Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle – Tasting the three-vintage blends

Christelle Guibert visits Laurent-Perrier's Grand Siècle Reserve cellar to taste their latest releases...

Stepping into Laurent-Perrier’s Grand Siècle Reserve cellar you would be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered onto the set of the latest James Bond film by mistake.

Opened in 2012 to coincide with Laurent-Perrier’s bicentenary, the vat room and state-of-the-art tasting area with subdued lighting setting off the slick black, grey and chromes, strike a note of serious sophistication with just a hint of Bond villain menace.

Scroll down to see Christelle’s tasting notes & scores

This slick modernism is combined with plenty of reminders of the great house’s past. Vintage glass bottles, pictures and other memorabilia adorn the walls of the old brick cellars which have been tunneled out of clay.

The Champagne house, known as Veuve Laurent-Perrier, was founded in 1812 and bought by Marie-Louise Lanson de Nonancourt in 1939. She looked after the business with her two sons and in 1945 Bernard de Nonancourt was named CEO. Today, the house is run by the two daughters and includes 150 hectares of their own vineyards and 1250 hectares under contract with loyal growers.

The old pictures that adorn the walls are a reminder of Laurent-Perrier’s claims to innovation. One image from 1907 shows Champagne in wooden crates labelled ‘non-sucré’, a reminder that the current trend for brut nature Champagne has a longer history than you might think. Bernard de Nonancourt relaunched Ultra Brut in 1981, something of a pioneering move in the modern champagne production.Another key innovation was his design in the 1950s of a rounded black bottle inspired by an original from the period of Henry IV. This bottle design, as well as being iconic, also has a practical purpose. With a bottle neck measuring 26 millimetres compared to the standard 29 millimetres, the amount of wine in contact with air is reduced. This is in keeping with the house style of reductive wine-making, with exposure to oxygen minimised. Since the 1970s barrels have been replaced with stainless steel vats, and cold fermentation was introduced with the aim to respect the primary fruit.

Grand Siècle is de Nonancourt’s most famous creation. Technically a non-vintage, yet in reality a blend of three vintages, the cuvee, as the house are very keen to stress, is ‘an attempt to create the perfect year using the art of blending’.

1959 was the first Grand Siècle, based on 1952, 1953 and 1955. Each vintage brings something different to the blend, one vintage is selected for the freshness, the other one for the structure and the final one for the elegance and finesse. Only grapes from grand cru vineyards are used, and the Chardonnay always represents the majority with a typical blend of 55% Chardonnay and 45% Pinot Noir. The wine then spends an average of 8 to 10 years in the cellar before being released.

As of today, only 21 cuvée Grand Siècle have been released, and strangely enough the back and front label does not bear any mention of the blend, let alone the release number.

This of course makes it difficult for any wine lover to know which particular vintage blend they are buying and drinking. It only took a quick discussion with the cellar master Michel Fauconnet and the marketing team to see this is a sensitive subject, but they did imply future releases may carry an edition number on the bottle, so watch this space.

Tasting Grand Siècle

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