First taste: Piper Heidsieck, Hors-Série 1971

The young, 36-year-old Emilien Boutillat, former cellarmaster at Maison Cattier in charge of making the Champagne bearing the famous Armand de Brignac brand name, made the ambitious move to join Piper Heidsieck in 2018 just in time for the harvest.

Scroll down to see the tasting note and score for the Piper Heidsieck Hors-Série 1971

This celebrated house, owned by the French group EPI – which also owns Charles Heidsieck, Rare Champagne, Biondi Santi in Tuscany as well as luxury fashion brands such as JM Weston – is now fully independent and wants to enjoy its own limelight.

‘After Rare Champagne became an independent brand, we no longer had a prestige cuvée. Hence the idea of this limited edition, which is really something different from what is ordinarily done in Champagne – or elsewhere, for that matter,’ says Boutillat.

Creating a prestige cuvée

He explains that this special cuvée named Hors-Série aims to ‘highlight the history and heritage of the House of Piper Heidsieck.

The focus will not be exclusively on older vintages, as is the case for the first release; we may choose in the future to highlight a terroir, or a grape variety, or even something else, such as a bottling showing our vision of the future of Champagne in the context of global warming.’

The release comprises a limited number of 2,021 bottles of Champagne from the 1971 vintage.

According to Boutillat, ‘the choice of this year was self-evident as soon as I tasted it. It had such vibrancy and elegance that I felt it had to be shared with consumers,’ he enthuses.

The 1971 vintage

To learn more about this 1971 vintage, Boutillat visited 92-year-old Claude Demière, who was the cellar master at the time. ‘He told me that the winter was very cold, the spring as well, and then came a sudden warming period during the summer with hail at the end of July and in August. The end of the season was rather fine, making for excellent ripening conditions for that cooler epoch, since the harvest started on 18 September, which was very early at that time.’

This was a time when malolactic fermentations were not carried out at Piper Heidsieck, and this accounts for the remarkable and refreshing acidity of this 1971 Champagne still today.

This acidity was balanced by a high dosage from today’s perspective – 10g/L – but it was not at all perceptible in our tasting of this Champagne.

‘I chose to use a dosage of 10g/L at the time of the release bottling in February 2021 to achieve an overall harmony, and I prepared it with a Chardonnay-based wine from 2019 that also had not undergone any malolactic fermentation in order to respect what Claude had in mind when he produced this vintage Champagne,’ explains the Boutillat.

Although the archives were destroyed in a fire, Claude Demière remembered the grape blend used. According to Boutillat, ‘It was about 50% Chardonnay and 50% Pinot Noir from 12 grand cru and premier cru sites located in the eastern part of the Montagne de Reims sector for the Pinot Noir and the Côte des Blancs for the Chardonnay.’

Boutillat points out that all the bottles of this 1971 vintage Champagne remaining in Piper Heidsieck’s chalk cellars were tasted ‘one by one before adding the dosage so as to make sure that those released in this new prestige Champagne series were perfect,’ even if he knows that with any 50-year-old wine, there can be a good amount of bottle variation.

The wine from the bottle we tasted is indeed tight, precise, and very elegant. This edition of Hors Série will provide a remarkable tasting experience for the coming holiday period.

See the tasting note and score for the Piper Heidsieck Hors-Série 1971

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