Independent Champagne: Top trends & key names to know in 2024

Blue strobe lighting bounces off a blood-red Gibson guitar as a swish of shoulder-length silver hair motions towards the drum kit. The bassist, clad head-to-toe in black, stands wide-stanced, a low-slung bass hanging above steam-punk work boots. The crowd is cheering. Somewhere near the back, there’s a ‘pop’.

On stage is the Bulles Bio band – a group of organic Champagne producers, playing two sets of classic rock at Le Cirque in Reims. It’s the evening after a day of tasting at Le Printemps des Champagnes 2024, the four-day trade-only bonanza focused on independent and grower Champagne in Reims. The silver-haired guitarist? Pascal Doquet of the eponymous Côte des Blancs domaine, having swapped the day’s spittoons and samples for six strings.

Doquet is no slouch on the guitar, marshalling a band that includes Jérôme Bourgeois, from Champagne Bourgeois-Diaz in the Marne Valley, on the vocals, and Olivier Horiot from the Aube on drums. The Rolling Stones, Placebo and Radiohead are rolled out, and more than a few vignerons – most of whom had been standing still pouring their wares for the world’s trade and press in the very same room all day – start busting out moves not normally seen during cellar visits.

Organic Champagne on the rise

The Association des Champagnes Biologiques (or Organic Champagne Association) now counts over 60 producers in its ranks. Some of these are well-established names, such as David Léclapart and Pascal Doquet. There are also 19 new estates, whose organic certification is so recent that they were only able to share their vins clairs (still base wines) at the Printemps tastings, rather than finished Champagnes. It’s perhaps the most dynamic and surprising tasting of the whole weekend.

Historically, the whole point of Printemps was to taste the vins clairs. It began with the group Terres et Vins de Champagne in 2009 as a response to Bordeaux’s ability to gather the trade and press to taste the region’s latest vintage en primeur. Nowadays, although of academic interest to Champagne insiders, tasting vins clairs is of less interest to most attendees, because they are a long way from the finished article.

Valuable insight into the 2023 vintage

Tasting vins clairs is, however, an opportunity to put a positive spin even on the hardest vintages. Chardonnay, the eternal escape artist of Champagne, came away from the highly volatile, one-off season that was 2023 looking very smart; even growers with only a tiny amount of Chardonnay in their plantations made sure they wheeled out at least one. Most, despite enormous yields at times, were true and fine, if a little easy going.

Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt of Laurent-Perrier expressed slight disappointment that the normal ‘intensity’ of Chardonnay was not present enough for them to declare a vintage.

There will certainly be many happy growers in the Côte des Blancs, however, and it’s safe to assume that most vintage and prestige blanc de blancs will be made in 2023.

It’s a different story for Pinot Noir and Meunier however, as our 2023 harvest report suggests. The general mood seems to be one of slight resignation, despite pockets of optimism. Lack of aromatic maturity in the Pinot Noir that did escape botrytis is an issue, although the flavours and the concentration found in the Meunier have been a pleasant surprise for those that escaped disease, despite the lower potential alcohol levels.

‘9.5% natural alcohol was good for Meunier,’ says Meunier specialist Benoît Déhu, presenting a spicy, relatively fulsome version of his La Rue des Noyers vin clair, made from Meunier in Fossoy.

Some base wines did appear to be alarmingly open, easy and advanced, and one or two showed botrytis or volatile notes. Perhaps unsurprisingly it was the drier grand cru terroirs for Pinot Noir which seemed to show well: there were good wines from Bouzy and Ambonnay (from Maurice Vesselle and Georges Remy), although how clean and concentrated the crop was has as much to do with individual approaches to viticulture and harvesting, too.

Overall, 2023 looks like it could be quite simply the most variable vintage in Champagne’s recent history, with neither quality, concentration, rot or underripeness easy to predict.

Five trends in independent Champagne to look out for this year:

The 2020 vintage: reasons to be cheerful

With 2021 also showing highly variably, it was cheering to see a raft of 2020-based non-vintage and vintage Champagnes (which will be ready from summer 2024) show the best face of what was a year of unprecedented heat and drought. These are compact, powerful wines, but they don’t seem heavy, grippy or too angular; in fact the best would seem to put to bed the widely held fears that 2020 would echo 2015’s difficulties with vegetal flavours. At Billecart-Salmon, cellar master Florent Nys went one step further, voicing his slight preference for 2020 over the much-vaunted 2019 (in the much-discussed trilogy of 2018, 2019 and 2020).

2021: caution needed

2023 came only two years after another highly complex vintage in Champagne: 2021. With an explosion of downy mildew early in the season, the challenge was less about sanitary conditions at harvest (as it was in 2017 and 2023), and more about low yields and low levels of maturity caused by the cool, wet summer. As the first Champagnes (non-vintage) emerge it appears to be a year that may be marked by, at best, crisp, taut but essentially ripe Champagnes and, at worst, green or under-mature characters.

Stalemate in the ecological divide

After a wet winter and accelerated weed growth, Champagne’s vineyard was visibly brown in the spring of 2023, with widespread herbicide usage. After 125 growers signed a letter to the French newspaper Le Monde in 2022 calling for Champagne to ban herbicides, the debate has hit a stalemate.

On the one hand, Champagne’s organic vineyard area continues to increase, now approaching 10% of total hectarage according to Jérôme Bourgeois (president of the Association des Champagnes Biologiques), and many of the larger houses (Louis Roederer, Bollinger, Taittinger, Charles Heidsieck, Piper Heidsieck and the LVMH vineyard holdings, among others) work their own vineyards either organically or above the basic standards required of HVE (Haute Valeur Environnementale) or VDC (Viticulture Durable en Champagne) certification.

On the other hand, the region has yet to solve the issue of how to persuade more growers who simply sell their grapes to certify as sustainable, despite its aim (rather than promise) to achieve 100% certification by 2030. A 2022 report by Union Champagne, the group of 15 cooperatives in Champagne, representing one of the largest forces in the region (covering over 1,500ha, just short of the 1,700ha owned by LVMH), states that less than half of the vineyard surface controlled is under sustainable certification.

Coteaux on the rise

Champagne’s still wines put on their best showing yet, perhaps helped by the naturally ripe and hot 2019, 2020 and 2022 vintages. What was once a niche product appears to be fully assimilated into the output of many Champagne producers.

At Chamery Cirus, the tasting dedicated solely to Coteaux Champenois wines from the village of Chamery, few producers were making more than 1,000 bottles of any one cuvée. Style is more diverse than straight, quasi-Burgundian approaches: there’s everything from skin-fermented Chardonnay and Petit Meslier to carbonic maceration (Beaujolais-style) Meunier. Look out for more coverage of Coteaux Champenois on Decanter Premium later this year.

The Petite Montagne: a hotbed?

The Petite Montagne de Reims, just west of Reims, continues to shine as a region for independent Champagne growers as the potential of the sandy slopes in villages such as Éceuil, Chamery, Sacy and Ville-Dommange for all three grape varieties becomes clearer. Champagnes Louis Brochet, Gaspard Brochet, Nicolas Maillart, Émilien Allouchery, Bonnet-Ponson and Perseval-Farge in particular are worth following.

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