First taste: Louis Roederer 2018 and new releases

Champagne Louis Roederer launched the latest edition of its Brut Nature Blanc and Rosé from the 2018 vintage at the Grand Palais in Paris in late May 2025.

The Brut Nature wines are a collaboration with French designer Philippe Starck.

Back to the roots

Speaking at the launch event of the wines underneath the domed glass roofs of the Grand Palais, Starck said that, ‘my whole life, I tried to strip everything down to the core. I wanted to go back to the roots, all my life I said “less is more”.’

Indeed, Starck’s ideas of minimalism and purity inform the wines.

For Louis Roederer’s cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, this meant stripping everything that could be classed as artifice away from the wine and creating a ‘minimalist’ Champagne.

Scroll down for notes and scores for the new releases

Bare essential from a single hillside

To strip things down to these bare essentials, the fruit that makes Roederer’s Brut Nature cuvées is co-harvested, departing from the usual philosophy of keeping every plot separate to be blended later.

The plots dedicated to the Brut Nature wines are on a south-facing, concave hillside in the village of Cumières, sloping down to the Marne river, on soils of heavy clay on top of a chalk subsoil.

These are some of Roederer’s earliest ripening plots, giving the wines the requisite roundness and amplitude to be made into a brut nature style (wines without any addition of dosage).

Here, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay grow as a field blend and are co-harvested and co-fermented.

Over the past few years, cellar master Lécaillon has supplemented these plantings with Pinot Blanc, Arbane and Petite Meslier.

The newly launched 2018 wines are the first to contain ‘a touch of’ Pinot Blanc, which, according to Lécaillon, adds ‘a kind of sweetness, of roundness.’

Petit Meslier and Arbane, which will form part of future releases, will ‘stretch acidity.’

Malolactic conversion is avoided to retain and preserve freshness.

Lécaillon says that the rosé is achieved by harvesting the, ‘ripest, darkest Pinot Noir grapes’ five days ahead of the main harvest, destemming the fruit and giving it a cold-soak.

Its pink free-run juice is then co-fermented with the juice of the main harvest, adding colour.

Everything is amplified

The Brut Nature wines thus stand apart from Roederer’s usual modus operandi.

Lécaillon says he looks at these non-dosed wines ‘more as a still wine with bubbles’.

‘Everything is amplified,’ he says, ‘it is not addition but subtraction. It is not about creating a harmonious blend [as per the house’s usual blends], but about taking things away’.

This, he suggests, is in order to reveal the purest sense of that Cumières hillside, of fruit harvested, co-fermented, made sparkling and disgorged without dosage – as opposed to creating a blend of various sites.

Both wines, for now, seem embryonic, and will gain complexity with more time in bottle.

Louis Roederer first made a brut nature wine, inspired by Philippe Starck, in 2006, and again in 2009, both times only in white.

In 2012, 2015 and now 2018, both a white and a rosé wine were made.

The wines will initially retail exclusively at Harrods for £105 and £115 for white and rosé respectively from July until October, from when they will be more widely distributed.

They will also be poured at Raffles London.

Louis Roederer 2018s and 2015s tasted and rated:

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