Côte des Bar: A pocket of Champagne brimming with character

Glancing down at my feet as dinner arrived, I felt a little self-conscious. Any trip to the smart Champagne houses of Reims and Epernay normally requires a clean pair of shoes to be stowed in the car boot.

But the tone is a little more agricultural here, 90 minutes’ drive south in Champagne’s Côte des Bar region, and my sole set of footwear – a pair of hiking boots – was covered in a crust of mud that was slowly detaching itself onto hallways and winery floors across the Côte des Bar.

Everything feels different here. Even the landscape has little to do with the muted, chalky expanses of the Montagne de Reims and Côte des Blancs, where vineyards are stitched together in endless tapestries and free-draining soils whisk away mud-inducing rainfall.

Scroll down to see Tom Hewson’s 25 recommendations from the Côte des Bar

Lay of the land

Here, the cascading valleys make you feel like you’re always turning a corner, the vineyards tumbling down surprisingly steep hillsides, nestled between forests and rivers.

‘We are lucky to have some balance with nature here,’ says vigneron and independent winemaker Etienne Sandrin, who farms 10ha around the village of Celles-sur-Ource. ‘If you only see a sea of vineyards, there’s a problem.’

This is no hidden enclave, however; the 8,000ha of the Côte des Bar constitutes almost a quarter of today’s Champagne Viticole.

The distance from the northern vineyard area is felt culturally, too: ‘We are children of Burgundy, and siblings of Champagne,’ says Jacques de Taisne of Taisne Riocour in Les Riceys.

Champagne’s first attempts to demarcate its vineyard area in 1908 excluded the Côte des Bar entirely. At the time it was three-quarters planted with Gamay and, according to Georges Couanon, the French Inspecteur Général de la Viticulture at the time, was ‘entirely in Burgundy’.

The vignerons of the Côte des Bar fought hard for a revision until its eventual inclusion in the Champagne appellation in 1927.

Surge of interest

Despite the economic dominance of Champagne’s large houses, the Côte des Bar today is exploding with récoltant-manipulant domaines – those that both grow and vinify their own Champagnes.

‘It’s a relief, at last,’ says Elise Dechannes (pictured, above), a long-term resident of the region whose naturally minded Champagnes from Les Riceys are among those that have attracted a recent surge of interest. ‘It’s quite an old-fashioned area, really,’ she says with a raised eyebrow.

Much of this increased interest is seen in the villages of the Barséquanais to the south and southeast of Bar-sur-Seine (see map), where the great river’s tributaries the Sarce, the Laignes, the Ource and the Arce have carved tightly nestled valleys through the Jurassic bedrocks of the Kimmeridgian and Portlandian stages that share their origins in time with those of nearby Chablis and Sancerre, roughly 70 million years before the Cretaceous chalks of the Marne were laid down.

These often richer, heavier soils than those of the Marne were looked down upon from the chalky slopes of the north, despite their repute across the administrative border in Chablis.

There is a crucial difference, though: while Chablis and the rest of northern Burgundy are replete with Chardonnay, here Pinot Noir represents about 85% of plantings.

‘When I came to Champagne after studying in Beaune, I loved Chardonnay,’ says Michel Drappier (pictured, above) of Champagne Drappier in Urville, in the Bar-sur-Aubois area. ‘Slowly, though, I had to admit it; Chardonnay is easier to grow, but it doesn’t give us so much feeling here.’

‘Some people say, “You have white soils, you should have white wines”,’ says Vincent Couche in Buxeuil. ‘But they forget, we do have white wines – it’s just that they’re made from Pinot Noir!’ he says, referencing Champagne’s hallmark process of extracting white juice from red-skinned grapes.

Pinot Blanc presence

The Côte des Bar also has a surprisingly high quota of Pinot Blanc, centred on frost-prone villages in and around Celles-sur-Ource.

‘One hundred years ago, nine out of 10 harvests here failed,’ says Aurélien Gerbais (pictured, above) of Champagne Pierre Gerbais, one of the region’s true specialists in the grape. ‘Pinot Blanc was the village’s solution to the frost – it’s a week or two later to bud than Chardonnay.’

No adaptations are perfect, however, and behind the energy and joviality of the vignerons here is a constant nervousness over vintage variation; 2024 was a catastrophe, with frost and mildew widely decimating the vineyards.

‘We only harvested 8ha out of 47ha,’ says Arnaud Fabre of Domaine Alexandre Bonnet in Les Riceys.

It wasn’t the first difficult year of recent times, either; 2021 was as tricky here as it was in the Marne, with late ripening and occasionally sharp, austere wines that, at best, are focused and bright, but sometimes a little hard going.

Fortunately, although the heatwaves and droughts of 2020 and 2022 tested the resourcefulness of growers, both can be excellent – 2020 ripe and crunchy, if occasionally affected by vegetal aromas found throughout Champagne in this year, and 2022 starting to show as immensely juicy and approachable.

2017 was a much healthier harvest than in the Marne, 2018 a little more complex but widely sunny and approachable, while 2019 mirrored the north in universal, exceptional quality.

Rounder, fruitier, surprisingly delicate

Independent and grower domaines dominate in this region, and the sort of lengthily lees-aged wines and complex blends made by Champagne’s well-known grande marque houses are rare compared to more youthful styles often focused on one or two source villages.

Many current releases of non-vintage wines are based on 2021 or 2022, with 2020 and the superb 2019 now more commonly found as single-vintage releases.

In general, the wines from this area, with their open and expressive fruit character, are released ready to drink, although producers working with restrained, tense styles are producing single-vintage wines that will benefit from three to five years of further ageing.

Although the rise of new talent is bringing some life and energy to the area, not all the newcomers are yet making wines with unswerving reliability.

Many are highly promising, yet among the increasing band of Champagnes made with ultra-low (or zero) sulphite additions were encounters with rapid post-bottling oxidation and mouse taint (goût de souris), which makes recommendations of a producer’s wines difficult until they’ve had a period of consistency.

While the wines of the Côte des Bar are often rounder and fruitier than those of the north, they can be surprisingly delicate – ‘fragile’, as Thibaud Brocard of Champagne Pierre Brocard in Celles-sur-Ource puts it – and the revelations emerge when winemakers retain the subtlety and detail present in the vineyards.

It remains the skies, though, rather than the soils or the cellars, that draw the lines between success and failure.

After driving through the vineyards of Buxeuil with biodynamic pioneer Vincent Couche (pictured, above), we reached the imposing statue of Notre Dame des Vignes, casting her gaze over the valleys below.

‘Her job is to protect the vineyards,’ said Couche. ‘She didn’t do so well last year…’

Returning to Alexandre Bonnet in Les Riceys, I removed my boots at the door and tasted through the range in socks alone. Barely an eyebrow was raised.

The Côte des Bar, after all, is made of different stuff – not only below ground, but above, too.

Côte des Bar: five key producers

• Alexandre Bonnet: The leading voice in Les Riceys and the most important producer of quality still Rosé des Riceys

• Clandestin: Substantial, serious and strict wines from this ambitious organic négociant

• Drappier: An ambassador for the region, this fine house creates original, inventive organic Champagnes full of local character

• Jean Josselin: An impressive up-and-coming estate making beautifully vibrant, juicy Champagnes in Gyé-sur-Seine

• Pierre Gerbais: A prominent voice in the key village of Celles-sur-Ource, notable for Aurélien’s expertise with Pinot Blanc

Go south: Hewson’s pick of 25 Côte des Bar Champagnes

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