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

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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