First taste: Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 2015

Veuve Clicquot has fired the starting gun on grande marque prestige releases from Champagne’s much-discussed 2015 vintage with the latest iteration of its recently-refined hommage to Pinot Noir.

‘There was no frost, no disease – the vintage was easy to handle’, chef de cave Didier Mariotti explained at the London launch, which also saw a preview of the 2012 La Grande Dame Rosé.

The ‘solar’ character of the 2015 vintage, together with some pronounced drought conditions, conjured up unusual ripening patterns that have made the vintage a hot topic in the cellars of Reims and Épernay. ‘It’s a good vintage for understanding what’s happening right now with global warming,’ says Mariotti.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for La Grande Dame 2015 and La Grande Dame Rosé 2012

La Grande Dame’s scales are tipped unusually heavily towards Pinot Noir for a prestige cuvée – just 10% Chardonnay is used in the blend. However the 2012, released at the end of 2020 and tasted alongside the new 2015 vintage, showed just how much precision is possible with what is almost a blanc de noirs.

Veuve Clicquot’s secret has been the move towards sourcing Pinot Noir from the cooler, later-ripening, north-facing grands crus of the Montagne de Reims (a change initiated by Mariotti’s predecessor Dominique Demarville). Not only does Mariotti find more ‘energy’ in villages such as Verzy and Verzenay, but also more of the bitterness that he believes builds a long finish: ‘Acidity refreshes your palate; it is the first feeling when you taste the wine. Bitterness is the last.’

The companion piece, La Grande Dame Rosé 2012, incorporates 13% red wine from the Clos Colin parcel in Bouzy. With a new facility in the village dedicated solely to red wine production, rosé is clearly high on the agenda here, and fans of the engaging fruitiness of the non-vintage rosé will find new levels of detail, depth and age-worthiness in this fine release.

Some vintages, such as 2012, offer up a natural sense of balance. Others seem to make the winemakers work a little harder. Discussion of 2015 so far has centred around occasionally hard, chewy and vegetal flavours that can throw a surprisingly tough angle on what should be a ripe, generous year. La Grande Dame 2015, though, hints at the possibility that the illustrious grape sources behind the top prestige releases may help sidestep some of these quirks.

‘Madame Clicquot was full of energy, an elegant Grande Dame; the wine has to be elegant and pure too’, says Mariotti. La Grande Dame continues to make the case that even in a changing climate, Pinot Noir can – almost – go it alone.

See Tom Hewson’s verdict on the new La Grande Dame releases:

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