Slow and steady: Champagne’s 2004 vintage 20 years on

‘2004 is stunning,’ says Ruinart’s cellar master Frédéric Panaïotis. ‘It’s a lesson in being humble about our statements, nuanced in the way we talk about vintages.’

The ‘sleeper vintage’ is a recurring trope in wine discussions: a vintage that pulls the ultimate tortoise-and-hare trick, holding steady in the long-haul to overtake its showier neighbours despite long odds at the starting line.

It’s impossible, then, to understand the current interest in Champagne’s 2004 vintage 20 years on without seeing the hare: 2002.

Scroll down to see notes and scores for 23 Champagnes from the excellent 2004 vintage

Vintage comparisons

2002 was so good that it seemed as though every Champagne producer made a full range of vintages and prestige cuvées, whether led by Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. Coming after an uneven millennium vintage and a miserable 2001, 2002’s exceptional maturity and aromatic opulence caused a great deal of excitement.

2003 – a year of frost, extreme heat and therefore challenging grapes – came and went. 2004 arrived with an extraordinary early summer flowering period that allowed what was then the largest ever crop of grapes to set on Champagne’s vines. It was so large – just short of 14,000kg per hectare on average, according to official statistics from Champagne’s regional body the Comité Champagne – that fears of dilution abounded.

‘2002 seemed so luscious, everybody was going for it – but 2004 seemed too lean and diluted,’ says Panaïtois. ‘But today, 2002 is heavy wool and 2004 is lace; sometimes we just have to wait.’

Krug’s cellar master Julie Cavil points out that the house chose the phrase ‘luminous freshness’ to sum up its 2004 vintage, which contained a little more Chardonnay than usual to ‘tell the story of that freshness and length’.

‘2004 was very, very fresh, with a lot of rain – big bunches, and big grapes,’ says Cavil.

There are echoes, too, of the vintage which is currently sitting in Champagne producers’ cellars: 2023

Where 2023 finished with a sting in the tail of heat and exploding rot pressure, though, 2004 was a calmer affair with a dry and warm September providing a perfect final stretch after a mixed mid-summer, allowing the grapes to ripen fully without the risk of rot.

Harvest commenced on the 18 September with an average potential alcohol level of 9.8% (0.5% lower than 2002) and acidity levels of 7.3 g/L (0.3g/L higher than 2002).

The vintage is a fine example, too, of Champagne’s very particular relationship with yield. While much of the wine world tends to associate high yields with lower quality (and vice versa), many in Champagne quietly believe that high yielding years can be remarkably successful – the fêted 2008 provided natural yields over 14,000kg per hectare, for example.

The human factor

Twenty years is a long time not only in the life of a wine, but also in the life of a Champagne house. As London wine retailer Bordeaux Index lined up an extraordinary set of perfectly matured 2004s for tasting in May 2024, it would be easy to assume that behind the decades and sometimes centuries-deep reputations on show, there are styles and approaches which were set in stone.

Does Cristal still taste how Cristal used to taste? Would a fantasy dinner party of illustrious guests Doms Ruinart and Pérignon, the Comtes de Champagne and Churchill be able to sit together and recognise today’s wines made in their names?

The truth is that ethos, approach and bias shift, albeit subtly, with every administration that makes them. Grape growing and sourcing, cellar work, even commercial realities that force decisions on how long to age wines and when to release them, all ebb and flow.

For some producers, 2004 comes in a real purple patch, every bit as strong as modern wines – Krug and Charles Heidsieck come to mind – but there are also plenty of producers whose standards in both the vineyards and cellar today are arguably even higher than they were back in 2004 (take Bollinger and Roederer, for example).

Indeed the turn of the millennium was a transitional stage for many maisons. Cristal 2004 dates from the very beginning of current cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon’s trials with organics and biodynamics.

Bollinger’s Mathieu Kauffmann, Pol Roger’s Dominique Petit, Charles Heidsieck’s Régis Camus and Taittinger’s Loïc Dupont were all within the first five years of their time at the helms of their respective houses.

It was a time of transition in the vineyards too, as the region was left in shock by the heatwave of 2003 – a vintage where ‘everybody was on the beach’ when the grapes suddenly needed harvesting, according to Dom Pérignon’s Vincent Chaperon.

After 2003, there would be August harvests in 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2018, and 2004’s cooler, later-ripening profile would become increasingly rare. Reason enough, perhaps, to treasure the 2004s still in circulation. Only 2013 (and the tricky 2017, whose best wines have largely been blanc de blancs), have had later harvest start dates.

In the end, this was a tasting which cemented 2004’s place as a contender for 2002’s (and perhaps even 2008’s) long-assumed crown among the Champagne vintages of the 2000s and 2010s.

Perhaps other vintages are marked more strongly, more deeply – the tension and coolness of 2008 and 2013, the intensity of 2012 and 2002, the sunny abandon of 2006 and 2009 – but 2004’s quiet, serene beauty has never been more evident and deliciously poised, 20 years on, between freshness and maturity.

It’s a year worthy of a much-overused word: classic.

20 years on: top wines from Champagne’s 2004 vintage

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