‘This wine is a lot of work,’ says Laurent-Perrier oenologist Constance Delaire as we taste the current release of the house’s Cuvée Rosé, one of Champagne’s best-known rosés.
Most rosé Champagne is made using the assemblage method, which sees red wine from Pinot Noir added to a white base wine before bottling for the second fermentation.
Laurent-Perrier’s Cuvée Rosé, on the other hand, is made using a different method, and it’s an approach that many Champagne houses would consider unthinkably complex for making a rosé at scale.
Although commonly referred to as saignée in Champagne, the method used by Laurent Perrier is more accurately described as maceration.
Outside of Champagne, saignée technically refers to rosé wines made from bleeding off pale must from red wine ferments.
In Champagne, however, saignée is used, albeit inaccurately, to refer to rosés made from red grapes which are destemmed, macerated for a precise amount of time to extract colour and flavour, pressed, and then fermented.
It is usually the preserve of small Champagne producers and growers, due to how labour-intensive it can be.
Such are the demands of this method, in fact, that Laurent-Perrier has built an entire winery dedicated solely to this one cuvée.
True dedication
Olivier Vigneron, the new cellar master at Laurent-Perrier, joins our tasting late, having been checking in on his wines after a few weeks of travelling.
‘I’m a cellar master of the cellar, really,’ he says, as opposed to a public ambassador for the house, as many other cellar masters are today.
‘At harvest time, Olivier and Michel would pretty much sleep next to the tanks for Cuvée Rosé,’ Delaire says of Vigneron and longtime predecessor Michel Fauconnet, who still consults at the house.
The making of a rosé icon
‘You have to start in the vineyards with a very strict selection,’ says Delaire, ‘the whole harvest for the rosé goes through a sorting table’.
This in itself is fairly extraordinary in Champagne. Sorting tables are vibrating units where individual bunches, or indeed grapes, are picked over by hand. They are a rare sight, except for top prestige rosé production.
‘We keep only the berries, separated by village, in cold maceration for 48 to 72 hours,’ says Delaire.
Perhaps sleeping next to the tanks doesn’t seem so crazy after all: the timing for pressing off the juice before it becomes too extracted is crucial.
‘You can miss it, even by an hour,’ says Vigneron.
So what’s the point of this process? ‘The idea is to get perfect extraction of the fruit,’ says Delaire.
Laurent-Perrier’s rosé comes out a shade darker than many.
Thanks to its 100% Pinot Noir makeup (compared to most rosé Champagne which also includes some Chardonnay and Meunier), it is fragrant and rich in red fruit characters.
What’s more, thanks to long lees-ageing (unusual for a non-vintage Champagne), there’s none of the slightly raw youthfulness that saignée – maceration – styles can sometimes display.
The current releases are based on the excellent pair of vintages, 2019 and 2018.
A step further
As if Laurent-Perrier’s unique approach to non-vintage rosé production wasn’t enough, its Grande Cuvée Alexandra Rosé has an equally unusual conception.
‘We wait for the maturity of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at the same time’, says Delaire – meaning this cuvée can only be made when the two grape varieties ripen concurrently.
It’s a sort of hybrid winemaking, where a strict selection of Pinot Noir – all from grand cru villages on the Montagne de Reims – is macerated and added to freshly pressed grand cru Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs.
‘It’s a really complicated wine to make,’ she says.
Complicated it may be, but the grand cru Chardonnay brings excellent longevity, which means this exceptional bottling can age into one of Champagne’s greatest rosés.
As we taste a library edition of the 2007 release, its beautiful aromas of dried strawberries, preserved citrus, truffle honey and pastry cream fill the room.
The colour has started to turn a little copper, and the mousse settles into silky maturity.
It’s a fine reminder of something that the team at Laurent-Perrier knows extremely well: sometimes you have to do it the hard way to get the greatest result.
Laurent-Perrier rosé:
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