottle was disgorged.

Know your facts: what is disgorgement?

After the second fermentation in bottle, at the end of a period ageing on lees, the wine is disgorged before the final cork goes in to remove the yeast deposit from the bottle. The bottles are gradually shifted into an upside down position to nudge the yeast into the cap, the neck of the bottle is frozen, and the solid yeast particles are then expelled from the bottle.

Grande Cuvée is disgorged in batches, some much later than others. Notice for example that the 160th edition tasted recently was disgorged eight years ago.

Once disgorged and freed from the protective animated suspension of contact with the lees deposits in the bottle, Champagne ages quicker.

Some love maturity more than others, some prefer a whistle-clean young purity. In any case, Krug ages at a snail’s pace.

Hugh Johnson’s answer to Krug’s mystery is taste: ‘Each sip is so packed with flavour that a full-mouth swallow would leave you gasping.’ He’s right about the sip; I’ve never dared test a gulp.

Tasting Grande Cuvée 170th edition

A vertical of Krug’s Grande Cuvée was a fabulous chance to test the house’s claim about the logic of the edition approach.

How was each wine a child of its base year, yet also a chip off the parental block of Krug’s style?

Vintage authenticity did work, but in rather varied ways. The 170th edition, or the ‘new baby’ as cellar master Julie Cavil put it, is mostly 2014 (55%), which was a difficult year. Yet the wine is a triumph of compensation, a blend of 195 wines from 12 different years, buttressed heavily (45%) by 2013 reserve wines.

The 169th works in a different way, deliberately highlighting the wonderful freshness of the superior 2013 harvest.

And 2008’s superb year allowed 68% into the final 164th edition bottling, with the reserves taking a subtle back seat. It was my top wine.

It pays to research the conditions of the main base year wine to try and discern what Krug have tried to create. But don’t be surprised if mysteries persist; these are arguably the joys of fine wine.

Know your facts: what is base wine?

Base wine refers to the lion’s share of the wine that makes up the blend of a non-vintage Champagne. It is the wine from the most recent harvest year. It often makes up 70-85% of the final wine, and is the youngest wine in the blend. The remainder of the blend is made up of reserve wines from other vintages. Krug takes the principle to painstaking extremes, aiming to make the most complex blends.

The 170th edition of Krug Grande Cuvée will be available in the UK in late May 2022 and will retail between £200-£210. Krug Rosé will retail around £240-£245.

See Tim Hall’s notes and scores for the new Grande Cuvée 170th edition:

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‘Meunier is the most “Champenois” of grapes’, according to Benoît Déhu of La Rue de Noyers.

Of course, he is right. This grape variety is planted over one-third of the vineyard area in Champagne, and yet enjoys a far lower profile than the other Champagne varieties, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Misunderstood and maligned, the variety is rarely planted outside Champagne, yet a new generation of Champagne producers are now singing the praises of this underappreciated variety.

Some of their work is nothing short of spectacular.

Scroll down to see Charles Curtis MW’s 100% Pinot Meunier Champagne tasting notes and scores

The grape’s full name is Pinot Meunier, and it is a mutation of Pinot Noir. It received its name because the leaves appear to have been sprinkled with flour, and Meunier means ‘miller’ in French.

Although closely related to Pinot Noir, many producers in the region refer to it simply as ‘Meunier’ full stop in order to emphasise the grape’s unique identity.

The first reason that it is so widely planted was very evident this year when frost swept through Champagne on the nights of 6-7 April: Chardonnay suffered frost damage, while Meunier, which had not yet budded out, did not.

The growing season is shorter on both ends than Pinot Noir, budding later and ripening earlier. As such, it was often relegated to the bottom of the slope where frost damage can be an issue and to cooler north-facing sites that can sometimes ripen fruit with difficulty.

The newest wave of Meunier enthusiasts, however, can be found throughout the region. 

Sales, too, are skyrocketing.  Tastemakers such as Aline Serva, owner of Au Bon Manger in Reims are smitten, and its popularity grows weekly.  According to Déhu, ‘A week does not go by that I don’t receive an inquiry about Meunier Champagnes’.

The secret of its success is simple: there is an easy, fresh appeal at first and, contrary to received wisdom, Meunier Champagne can age quite well. Despite the ever-higher prices, it is hard to keep the best of them in stock.

Meunier in the glass

Although Champagne made entirely from Meunier is by definition a blanc de noirs, this type of Champagne lacks the vinous nature of many blanc de noirs.

The most salient character of Meunier is a soft, gentle fruitiness – not a bad character in a Champagne.

Aromas tend toward ripe pear, white blossoms, and chamomile.

The grape has slightly lower acidity than Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. Winemakers counter this by blocking malolactic fermentation and by omitting dosage. This keeps the wine fresh, yet Meunier Champagnes are easier to approach in their youth than those based on Pinot Noir or Chardonnay.

A dozen names to know

Tarlant

One of the most innovative domaines in the region, and an excellent place to begin the discovery of 100% Meunier Champagnes. Among the diverse wines they produce, winemaker Benoît Tarlant crafts a wine from vines planted in 1947 by his grandfather in the lieu-dit La Pierre de Bellevue on north-facing slopes overlooking the Marne.

Meunier can lack structure, so Tarlant does not encourage malolactic and adds no dosage, ensuring that the result remains lively and fresh, even after ageing 10 years on the lees.

Dehours

Jérôme Dehours greets visitors to his winery in Mareuil-le-Port in a starkly modern tasting room overlooking the vineyards, with rock and roll playing in the background.

Despite the trendy surroundings, however, these are serious wines. Dehours was one of the first to bottle a single-vineyard wine from Meunier in 1999, Les Genevraux.

The roster of Meunier-only wines has expanded over time and now there are no fewer than seven: three single vineyards, three blends and a rosé. The single-vineyard wines are all fermented on cask on their own selected yeasts and aged in barrel until the summer before tirage.

Christophe Mignon

His vineyards are farmed using organic and biodynamic techniques, although they are not certified. He produces a 100% Meunier blended from grapes from Le Breuil and Festigny in non-vintage, vintage, rosé, and rosé de saignée versions.

Benoit Déhu

Studious and somewhat shy, Déhu makes the wines for the family house of Déhu Père et Fils, but his true passion is his own 1.7ha single vineyard, La Rue des Noyers. This organic-certified vineyard produces four Meunier-only wines: a blanc and a rosé Champagne, and a white and red still wine that bear the appellation Coteaux Champenois.

The Champagnes are fermented and aged in casks made of wood from the local forest, while the Coteaux are destemmed and fermented in stainless steel. These are powerful, vinous wines with plenty of structure that can age for years.

Déhu believes that the secret to making vinous, sinewy wines from Meunier lies in four techniques: biodynamic methods in the vineyard, keeping yields low, cask fermentation, and ageing the base wines in cask on the lees for an extended period.

Bourgeois-Diaz

Jérôme Bourgeois-Diazalso farms biodynamically and is certified by Demeter. His seven-hectare estate is planted to a mix of grapes. Still, he focuses exclusively on Meunier for his Cuvée BD’M is fermented in a combination of stainless steel tanks, casks, concrete vats, concrete and sandstone eggs, and amphora and finished without dosage.

Laherte Frères

Les Vignes d’Autrefois is a selection of the oldest vines, all planted between 1947 and 1953, vinified in cask to give a wine of concentration and intensity. There is also a brightly coloured rosé de saignée called Les Beaudiers, from old-vine Meunier macerated on the skins for 12–14 hours before fermentation in cask.

Geoffroy

Based in the premier cru of Cumières, seventh-generation winemaker Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy crafts a single-vineyard 100% Meunier cuvée from the lieu-dit Les Tiersades. The vineyard lies behind the village in a prime mid-slope location with vines nearly 50 years of age are planted in sandy soils over chalk.

Augustin

Further along the Grande Vallée, on the way to the Montagne de Reims lies the premier cru village of Avenay Val d’Or. Here Marc Augustin employs biodynamic methods to produce his Demeter-certified cuvées along the principles of feng shui. His Cuvée Cœur Saphyr is 100% Meunier vinified in amphora and enamelled steel tanks.

Juillet-Lallement

As one follows the D26 around the Montagne de Reims from Avenay Val d’Or past Bouzy and Ambonnay to Trépail, Verzy and Verzenay, there is remarkably little Meunier, and Pinot Noir has been given pride of place in nearly all the vineyards.

Meunier begins to appear again in Sillery, a north-facing grand cru village. Here, Jean Lallement crafts his innovative cuvée Belle de Juillet Pinot Meunier Grand Cru from the single-vineyard site Les Buissons des Vignes. (Even Moët et Chandon recognised the possibilities of Meunier in Sillery. This iconic house was among the first to release Meunier from a single vineyard site in Sillery in 2001, Les Champs de Romont.)

La Closerie

The Prévost family owns a parcel in the lieu-dit Les Béguines, in the Petite Montagne. This was a tidal zone, with layers of sand mixed with clay, and the sand makes for a warmer terroir, ripening grapes well. Despite this ripeness, technique is important to draw the best out of Meunier.

According to Jérôme Prévost, ‘What I like about Meunier is that it is a bit shy, reserved: for it to have something to say, you have to go in search of it, but you cannot force it.’ Vines propagated via massale selection, picking very ripe fruit and a modest dosage are all essential in his view, but among the most important factors is time. ‘I have noticed that it takes an average of six years after harvest for optimal expression of the vintage.’

The ‘shy’ Meunier of Prévost produces a wine of exquisite finesse and elegance. He produces several cuvées from this plot, including a delicious (but very rare) rosé called Fac-Simile.

Emmanuel Brochet

From the 2008 vintage, Brochet has isolated a 0.4-hectare plot planted in 1962 to produce a barrel-fermented cuvée in particularly good years. The old vines give the Champagne intensity, yet it is supremely elegant as well, with a freshness that comes from blocking malolactic and finishing the wine as brut nature without dosage.

Nicolas Maillart

A parcel of Meunier planted in 1972 is the source for his Mont Martin wine, which he barrel ferments and ages for eight months on the lees before bottling for the second fermentation. Recent vintages have been bottled without dosage, and the result is delightful – intense, expressive and elegant.

See 20 top Pinot Meunier Champagne tasting notes and scores

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Stripped of their grapes, vines can be hard to tell apart. But there is one variety whose silvery-grey leaves are instantly recognisable, and that is Pinot Meunier.

Named after the French word for ‘miller’, on account of the floury-looking down that adorns each leaf, this distinctive vine was once the most widely planted in the Champagne appellation. Later budding (and therefore more frost resistant) than Pinot Noir, and also higher yielding, it was prized for being a dependable workhorse, well suited to the cooler climes of northern France, and particularly the frost-prone vineyards of Champagne’s Marne Valley.

But as competition between Champagne and Burgundy grew, Pinot Meunier started to lose ground to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Plantings declined and so did its reputation – a demotion from which the black grape has seemingly never fully recovered.Today, according to the CIVC (Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne), Pinot Meunier accounts for 31% of all plantings in the AP, putting it neck-and-neck with Chardonnay and just a few per cent behind Pinot Noir. It remains a key component in many blends, adding a touch of floral, slightly spicy fruitiness that can often be exactly what’s needed to reconcile the nerviness of Chardonnay and the weight of Pinot Noir.

Yet the stigma persists. Critics accuse Meunier of being flabby, overly fruity and a poor performer in the cellar. It’s also often claimed that a village planted with Meunier can’t be classified as grand cru – a story that the CIVC assures me is a complete myth. With a few distinguished exceptions such as Krug – which has always proudly highlighted the role of Pinot Meunier in its Grand Cuvée – most luxury cuvées don’t use the grape at all.

Pinot Meunier has had a rough time of it. But lately it has started to look like the grape might once more be in the ascendant – not just in Champagne, but in other countries, too. Last autumn, the region’s oldest wine house, Champagne Gosset, gave the grape a major fillip when it launched Gosset, Grand Blanc de Meunier Extra Brut, a 100% Pinot Meunier, limited-edition cuvée with a price tag of £85-£90.

Made from fruit sourced principally from the ‘circus’ of premier cru villages around Epernay (Cumières, Dizy, Pierry, Moussy, Chavot and Vinay), and aged for 10 years in bottle, this non-vintage cuvée was a riposte to those who claim that Pinot Meunier can’t age. ‘I didn’t know we could do this with Pinot Meunier,’ admits Gosset export director Bertrand Verduzier at the launch in London. ‘It gives a different and new view of what the grape can do in Champagne.’

When selecting the plots, he explains, Gosset prioritised vines on south-facing mid-slopes, rather than the low-lying, north-facing slopes where Meunier is normally planted, resulting in fruit with greater ripeness and complexity. In keeping with the Gosset style, malolactic fermentation was also blocked, helping to preserve the wine’s bright acidity and increase its ageing potential.

‘It is a delicious, racy, elegant wine with the inimitable fruitiness of Pinot Meunier, both tropical and spicy,’ he says. ‘It already has 10 years of ageing in the bottle, but it has still plenty of life ahead of it.’

Growers’ favourite

The Gosset Pinot Meunier may have grabbed the headlines, but it’s the grower houses that have really been behind Pinot Meunier’s renaissance in the past generation or so.

One of grape’s great champions has been Laherte Frères, a biodynamic domaine in the village of Chavot, just south of Epernay. Using fruit from different plots around the Marne Valley and the Côteaux Sud d’Epernay, this family-owned winery produces three exceptional, and very contrasting, 100% Pinot Meunier Champagnes (two rosés, one white), and also a still red.

‘We love the wines from Meunier, as the Meunier takes a lot of the characteristics of the terroir – in both a good and a bad way – and I feel that the aromatic variation could be really large,’ says winemaker Aurélien Laherte. ‘We have Meunier planted on clay, some on chalky subsoil, and some on a mix of sand, clay and marl.’

It’s the fruit from the richer, clay-based plots that goes to make Laherte Frères’ Rosé de Meunier, an exuberant, saignée blend the colour of crushed strawberries. ‘This is more the profile of the charming Pinot Meunier,’ as Laherte puts it.

For the more ‘intellectual’ blanc de noirs Les Vignes d’Autrefois, Laherte takes fruit from 60-year-old Meunier vines (some without rootstock) rooted in deep chalk. ‘It has the same minerality as a Chardonnay from Côte des Blancs, because of the chalky terroir,’ he says. ‘But of course, it also has more fruitness and aromatics than a Chardonnay!’

This wine has none of the ponderousness that Meunier is notorious for – its focus is laser-sharp. The fruit is firm: dried apricot, pale stone fruit. And the finish has an appetising touch of saltiness.

‘The quality of the grape comes from the soil where it’s grown – if you plant Meunier in the best soils, there is no reason why it should not give you top wines,’ insists Laherte. ‘Also, we have to say that global warming is helpful for getting better and better Meunier.’

Other grower houses that have long championed Pinot Meunier include Georges Laval (Cumières), Chartogne-Taillet (Merfy), Collard-Picard (Epernay) and the Moussé family, which has been cultivating vines in the Marne Valley since 1750. In 2015, eight houses joined forces to form Meunier Institut, which now runs a showcase at the Printemps des Champagnes tasting each spring.

Arguably the most famous, and sought- after, Pinot Meunier Champagnes of all, however, are those made by Jérôme Prévost at La Closerie, a tiny 2.2ha domaine in Gueux. Here, in this out-of-the-way village just west of Reims, the soil is a mix of fossil-rich sand and limestone. From this terroir, Prévost produces just two single-vineyard cuvées: Les Béguines – a non-vintage blend that’s more than 90% Pinot Meunier – and Fac-Simile, an ultra-scarce rosé made from a blend of Les Béguines and a richly concentrated red wine made from the same grape.

Fermented on the skins for up to eight hours, and bottled with little or no dosage, Prévost’s Champagnes have a reputation for being challenging when young. But with time they develop an intensity and texture that’s incredibly compelling.

‘Pinot Meunier is very timid – if you push it and add lots of fertiliser it doesn’t work. You must have low yields,’ says Prévost. ‘But for me wine is not a question of cépage. I don’t want to know about the Pinot Meunier. It’s a question of terroir. With every fermentation you increase the presence of the terroir. You reveal things about the place you can’t see.’

‘Pinot Meunier loves deep, sandy soil, but phylloxera hates it,’ says Raphaël Rodriguez of Vine Trail, Prévost’s importer. ‘So you get these pockets of really old, ungrafted Meunier vines on sand, especially in the Marne Valley, that make really amazing Champagnes.’

Les Barres Extra Brut 2013 by rising star Chartogne-Taillet is one of those – made from a tiny parcel of ungrafted Meunier planted in 1952, it has an uplifting bouquet of apples and flowers, and fine, racy acidity.

Home and away

France remains the Pinot Meunier heartland – about 80% of all the Meunier in the world grows in Champagne. But increasingly, the grape is finding a home in England, too. One of the best English sparkling wines I tasted this year was a limited-edition 100% Meunier rosé from Hampshire’s Exton Park. Harvested in 2014 from the estate’s oldest vines (planted in 2003), this copper-pink rosé has crisp, sherbetty red berry fruit, aromatic rose notes and a succulent, slightly creamy finish. It was released in 2016, but has yet to reach its peak.

Pinot Meunier is also a major component of Exton Park’s non-vintage rosé blend, so it comes as no surprise to learn that winemaker Corinne Seely is a fan. ‘I adore Pinot Meunier,’ she says, with a grin. ‘I always thought it is the grape that expresses the terroir best. And it has this wonderful floral character that I associate with an English garden in early summer – fresh, delicate and slightly spicy, slightly green, but pink too, with this deep, deep bouquet of rose.’

The 100% Pinot Meunier was officially a one-off, but Exton Park recently planted a further 2ha of the variety – which suggests that more single-varietal and Meunier-led cuvées might be on the way. ‘I am also trying to get together a little club of fellow winemakers who love Pinot Meunier,’ says Seely conspiratorially. ‘I can’t say who just yet, but so far we have members in England, Germany, Italy and Champagne.’

Earlier this year the Kentish winery Simpsons released its Derringstone Pinot, Meunier 2018, a still white with ultra-creamy, quite viscous orchard fruit. In October, Hambledon Vineyards in Hampshire also unveiled its first 100% Meunier sparkling rosé, a rather meaty saignée that tastes more like an homage to the still wines of Burgundy than the pink wines of Champagne. Zero dosage, non-vintage and constructed from a blend of 2015 wines bolstered by some barrel-aged reserve wines it is, in their words, ‘a gastronomic wine, free from categorisation’.

Another English winery that’s made a big play of the grape is Black Chalk in Hampshire – both its white and rosé cuvées are about one-third Pinot Meunier. ‘It’s always struck me what incredible weight and texture Pinot Meunier can achieve at quite an early stage,’ says Black Chalk’s winemaker Jacob Leadley.

‘Pinot Noir may be slightly more elegant in the long run, but the vines need to be more mature to achieve that elegance.’ Leadley favours harvesting Meunier on the early side, ‘while the fruit is still bright. And rather than using oak to soften the acidity, I like to use a touch of lees ageing, then you get that texture and weight, and even some autolytic character, without losing the very expressive, bright red fruit.’

Over on the US west coast, rising prices for Pinot Noir have also prompted some of California’s more maverick winemakers to explore the potential of Pinot Meunier. Keep Wines, a low-intervention winery in Oakville, California, makes a delightful still red using Meunier from Yount Mill, a renowned organic Sierra Foothills vineyard.

‘It’s rustic Pinot meets a fruit-forward Gamay, which is exactly the style we were going for,’ says winemaker Johanna Jensen, who cut her teeth at the fashionable Broc Cellars and the Scholium Project before founding Keep Wines with husband Jack Roberts (who is also assistant winemaker at Matthiasson Wines).

And it looks like Pinot Meunier may have more surprises in store. The received wisdom has always been that Pinot Meunier is a clonal variation of Pinot Noir. But, according to Tim Hall of Champagne specialist Scala Wine, new insight suggests that might not actually be true. ‘Research is now casting doubt on the link of Meunier with the Pinot family,’ he says. ‘Hence most people are now dropping the “Pinot” from the name of the grape.’

Misunderstood, maligned and possibly even misnomered – high time, it seems, that Meunier got a second hearing.

Lascelles’ pick: 10 top Pinot Meunier wines