 We highly recommend the wines of this small house based in famous grand cru Aÿ on the southern flank of the Montagne de Reims, having followed them closely for the last eight years. But perhaps more significantly than our attentions, these wines have been lauded in fulsome terms both by Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, having caught their respective eyes some years ago. Parker was moved to say: “This may be the finest champagne house virtually noone has ever heard of,” proving himself wrong in an instant.
The man in charge, and dynamic driving force, is the often reserved Claude Giraud, 12th generation descendant of the Aÿ based Hémart family whose roots go back to 1625. Léon Giraud, a military man, married into the Hémarts at the start of the 20th century and Claude, 60, is his Giraud-Hémart grandson. He took the reins from his father Henri in 1983. The huge changes he has made since to the quality, character and reputation of the house’s wines mean that Champagne Henri Giraud, for all its long pedigree, seems a relative newcomer to the Champagne top firmament. Certainly, these wines more or less exploded onto the Champagne scene from the early 2000s.
Various commentators refer to Champagne Giraud as a ‘grower’ but the exact position is a little different. The original Giraud-Hémart outfit was a ‘récoltant manipulant’ (RM) but from 1975 was registered as a négociant ’house’ (NM) allowing it to buy in grapes over and above what they grew themselves. However, it was not until 2007 that this actually happened when a ‘diffusion’ or entry level range of wine called ‘Esprit’ was launched. All of the premium cuvées made here are grand cru and made with Giraud fruit from Giraud land, all but a tiny amount of it in grand cru Aÿ. In that sense, these wines are single domaine champagnes. The Esprit range involves buying in some 12ha but it is bought locally and from family friends and there is close collaboration on vineyard work and methods with all the growers. In total, 8.79ha is owned, 8ha of which is in Aÿ, divided amongst 35 parcels. The field proportions are 70% Pinot Noir to 30% Chardonnay and this is the approximate blend of nearly all the finished champagnes. About 250,000 bottles are made annually.
Claude Giraud, it was announced in January 2012, has a new and parallel project afoot, to develop a winery and transport facility separate from their exisiting base in the centre of Aÿ. This new centre will also be the HQ for a négociant business Giraud Distribution, not limited to champagne wines, supplying hotels and restaurants in the Champagne region. Nothing stands still long chez Giraud. You have to admire the train racing across the plain.
Critical discussion of the Giraud style and approach has tended to focus on his use of small oak barrels for the fermentation and ageing of the grand cru vins clairs. But this is part and parcel for some forward thinking about the texture and clarification of musts for champagne. He carries out a relatively long debourbage (settling) of the pressed juice at low temperatures (10C) and in shallow enamelled steel tanks, all factors reducing convection of grape solids and the stratification of colloids with lees you want to settle out. The bourbes are a type of ‘gross lees’ or organic grape solids which unavoidably are part of the juice from the pressing. They need to be elminated as far as possible to avoid their breakdown and off-odours during fermentation. Claude Giraud adds that the volume of bourbes is bigger at Giraud because they harvest 4-5 days later than most to give their grapes maximum ripeness. He claimed in 2005 that the system at Giraud of a four day cold settling is unique in Champagne; some six years on, perhaps not unique but still unusual. This method is also a more natural way to separate the grape bourbes than the rapid process used by many in champagne which depends on adding synthetic enzymes to break down the the cell walls of the lees. And the long cold soak will also extract more grape aromatic intensity, something this house values in its strategy of off-setting fruit with oak complexity. Intense musts will partner oak better.
Allied to that, all the vins clairs of the grands crus wines, most barrel-fermented, spend 12 months on lees in small 128L barrels before bottling for the prise de mousse. Both for the Esprit wines made mainly in stainless steel and the oak-aged wines, this long settling and lees-ageing makes for richer, more concentrated wines as well as wines with a remarkably fine texture and mousse. All of the wines undergo malolactic and Claude says most of the dosages are around 9g/L. The style here is of forceful, richly flavoured wines, with the premium wines marked by oak but not over-done. But there is a notable refinement and finesse of texture, a lovely carry over the palate.
Champagne Henri Giraud’s barrels come from the Argonne forest, around Ste Ménehould 80kms east of Aÿ. This was not his own innovation; his father used the same oak but old barrels which he carefully preserved. They were the traditional source of Champagne barrels in the 19th century and before 1950 but the industry had died out when fermentation in steel tanks became the norm for the big houses. Claude revived the detailed business of obtaining and certifying oak from the Argonne, involving an established cooper Camille Gauthier, and his barrels are made by tonnellerie Vicard in Cognac. His belief is that this is not merely a ‘heritage’ exercise, but that Argonne oak gives a gentler, less aggressive texture and flavour to Champagne wines than oak from elsewhere in France, but simultaneously gives energy and pulse to the wines. Claude told me he is convinced the soils of the Argonne forest, called ‘gaize’ – a type of siliceous sandstone – retain cool moisture particularly well and lend a gentle aromatic profile to his barrels, less forceful than French oak from other places.
The Wines
THE ESPRIT RANGE
Henri Giraud Esprit NV The entry level brut NV largely from bought in fruit. Tasted on several occasions since 2006. 70PN 30CH made in stainless steel and vins clairs held 12mnths sur lie before blending. About 5% of the 20-30% reserve wines are barrel-fermented. Medium-deep – quite marked colour; floral and apple/ pear and cream , quite intense with a citrussy race running through. Mild positive oxidation hint of wood notes but in the background. Quite a statement for a brut NV, pent up and persistent.
Esprit Blanc de Blancs NV Tasted 02.11, 05.11 and 11.11. Boiught in Chardonnay from the Montagne de Reims, fermented in stainless steel with blending of 10% barrel-fermented Aÿ grand cru wine. My first tasting of this wine was disappointing – Slightly lacking in mineral attack, a touch nutty and rustic. However, much better since. Real weight and creamy, oaty texture, light brioche and freshness. Good.
Henri Giraud Rosé Esprit NV 08.09 and several times since. 70PN 22CH 8% addition of Aÿ grand cru Pinot Noir still wine barrel-fermented. It’s this mild oxidative oak influence that adds the depth and subtlety to this wine. Pale copper, crunched rose petal and tug of Pinot mushroomy development. Warm berry fruits. Very sophisticated; mild oxidative style. Creamy sticky toffee pudding note; a rather stern Ay finish. Exhilarating quite serious rosé. Tasted also London, 03.10 : Very appetising, complex rosé, dry, yeasty, long and savoury. Tasted also in 07.10 : Deep copper pink. Savoury and blueberry nose. Attractive palate and complex white chocolate and cinnamon on the finish.
THE AŸ GRAND CRU RANGE
Hommage Francois Hémart Grand Cru Ay NV 70PN 30CH Stainless steel and held six months, then six months ageing in small oak barrels, First tasted 06.06 and found intense and complex, quite austere and requiring cellaring. In 05.11 this had burnished and some quite rich buttery notes with evident oak. Creamy and long. In 11.11 this was mid-gold, a very focused nose with mild attractive aldehyde and warm straw notes, powerful and structured. A yeasty bite; long and toasty.
Code Noir NV 100PN Always from a single harvest, but not dated. Named in honour of the 2007 decoding of vine DNA from a Pinot Noir vine by French and Italian scientists. Vins clairs new small barrel-fermented 12 months. Three years on lees. 05.11 All toffee, leesy and buttery – but with impressive structure. Opulent wine aimed for food. 11.11 Complex and marked by oak, smoke, nutty boiled rice and cedar box. Real umami and butterscotch.
Code Noir Rosé NV 100PN 90% PN with added 10% still Aÿ red. Otherwise made as the Code Noir NV. 05.11 Rose petal nose. Quite aggressive mousse. Oak evident; treacle tart and bakery end. Aged 4 years. Rich complex rosé 11.11 Mousse much more integrated; cream and power.
Fût de Chène ’96 The top cuvée of the house. 70PN 30CH Barrel-fermented 12 months, small oak. Vintages made so far are: 1990, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2002. This wine was deep gold; intense flavours of new oak and oxidation, vanilla and apple – tarte tatin. But also some complex notes of coffee, cream, intense and long. Tremendous vivacity. 9g/L Tasted 06.06
Fût de Chène ’99 Tasted 03.10 Yellow; obvious burnt apple positive oxidation and powerful Pinot Ay fruit. Very much the style.
Fût de Chène ’00 Tasted 05.11 Eight years on lees. Yellow hue; complex whisky barrel; silk-like mousse. Savoury and complex, big wine. In 11.11 this was marked by oak, but with a fine mousse and whisky / aldehyde sherried note. Nutty, vanilla and spice.
Chardonnay Coteaux Champenois ’07 Tasted 05.11 Barrel-fermented one year in new oak. Early days and a little awkward but intense and tense; fine Burgundy but very tight yet and overtly oaked. Similar note in 11.11 adding slightly oily – still immature.
Ratafia de Champagne 70PN 30CH 50cls. Second pressed musts cold settled and mistelle of distilled aged wine added. Then élevage in small oak with solera type management. Tasted 05.11 and 11.11 Stylish, fruity and mouth-filling. Sweetness modest, oxidative style attractive. Aperitif.
Champagne Henri Giraud
71 Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, 51160 Aÿ 03 26 55 18 55
http://champagne-giraud.com
For stockists see http://www.wine-searcher.com/
 The decline in admiration and desire for serious wine engagement in the UK is typified by how little most people, even those who profess a love of wine, know or care about Austrian wine. Even inside the ark of connoisseurship, Austrian wine shares cinderella status with Germany. There’s little in supermarkets. We’re talking high arcana. Caught comparing notes with a mate about Austrian wine and it’s doubtful you would get free treatment on the NHS. Wine merchants and wine journalists have to carry on and keep calm, smiling through of course. Every year I read articles saying how a bit of luck, a couple of good vintages and pigs flying, will unlock the dam for Austria in the UK – the world’s biggest wine importer. Austria makes less than 1% of the world’s wine and they drink three out of four bottles themselves – two reasons why they don’t make the top 10 countries that export wine to Britain. The fact their big producers won’t sell ‘easy glug’ wine as cheap as our supermarkets want it, and you have a third. So most Austrian wine that does make it into the UK is posh and relatively dear and not in Tesco.
Many ’consumers’ have heard that most Austrian stuff that is over here is white and they may even have heard that the Riesling can be world class and that Grüner Veltliner, the most planted grape in Austria, is smart too and may be smugly called ‘Gruvee’ or ‘GV’ by the wine literati at dinner parties. But Austrian red wine for most people? Keep taking the pills.
Which is a shame because it is one of the coming things within wine geekdom and I’ll mention a few worth seeking out. There are well-known ‘international’ grapes making Austrian reds, so it’s not too hard to find Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Noir (often called Blauburgunder) but the most interesting are made from indiginous varieties. And for some reason, the Austrians tend to give these red grape types the prefix ‘blue’ or ‘blau’. I suppose red or black for non-white (oops, green) is a bit of a misnomer all over the world’s vineyards, so good on the Austrians for putting us right. But come to that, the Danube didn’t look blue to me either.
More and more I find Austrian reds taste distinct and exciting. I’ll hazard one reason for this is continentality in the climate whose warmth creates rich colour, ripe dense tannin and burnished intense flavours, but whose cold nights and long autumn days give freshness and crunch.
Just about the best Austrian red wine in the room for me recently was that shown in the picture - from producer Leth, in the Wagram region of the Donauland (Danube), north-west from Vienna. This wine called Gigama 2009 is made from the Blauer Zweigelt variety, usually shortened to just Zweigelt, a crossing made in 1922 from St Laurent and Blaufränkisch. The wine is dark, rich and complex but airily poised, not at all heavy for all its nearly two years in barrique.
It’s fashionable to bash oak-aged serious reds for their ‘international’ style (meaning not made locally round here in France by a small producer), a sneer I find misplaced for wines which have been oak-aged in style for centuries but which I can see the point of when criticising over-used new and raw oak, making wine seem over-oily for the quality of wine that’s been put in the barrel and which puts your mouth in a vice of dry tannin on the end. But I don’t find that an ‘international’ style, just a common or garden misjudged over-oaked red wine that’s been around a long time and is two a penny. There’s plenty of unoaked red wine that’s misjudged in other ways too. But this Gigama wine shows only wonderful poise and skill with the oak a sleek patina to exhibit the gorgeous succulent ripe tannin and provide a background to the chocolate and cooked berry fruit. The 14% alcohol is carried very well, not at all hot or heavy. There’s muscularity and ten years or more of development to come, but for now it is lithe and supple. It’s a drive in the hills on a warm day with the roof down. It goes confidently through the door of fine wine.
For those who love modern treatments of Blauburgunder outside Burgundy, Anton Bauer’s Reserve Pinot Noir, also from the loess-formed Wagram district, is a tip-top example. This is so sleek and finely-bodied with the crushed damson cherry fruit sunk convincingly into medium charred French oak to give that come hither smoke and sweet spice profile. OK it is ‘international’ but it will have many fans, especially with frankly flavoured food. At 13.5% alcohol and finely honed, I prefer this style of smart oaked Pinot to many of the sweet, hot and heavy versions easy to find from California.
I was impressed too by the red wines of Judith Beck, a graduate of the Klosterneuburg Viniculture College and with experience of winemaking at Cos d’Estournel, Piemonte and in Chile. Biodynamic (and it was a ‘fruit’ day on which I tasted the wines!), she specialises in red wines from the Neusiedlersee town of Gols in southern Austria’s Burgenland. The warm microclimates and thermal tempering provided by the lake produces marvellous Blaufränkisch, the red grape I first met as a warm fruity easy style called Limburger around Stuttgart in Germany. In Burgenland, more red wine is now made than white and Blaufränkisch leads. Judith Beck’s Blaufränkisch 2008 Altenberg Neusiedlersee showed peppery, clear and clean, long but refreshing with fine texture and a powerful sense of fruity sinew, roots deep in earth and rather more serious than most German Limberger.
Break out the band; play the Red Danube.
For stockists see http://www.wine-searcher.com/
 Here’s a champagne that early days though it may be, is the best I’ve had yet in 2012. Those who follow Champagne and champagne closely will no doubt remember champagne writer Tom Stevenson saying anyone who made vintage champagne in 2001 needed their head examined. Well I’m happy to delve deep into the mind of Laurent Champs, owner of single estate champagne Vilmart, in that case. He has made a fabulous wine in 2001, perhaps against all the odds. I’ve tasted this wine a couple of times in the last week and it sings, both of where it comes from and the brilliance of the winemaking.
2001 in truth was a shocking harvest to negotiate; in short, in September, after a difficult summer that alternated warmth and storms, it truly rained. Rot spread rapidly through the vineyard, cutting yield and underripe for careful growers, causing off-odours and oxidation of must for the careless. The worst year for some time and there hasn’t been a worse one since. Being in the elite of single estate champagne makers, Vilmart is of course very careful but there is a strategic plan here for quality and producing grapes that is significantly different from fruit wanted by the average big house out to buy as many grapes as possible and therefore wanting their growers to have very high yields. The vines of growers whose fruit is destined for the big houses regularly are cropped at 13,000kg/ha and up and are pulled out and replaced before 25 years old so the vineyard can keep churning out big bunches with big grapes. Young vines after all, if you push them, make for very big yields that fill millions of bottles.
At Vilmart, the yield is deliberately much lower but the vines that make this wine are much older, most over 50 years old, in one specific parcel or lieu-dit called Les Blanches Voies. Older vines make less juice but it is more complex, more concentrated and riper. They are also healthier than most, being organically nurtured along the ‘lutte raisonée’ lines of the Ampelos grouping of growers Vilmart belongs to. Without being biodynamic this approach is all about minimising chemical treatments to almost nothing by monitoring the health of each vine often and using only the minimum of preparations and no herbicide or insecticide.
But in 2001 Vilmart avoided the worst of the weather by a combination of luck and for this particular cuvée, its design. This wine is 80% Chardonnay and only 20% Pinot Noir, in fact, unusual for a domaine in Rilly-la-Montagne on the Pinot dominated slopes of the Montagne de Reims, Vilmart is in total only 40% Pinot Noir to 60% Chardonnay. A miracle therefore: the Chardonnay ripens earlier than Pinot and was picked already before the rains set in that were deestined to smash and rot the Pinot Noir in so many other vineyards that year.
The title ‘Coeur de Cuvée’ – heart of the first pressings – refers to the fact all the juice for this bottling was taken only from the middle flow of the first press cycle, the juice which is purest and higher in acidity, for finesse and longevity. The vins clairs were kept ten months in small 228L Burgundian pièces on average 1-3 years old before being bottled for the second fermentation and the wine was aged on the second lees for over six years, twice the minimum requirement for a vintage champagne. The wine is presently pale gold with an extremely fine bead giving an exquisite delicacy of textured mousse and a medium weight that belies the intensity of its flavours and their length. There are fig and vanillin notes and a refined velvet vellum nose from the wood which is not obtrusive but will integrate even further. Terry Theise refers to its ‘galvanic freshness’ but it carries more than lemony zip; there are endless details of butterscotch, pineapple and bergamot. It’s probably quite developed in its trajectory, after all 2001 will not make the oldest of bones, but there are a good ten years of development to come here yet. There’s real finesse, that poise and elegance allied to stately power, quite unforced, that confirms fine wine. At about £75 per bottle in the UK, this seems fairly priced compared to many prestige cuvées from other producers. I would not mind being offered this instead of Dom Perignon any day, lovely though DP can be. It confirms Vilmart not just as a superstar of single domaine champagne, but of tout Champagne.
See http://www.wine-searcher.com/ for stockists.
 ‘Nothing but Quality’ was the founding motto of the German family Mumm in 1827. The ‘G’ and ‘H’ stand for the Giesler and Heuser partners who joined the Mumms. Move on 150 years to the post second World War boom in the 1970s and Mumm was No 1 in Champagne. Nowadays they may play third fiddle to Moët and Veuve Clicquot if you rank by bottles made, but the Reims-based brand has terrific international visibility; its jeroboams adorn every Formula 1 podium celebration and the red Legion d’Honneur slash of its Cordon Rouge Brut NV bottle winks at you from a mile away. And there’s about 9m of them every year. Its visitor centre in Reims is a useful experience with informed multi-lingual guides who take you on a walk, shortish you will be relieved to know, of its 15.5 kilometres of cellars.
And there’s the 218ha of prized vineyards Mumm owns, nearly 75% of them of them in top grands crus such as Mailly, Ambonnay, Bouzy, Verzenay (where the famous windmill is part of Mumm) and Cramant. This gives Mumm the control and margins that should underpin great quality. And then there’s ‘heritage’ – the great story of René Lalou (1877-1973) and the glory days of Mumm when he was in charge. Unfortunately, the later years spent under the control of drinks giant Seagram from 1969-2001 seem to have emphasised volume and margins particularly up to 1995, but not great quality. Recently, things have improved, perhaps because towards the end under Seagram the brand was in the shop window looking for a buyer and took steps to pull up its socks. But both Allied Domecq and Pernod Ricard, the subsequent owners, have done far more than Seagram to lift the house. Now, with over 8.5m bottles made per annum it is again a big player and quality is high under Chef de Cave Didier Mariotti.
The founding family lost its baby a century after the birth. The GH Mumm group, having stayed German citizens, were stripped of the firm by the French on the outbreak of war in 1914. Dubonnet then bought the business from the state holding company after confiscation. In 1920 René Lalou joined Mumm. He was part of the investors’ group which took over the company from the state. At 43 he was an established Parisian lawyer and married to a Dubonnet, which presumably helped, and he took over full control in 1939, driving the firm forward, importantly breaking through in the USA. By the 1970s Mumm was the leading champagne firm making over 6m bottles. By the time Lalou died in 1973 he was still nominally Chairman of the firm at 96. Champagne Perrier-Jouët had been acquired in 1959 as was Chauvet in 1969 and Heidseick Monopole in 1972. Seagram became the main owner in 1969 and in 1996 sold off Heidsieck. In 2001, Allied Domecq bought the two houses. Pernod Ricard then acquired Perrier-Jouet and Mumm in 2005 when they swallowed Allied Domecq, and Pernod Ricard is very much the proud owner in the 21st century.
It is not entirely clear what caused the major dip in quality from the late 70s until the mid-nineties and not easy to give the period a precise date. The obvious causes are the end of the Lalou era and the sorry Seagram interregnum, when the brand was seen as a cash cow rather than a jewel to be polished and then in the face of competition from giant LVMH, as a brand in search of a new owner. Perhaps there were indifferent chefs de cave. Hubris and complacency after the great expansion? A tendency for the high dosage for the USA market to become the general style with the opprobium such sweet wines would receive from the drier palates of the leading European critics? Who knows?
What is slightly clearer however is that the building blocks for renaissance were in place at the end under Seagram from 1991. Jean-Marie Barillière was technical director from then and began a shake-up. A new winery was built. ISO 9002 followed, the first house to have it. The coup was the appointment in 1998 of Dominique Demarville as the youngest ever chef de cave in Champagne at 31, after starting at Mumm in 1994. He was in charge of Perrier-Jouet too from 2003. He was the creator of the now discontinued Mumm Grand Cru, presumably unnecessary given the revival of Cuvée R Lalou. He had studied viticulture and oenology at Avize and Dijon with starry success and worked at Philippe Gonet and Baujet-Jouette before Mumm. Most attribute the start of Mumm’s recent renaissance largely to him. He is now chef de cave at Veuve Clicquot and his successor at Mumm is the enormously talented Didier Mariotti who worked alongside Demarville to guarantee a successful transition.
The historical glory years were undoubtedly under René Lalou, the man of Mumm, and a Champagne great. His business talent and drive also included the huge expansion of vineyard ownership for Mumm which helps to make the firm such a profitable player today. His vinous monument was Cuvée René Lalou, Mumm’s prestige cuvee, announced in 1969 but discontinued by Seagram after the 1985 version – a period of 19 years in which only nine vintages were made. It was generally 50% Pinot Noir and 50% Chardonnay. This prestige cuvée was revived in 2007 with the launch of Cuvée R Lalou 1998 in a similar style to the original but with significant differences of selection and winemaking and followed by Cuvée R Lalou 1999 launched in 2011. Mumm wanted the name to change somewhat to avoid ‘copying’ the original. The gorgeous fluted bottle mould of the original design had to change too because rights to the design had unfortunately been sold years before. The two bottles are shown side by side in the picture taken at Champagne Mumm in 2011 above, the senior one on the right being the last edition of that series, vintage 1985 and the new series first vintage 1998 on the left.
The first officially released vintage of the original Cuvée René Lalou was the 1966, although it appears limited editions were made in 1961 and 1964 too. Mumm confirms these vintages: 1966, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1985. A 1989 was produced but never commercialised. The 1969 was the official champagne served on the first Concorde flight of 26th May 1976, Paris-Washington. Incidentally, there are references to the 1985 being the late Queen Mother’s favourite champagne ever. As the only one of the line-up I have ever drunk, I can confirm it was pretty impressive.
Lalou was friends with the Japanese painter Leonard Foujita. The rose image on Mumm’s Rosé is from a detail on Foujita’s painting ‘La Petite Fille à La Rose’ (in Mumm’s Paris HQ). In 1966 Lalou built a chapel on the premises at Mumm in Reims dedicated to Notre Dame de la Paix, his second memorial, along with Cuvée R Lalou. Foujita had converted to Catholicism in 1959 and promised Lalou who was godfather at his baptism in 1959, that he would help design the chapel. The building was given to the city, is open to visitors and contains striking Foujita frescoes – see picture below.
The predominance of grands crus villages in Mumm’s 218ha estate is impressive but makes it only 20% self-sufficient in grape supply. The great maw of the Cordon Rouge Brut NV’s approximately 9m bottles a year needs feeding. But the pedigree of holdings is frankly liquid gold: 35ha (PN) in Mailly, a whopping 37ha (PN) Ambonnay, 14ha (PN) Bouzy, 21ha (PN) Verzy, 18ha (PN) in Verzenay, 10ha (PN) Aÿ, 12ha (PN) Vaudemanges, 38ha (PN) in Avenay, 10ha (CH) Avize, 20ha (CH) Cramant and 3ha (PM) in Dizy.
The Cordon Rouge Brut NV is 88% of total production and uses wines from 77 crus. It is generally about 45PN, 30CH and 25PM with 8g/L dosage which Mariotti says is not different nowadays for different markets and, like many champagnes in these riper times, has been reducing in dosage. Johan Jaarry the assistant winemaker in charge of elevage and bottling in Reims told me that each annual production is a single blend without constant variations in volumes of fruit from different growers. Reserve wines make up some 20%. I have tasted this often in France and the UK and it is certainly drier and crisper than 15 years ago when it seemed sweet for the US market and tasted dull. But I do find bottles vary in their charms still, sometimes slightly green and piney, sometimes riper and rounder than others. I may not mind variation but I would like a little more depth of flavour – more reserve wines, longer on the lees? – given the customer is often asked £30 and more per bottle (UK). I reported here recently that tasting blind, it was not particularly easy to tell a Mumm NV from the NV Bruts of the other two leading houses: Moët and Veuve Clicquot.
The famous monocru Blanc de Blancs Mumm de Cramant NV, 100% CH of course, produces some 100k bottles per annum, usually from a single year but the wine in not vintage dated as it gets less than the requisite three years ageing on second lees to qualify. It is made at 4.5bar, a distinctly lower preessure than normal and used to be called ‘Crémant de Cramant’ before that word for ‘lightly foaming’ was allocated for other sparklers made champagne method in France. I often find this wine beguiling with a lovely finesse and cream-coffee flavour with Cramant’s insistent carry and a finish of lilies. Sometimes, particularly in the past, it has seemed a little too green but it can age well to give lovely hazlenut and smoky flavours. The dosage is about 6g/L. I wonder why it is not aged a little longer and sold as a vintage wine.
Apart from the relaunched Cuvée R Lalou, the Brut Millésimé vintage wines show a powerful Pinot Noir backbone, lovely complexity and pent up energy and impressive balance. They seem wound up and big when young and surely need cellaring if you are keen to see their potential. The 2004 and 2002 are noted below. The Rosé NV is dry and made by blending still red wine with some of the Brut NV cuvée to give overall proportions of 60PN, 22CH and 18PN, with 6g/L dosage and can be appealingly crisp and redolent of tangy red berries. Recent versions are much better than 5-10 years ago. A GH Mumm Demi-Sec is not the Cordon Rouge with a different dosage but a separate blend of 55PM, 35PN and 10CH, 18% reserves and 40g/L dosage, to give a lovely match with foie gras, light desserts and powerful cheeses. It’s not sweetness alone that is the key here, but the round fruit complexity of the Pinot Meunier.
I have been lucky enough to taste twice a new wine, Mumm de Verzeney not yet on the UK market but there may be a small allocation in the future I hear. This is a Blanc de Noirs 100% Pinot Noirs selected entirely from Grand Cru Verzeney – for notes and a picture, see below.
It seems strange that for 13 vintages from 1985-1998 Mumm lacked a true prestige cuvée given its gilded vineyard resources in grands crus. The Cuvée R Lalou is a welcome return and resounding success. Notes for the 1998 and 1999 are below. The wine is about 50% each of PN and CH, selected from up to 12 best parcels of lieux-dits from the grands crus of the estate, the dosages are oak-aged and about 6g/L and lees-ageing is 8-10 years. The overall style emerging from these two revivalist wines points towards quite a tall order for Champagne: a wine which blends equally the finesse and ringing minerality of Avize and Cramant Chardonnay with the powerfully structured Pinot Noirs of the Montagne de Reims. While each parcel makes its contribution it seems to me we are seeing a triumph for tout Champagne, avoiding the often heavily autolytic or biscuit style of Pinot dominated wines but adding power and richness to the intense and elegant Côte des Blancs fractions. A dialectic of poise and kinetic potential which could take years to unfold, especially in the 1998, and is full of promise. Other prestige cuvées such as Cristal and Dom Perignon may be more or less equal proportions of the main varieties sourced mainly from the Montagne and Côte des Blancs and can show the reticence and mineral intensity on release that Cuvée R Lalou seems to aim for. Mumm is keeping good company, no question of that.
Tasting Notes
Cordon Rouge NV Tasted on many occasions. Recently quite full and structured and ripe, robust, drier and invigorating after years of seeming inconsistent and over-sweet. Still a touch green and piney at times and I wonder if the value for money is completely convincing without longer ageing and a higher fraction of reserves. Not so easy, tasted blind, to distinguish from the other mass volume NVs from Champagne.
Mumm Rosé NV 01.09, 04.11 and 01.12 Has been rather dull and flat but very much perkier recently with fresh berry fruit and a burnished roundness from the Meunier yet not at all cloying. A lovely dry and crisp red fruit impression.
Millesime ’99 10.09 Quite raw meaty nose; complex and autolytic palate – sherbet and toffee. Attractive but not top.
Millesime ’04 04.11 Showing lovely balance from this persistent and not over-forceful vintage style. Just beginning to show some toffee and mocha development in the background. Very good wine.
Millesime ’02 01.12 6g/L 68PN 32CH The impression of smashed crystals and a persistent creamy length that many’ 02s exude, full of energy and potential. A fine texture and finesse for all the Pinot dominance; not at all phenolic. Still immature but getting there. A very good wine and noe of the best 2002s I’ve tasted.
Mumm de Cramant Blanc de Blancs NV Tasted on many occasions. One of Champagne’s good curiosities – a ‘crémant’ lower pressure mousse style, though not unique. Recently much improved having often been slightly ‘green’ in the past and inconsistent. Delicate and lightly bready. Soft mousse. Coffee cream biscuit character and mild hazlenuts with a little keeping. I believe this would be better with longer ageing and declaration as a true vintage wine.
Mumm de Verzeney Blanc de Noirs NV 100PN (not yet in UK) 04.11 and 01.12 Not noticably dark coloured but a powerful nose of red fruits and red skin vinosity. Mouth-filling but with excellent gently unfolding mousse, a powerful pniot impression but not aggressive. A high class Blanc de Noirs; let’s hope it comes to the UK. I tasted the ’98 version – like the Mumm de Cramant, this wine is from a single year but this is not a dated vintage wine, presumably because it is not given three years of ageing.
Rene Lalou ’85 11.98 London. Startling balance avoiding over-biscuit or fruity notes but with smoky development and brioche with a lovely finesse of texture and great length. Easily a superior chamapagne. The last vintage made of Lalou Series 1.
Rene Lalou 98 11.09 London, Mid-hue; cream and herbal nose. Builds, and is warming. An intriguing balsamic note but with terrific freshness. Long and very, very good. Tasted again with Michel Letter, (Dir Gen Adjoint Mumm) at Mumm, Reims 10.10: Nuanced and full with lily and citrus nose; great delicay with richness too. A hint of whisky barrel aldehydes and umami but avoids crude biscuit character. Cream and coffee and spice. Very long. Magnificent. Tasted later the same evening from magnum – much more austere and undeveloped, a real proof of the snail’s pace of larger bottles.
In London, tasted again a month later 11.10 – very similar note. Tasted again 02.11 London: Light gold; Still closed nose but the following complexity on the palate is exceptional. Has lemony and aldehyde whisky note seen before – this time on the end. Very impressive again. All the ripeness and finesse and power of ’98 beginning to show.
Mumm René Lalou ’99 Tasted London 02.11 6g/L A real baby – closed. Lily and wild flowers; cream but crystalline minerality, like a waterfall mist. Water on rocks. Chewy mid-palate, still very reserved. Good. The (Finnish) Champagne Magazine had put this down from 3rd(for the ’98) in its 2009 awards to 99th position for the ’99 a year later. Admittedly this had been recently bottled, but my tastings show this to be a magnificent wine, perhaps not as crystalline as the ’98 but very good. Tasted 04.11 at Mumm, Reims: Very refined, the same cream and herbal family notes as the ’98, almonds and lilies and very young still. Powerful and long with a lovely finesse of texture. Tasted in London 01.12: Somewhat more open now and very appealingly fresh. having been disgorged in 2011. The slightly softer ’99 vintage more discernible now and it’s looser-limbed than the ’98 but with lovely finesse and a bitter almond finish and still firmly structured. Very attractive and refined, modern champagne.
 
Champagne GH Mumm,
29, rue du Champ de Mars,
51100 Reims
0033 3 26 49 59 69
For stockists see http://www.wine-searcher.com/
 Champagne Mailly Grand Cru makes high quality champagne, well worth seeking out; we think so and so do many other commentators. But it is a ‘coop’, short for cooperative producer. In the UK, perhaps especially, ‘Coop’ is not a thrilling name, reminding us of a chain of grocers selling so-called ‘value’ foods which before that was an old mutual society selling life assurance and funerals to several millions of industrial northerners. Even wine lovers nowadays tend to see wine coops as the source of cheap and dependable own-label wine brands for supermarkets. There are still a lot of wine coops in Europe, even if not quite as many as there were. The traditional model from the 1920s and 30s in France, was of a large village or wine plant to which the local grape growers sent their grapes for cash. Most of the growers lacked the plant or expertise to make their own wine; the coop did it for them and the marketing too.
But it may come as a further shock to learn that wine coops are a vital part of Champagne, which is seen by many consumers as posh and which, as the richest and most successful wine region in the world, has never denied being posh either. In fact, there are more coops in Champagne than any other French region, 137 last count, although many are now federated into large coop conglomerates. Champagne coops press about half the harvest grapes of all Champagne, mostly for the big house brands such as Möet, Mercier, Veuve Clicquot and Mumm. But they also make their own brands or supermarket wines, in all about 9% of all the finished bottled champagne made. And the big daddy of them all, Champagne’s largest coop, is a behemoth, federating 80 smaller coops under the roof of a single entity, with 5000 grower members and making the wine of 7% of the whole Champagne vineyard: CVC Nicolas Feuillatte. Champagne Feuillatte is now the 5th biggest winebrand worldwide.
Champagne Mailly Grand Cru however, is not quite like most Champagne coops. Think high quality. It is set in the Montagne de Reims 100% grand cru rated village of Mailly and makes only wines from this commune’s vineyards. It is thus a ‘mono cru’ coop, using grapes only from Mailly; every bottle is 100% grand cru. Some 80 growers belong to or rather actually ‘own’ their coop, coming from 25 families. From their 70ha of vines from a total of 284ha for Mailly as a whole, some .5m bottles are made each year putting Mailly Grand Cru distinctly in the boutique bracket for size. That’s about the same size as Champagne Ruinart, the oldest champagne house of all. Do visit – they welcome visits and they are really informative, big on pride and information, low on Champagne flim-flam. When I visited, a pre-arranged 4pm trade appointment, we did not leave before nearly 8pm waved off into the night with a brilliant Reims restaurant recommendation in our ears which they had phoned ahead and booked. They are unmissable, a modern outfit on the main road through Mailly, with a pale blue glass tower in the car park.
The village of Mailly was always grand cru for red grapes and its Chardonnay was promoted in 1986. The plantings for the village are 89% Pinot Noir, 7% Chardonnay and just 4% Pinot Meunier which is excluded from grand cru status, not just in Mailly but in all grands crus. None of the Champagne Mailly Grand Cru wines contain any Meunier. Some 85% of the wines here are their own marketed wines with just some 15% of production given over to private labels or BOBs (‘buyers’ own brands – supermarkets etc). 50% is exported.
Xavier Millard, the Export Director, talked of the esprit of a good coop: ‘Everyone gets their bread from the same shop, so its better to make good flour.’ The coop has recently begun to vinify some plots separately, based on separate terroirs within the mono cru. Where possible, indigenous yeast is used. Fermentation temperatures are cool – 8-12C. The installations are modern. Malolactic is completed. There is some wood fermentation with 80 pièces, from Chateau Margaux’s 2/3 year old Pavillon Blanc second hand barrel stock and these wines make up 5% of the Brut NV. Movement of the grapes and must in the cellar is mostly by gravity – and storage is at 20m deep, galleries dug and built by the coop workers between 1929 and 1965 who at the time gave up three weeks annual labour to the construction project. Remuage of the cuvées in clear glass is done by hand.
The style of Mailly, nurtured by Chef de Cave Hervé Dantan, with its often north facing vineyards, is quite severe and structured, certainly majestically powerful when good but with a race and mineral excitement that is impressive. The Pinot Noir fraction dominates most of the wines is high and dosages are restrained, all giving a crystalline and savoury impression. It has been suggested Mailly’s terroir imparts a slight chocolate aroma – certainly a term often given to the nose of very cool climate Pinot – from Germany and Alsace for instance. The vins clairs and subsequent wines do have much less primary fruitiness than say, Bouzy. Our tasting of 10 vins clairs and final blends for cuvees from the ’07 vintage showed the dramatic contribution to roundness and complexity from the reserve wines. The final blend of the Brut Reserve NV was 70% from ’07 (5% fermented in oak) and 30% reserves from ’96, ’97, ’98, ’00, ’01, ’04, ’05, and ’06. The range is subdivided into ‘Les Classiques’, ‘Les Spéciales’ and ‘Les Artistiques.’
The Wines – tasted in Mailly, 02/2008 & several times since in London
Brut Reserve NV 75PN CH25 10g/L Mid-pale; expressive honey and white chocolate nose. A broad palate with a pleasant oxidative note. Slightly linear palate. Well-structured style, citrus and touch savoury note. Chalky, quite severe but very good.
Extra Brut NV 75PN 25CH 0g/L The coop have made some zero dosage for fifty years. Extremely elegant and mineral but with floral and fruit notes that prevent any tartness. Five years on lees.
L’Intemporelle ’03 60PN 40CH 8g/L Very fresh and mineral with emerging smoky and mushroom notes. Rich texture and presently quite severe and intense in its ripe length and structure.
Brut Millésimé ‘02 75PN 25CH 6g/L Smoky, sous bois nose; very expressive – chocolate, spice, nuts, cocoa, cream. Lovely weight and poise. Way to go.
Le Feu ’00 75PN 25CH 8g/L 2000 was the warmest ever year up to that date. Mango, butterscotch and peach; ripe but well-structured.
Blanc de Noirs NV 100PN 6g/L Quite chewy and severe but a match for richer foods. The same wine a year later in London: Medium straw; a big ‘bite’, red-wine full palate and Pinot flavours. Savoury. Firm structure, medium long. Needs 3-4 years. Good.
Les Echansons ’98 75PN 25CH From old vine parcels. 6g/L Smoky and mushroom nose, developed. A shimmering sherbet and lime impression, racy and dynamic. Very good.
Brut Rosé NV 90PN 10CH Made saignée. 8g/L Pure red fruits and persistent.
Demi-Sec NV 75PN 25CH 35g/L 40% ten year old reserve wines. Lovely balance and succulence. Dense, citrus and cream.
Champagne Mailly Grand Cru
28 rue de la Libération, 51500 Mailly 0033 2 26 49 41 10
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
http://www.champagne-mailly.com/
 If you already love good German wine, especially its modern exponents who can work wonders with dry and off-dry wines that go well with food, you have probably heard already of The Wine Barn. If not, it is Iris Ellman’s baby and the most exciting specialist German wine merchant in the UK. Either way, she is making a great offer to novices or connoisseurs alike.
For Scala School of Wine contacts through this website, she is offering a reduced price to taste her complete range of German wines and meet the winemakers in central London next Monday evening 16th January, 6.00 to 8.00pm. I can assure you, having seen her range of wines develop and expand over the years, that the quality here and the readiness of the makers to come and pour and talk about them, is stunning.
This will be a very relaxed walk about occasion. If you mention this offer from the Scalawine site, you will receive a special price of £22.50, 10% off the usual ticket price.
The Place: The St James Hotel and Club, downstairs in the Mayfair & Granville Rooms, 7-8 Park Place, London SW1A 1LP.
The Time: 6-8pm, Monday 16th January 2012
Price: £22.50 Book your place: 01256 391211
More information: http://www.thewinebarn.co.uk/download/129
 If you already know this is a small boutique-in-a-boutique champagne house, you are well informed. You may even be a champagne geek. There are well over 200 champagne houses, let alone the myriad single estate producers too – well over 2000 of those! – and even enthusiasts might be hard put to reel off more than twenty well-known names. But if you are keen to be in the know about champagne and Champagne, note bene this name. It’s pronounced ‘pl-why-ay shack-a-ma’ if the name puts you off. This report is here because the champagne made is really rather good. The bonus is that if you and your best friend want to spend a night or two away from the bustle of Reims or the (sometimes drab) charms of Epernay when in the champagne region, then do consider staying here where there is a lovely welcome and well-run bed and breakfast operation too, right in the very pretty Montagne de Reims village of Ludes. Stay or not, they welcome visitors so if you visit Champagne, put this in the itinerary and phone them for an appointment – you will get a useful smiling and informative tour and tasting about as far from the touristy flim-flam of the biggest champagne house of them all, as you could imagine.
This producer was acquired in 2004 by Groupe Prieux, a NE France specialist in garden centres and small hotels. Prieux acquired 34% of small house Champagne Gardet in Chigny-les-Roses in 2007 too and in 2010 raised their stake to 99%. Firms with little previous activity or experience in Champagne buying up small houses can create some anxiety amongst wine lovers as to quite what the direction and quality of the firm will be in future. So far my feeling is that quality here has actually improved, at all levels of winemaking. The finished wines have never been better.
The reputation of this house has certainly travelled: some 80% of the 90-100,000 bottles produced each year are now exported. A Mr Marcel Ployez, married to a Mme Yvonne Jacquemart, founded the business in 1830, just as the modern champagne industry was taking off. Nowadays the business is run by the grand-daughter of the founding pair, Laurence Ployez-Jacquemart. Only 2ha of vineyard are owned, making them only 10-15% self-sufficient, but the contracts they have with their grape suppliers, all in premier or grand cru villages, are long-established. Of the land they hold themselves, 1ha is Pinot Meunier in Ludes itself, a premier cru village, and there is another 1ha of Pinot Noir in nearby grand cru Mailly on the Montagne.
The juice is pressed and only the purer first-pressed cuvée is used. There is a very painstaking settling process for the juice. The first fermentation is in stainless steel with an important fraction in barriques bought from Burgundy to give added complexity to the rosé and small proportions of other cuvées, although the Liesse d’Harbonville is wholly made in wood before bottling. Malolactic is completed in all the wines, except the top cuvée Liesse d’Harbonville in which it is blocked completely and in the Brut Extra Passion, one thirds of the blend has no malolactic.
The practice here is an admirably long aging time on the second lees in bottle – three years minimum for the lesser wines and six years minimum for the vintages. For a small producer I noticed on my visit that the cellars are unusually quite deep and cool compared to the often shallow caves of many small houses and growers. This no doubt promotes the lovely mousse texture the wines show on tasting. The vintage wines are aged for two years horizontally sur lattes in the normal Champagne way but then, unique to this house as far as I am aware, are stored upside down ’nose-to-punt for a further four, which reduces the wine’s direct contact with the yeast, making, as they explain, for a more delicate and complex array of flavours in the finished wine. Dosages are 4-6g/L , even less in the Liesse d’Harbonville, giving elegant and transparent wines. All of their wines repay some cellaring after purcahse, especially everything above the NV Brut entry level and the rosé wine.
The quality here is triumphant and puts this house in an important position as a source of excellence amongst the plethora of tiny houses whose wines may not be well-known. I highly recommend them.
The Wines
Ployez-Jacquemart Extra Quality Brut NV Tasted 08/08 and 04/11 60 PN/PM 40CH Very refreshing but with attractive creamy undertow to its medium intensity. Consistent with first impression a couple of years ago – impressive in a minor key.
Extra Quality Brut Rosé NV The same blend as the Brut NV but with the addition of pinot noir still wine fermented in oak.
Ployez-Jacquemart Brut Extra Passion NV 12/11 Straw yellow; quite honied and ripe-flavoured but showing an impeccable finesse of mousse and persistent length. A sense of volume and intensity and restraint that is not forced, but compact, understated, all in tension and with remarkable harmony. A lingering complexity and shows the care and aging at this house.
Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs 2002 100CH 4-6g/L The grapes are sourced impeccably from the Côtes des Blancs and Ludes. The wine shows delicate ripe pear and lily notes with a hazlenut complexity emerging. The texture is gorgeously restrained and allows the dynamic force of the mineral 2002 quality to come to the fore with real finesse and tension. Impressive now but will unfold hugely in future. Very good.
Cuvée Liesse d’Harbonville Brut 1996 70CH 30 PN/PM Fermented completely in 225L small used barriques and held on lees between rackings for six months before bottling. Held on lees for 10 years before disgorging and release. Shows the typical structure of 1996, taught and ripe simultaneously yet is still relatively immature for all its time on lees. One of the best 1996 survivors, not all of whom have stood the pace of time.
For stockists, see www.wine-searcher.com
Champagne Ployez-Jacquemart
8, rue Astoin, 51500 LUDES
0033 3 26 61 11 87
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
http://www.ployez-jacquemart.fr/
 This small champagne producer from the Côte des Blancs crystallises perfectly the varied impact and opinions about ‘grower’ or, as I prefer to call it, ‘single estate’ champagne. In the USA, within the sometimes over-excited confines of the hipster single estate champagne current, José Dhondt is very much flavour of the month. Perhaps there’s a reputation also beginning in Japan which has a very fashionable and geek niche going on for champagnes from single domaines. But in the UK, where champagne sales and publicity are dominated by the big names selling to the supermarkets and major hotel and restaurant distributors, hardly anyone has heard of José Dhondt, let alone tried his fizz. There seems to be one UK stockist, in Tyne and Wear. No major wine journalist’s editor will be too pleased to tell the world you can only get this wine from one shop in the UK, but you never know.
Single estate or domaine champagne producers (whose makers are called récoltants manipulants – RM) sell only wines made completely in their own winery from grapes they have grown themselves, with a tiny allowance of 5% extra they can buy in to top up any shortage in their harvest. They may also sell some of their grapes to the local coop or big houses, but if they make and sell their own fizz too, it must come only from their land, their own hands. I probably don’t need to tell you there is something of a cult enthusiasm growing around the best single estate champagnes. The zeitgeist is perfect for these wines just now. Glitzy Champagne’s image is dominated by big brand Goliaths. So the Davids are getting increasing interest and affection. Amongst the knowledgeable food and drink sophisticates, small is beautiful, local and authentic. And not made in factories.
Over in the USA, where the cult of domaine champagne was off the ground early, José Dhondt’s wines were lauded as far back as 2006 in the New York Times by its wine correspondent Eric Asimov, and in case of confusion, the nephew of the late eponymous galactico sci-fi author. And as recently as July 2010, social media wine publicist and merchant Gary Vaynerchuk from New Jersey was shouting the odds for José Dhondt on his WineTV or ‘The Thunder Show’ as he called it before it went off air in 2011, calling Dhondt’s wines ‘sought after collector bubbles’ and giving the entry level wine, the Blanc de Blancs Tradition a ‘spectacular’ 95+ points.
Even so, José Dhondt is a second generation latecomer to the domaine champagne cult party. His family originally from Belgium, began making champagne in 1924 and José, whose mother was Spanish, took over in his 20s in 1976. The estate is some 5ha of land, based where the production facility is too, in the Côte des Blancs village of Oger. There are small portions of land too in next door Le Mesnil-sur-Oger and in the southerly Sézannais wherer there is also a little Pinot Noir planted from which a rosé champagne is made too. But on the whole, this is Chardonnay country and all of the wines bar the rosé are Blanc de Blancs 100% Chardonnay based. Some 50,000 bottles are produced annually, 25% is now exported, principally to the USA and Italy. A fraction of the harvest is sold to Möet and other houses. Although not organic, the estate is making strides in reducing the use of chemicals in the vineyard to a minimum. They aim to harvest as late as possible, wanting grapes as ripe as possible.
Small producers are busy people. Although publicity says visits are welcome here, it took several ‘phone calls and e-mails (only French is spoken) to fix a date, and I’d heard from others that José was not an easy man to pin down. So I arrived in Oger with some real anticipation to be meeting him for the first time in April 2010, only to find he had been delayed getting back from the USA on a promotional trip, by the ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Remember that? I admit at the time I couldn’t spell it either. However, I was met for a discussion and tasting by the charming and energetic gestion commerciale Mme D. Marty-Benoiton, who had been expecting me and to whom I am grateful indeed.
Nevertheless, I look forward to revisiting here and tasting the full range with the man himself. The wines I tasted, the top of the range Prestige ‘Mes Vieilles Vignes’ 2005 and the Rosé de Saignée NV, were very well-made, delicious and undoubtedly high quality. The tasting notes are below. I certainly recommend that you have a good look at these wines if you can come across them but it does have to be said that there is a lot of class competition for the top accolades of single estate producers on the Côte des Blancs. So for the time being my jury is out.
The Wines Tasted
Prestige 2005 Grand Cru ’Mes Vieilles Vignes’ 100CH 6g/L Made only from the first pressings of a single parcel in Oger planted in 1950. The top offering here. Tasted at the property 04.10 and in London 07.10. Pale gold, a chalk and lily nose. Concentrated and energetic with peach notes but a fairly searing cut of acidity and a little creaminess just beginning to show. Quite long and very fresh, certainly able to age and devlop more.
Rosé de Saignée NV Made from Pinot Noir by maceration. 6g/L A very fruity impression, vivid but a touch of reduction and leafiness behind. Very ripe, lush and ripe but not outstanding. Crisp dry finish, refreshing.
See http://www.wine-searcher.com/ for stockists in UK
Champagne José Dhondt
1, rue Flavigny, Oger 51190
0033 3 26 57 96 86
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Champagne Taittinger is proudly one of the few remaining independent and important family-owned and run champagne houses. It was founded as Champagne Forest-Fourneaux in 1734 then bought by Pierre Taittinger in 1931. Pierre also acquired Taittinger’s crown jewel, the Chateau de la Marquetterie (see right) at Pierry, on the south west outskirts of Epernay, in 1932. This showpiece’s 8ha vineyard also grows the material for Les Folies de la Marquetterie, a new NV Taittinger wine launched in 2006. The banner picture for this Scalawine blog (above) is in fact at La Marquetterie too, taken in 2009.
PierreTaittinger built the house up during the 1930s depression, adding a huge vineyard estate to the business, much of it bargain land. Today the estate stands at 288ha, supplying some 50% of the house’s needs at the firm’s present production levels of some 6m bottles annually.
The firm moved from its original Mailly location to Reims soon after the purchase of the original concern. The cellars are based in Reims at the former site of St Niçaise Abbey. The company maintains one of the better run facilities for visitors to Reims and the tour is recommended, not least as a way of avoiding the crowds at Moët in Epernay if you are looking for a less brash and commercial experience. Taittinger, like Champagne Ruinart, is also one of the best places to visit to descend the spectacular old Gallo-Roman chalk-pit cellars, one of Champagne’s glories.
From 1960 the firm was led by the very able and determined Claude Taittinger, now retired. His nephew Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, grandson of Pierre, presently leads the firm and at the same time is an energetic international ambassador for the Champagne appellation, having recently served a stint as Commandeur of the Ordre des Coteaux de Champagne. In fact Pierre-Emmanuel’s uncle François was one of the co-founders of the Ordre. Pierre-Emmanuel’s son Clovis and daughter Vitalie also work in the firm and the Flash intro (champagne houses do like their little ‘films’) to the current Taittinger website features Vitalie in a somewhat mysterious walk around on camera, well worth not pressing ‘skip’ to see. Pierre-Emmanuel’s energetic bonheur and traditionally classic view that champagne and Champagne should never muddy its ritzy celebratory and prestige image too much with long-faced connoisseurship is not the only side of this complex character. There is an apparently sharp business mind, an incisive wit and tenacious networker in play as well. He is a tirelessly influential Champagne personality. Incidentally, he recently declared himself dead set against putting the disgorgement date on the back label of champagnes, saying it would only confuse most consumers.
By 2005, Taittinger was organized as the Société du Louvre, involving 38 family members’ interests who controlled 65% of the capital, when it was sold for $3.2 billion to the US real estate firm Starwood Capital Group. Starwood’s eye was on the Concorde Hotel chain it thus gained, including the flagship Crillon in Paris, but the champagne business, an interest in California Domaine Carneros and Loire wine firm Bouvet-Ladubay were included, along with about €500m debt. Starwood kept the strategic assets and re-sold the Taittinger champagne business for €660m a year later, to Credit Agricole. The Taittinger family had continued to manage the firm and along with 24 other business investors from France, completed a management buyout from Credit Agricole in 2008, with the bank keeping a sizeable stake. Taittinger also owns Champagne Irroy, a faded star, near extinct, but at one time a member of the old Syndicat des Grandes Marques. Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger displays an infectious pride in the reacquisition of the house by the family and the family’s day to day hands-on role. He calls his house ‘The number one eponymous family company in Champagne’. Damien Le Sueur is the very capable Deputy General Manager and Loïc Dupont the very experienced Chef de Cave.
The distinction of the Taittinger style is in its remarkably high proportiion of Chardonnay in its blends, although not completely unique in Champagne. Laurent-Perrier also major on this grape, as do the proportions in use at Champagnes Ruinart and Jacquesson, two boutique houses compared to Taittinger’s size. Taittinger like Ruinart with Dom Ruinart, makes its prestige cuvée Comtes de Champagne, from 100% Chardonnay, as a Blanc de Blancs. The influence of Chardonnay is the signature to the refined elegance and finesse of the Taittinger style, a character which Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger constantly refers to as ‘feminine’. In fact the Brut Réserve NV is sold as ‘La Française in the USA.
The large 288ha estate combines high quality locations with other extensive holdings of more workaday vineyards. Its sheer extent, in a similar manner to Louis Roederer, Bollinger and Moët, gives Taittinger enormous cost advantages in production, remembering that 1ha of land in Champagne can yield up to €80k worth of grapes. For every hectare it owns, that’s what Taittinger does not have to spend, every year – some €20m. De facto it gets its grapes half price being 50% self-sufficient in grape supply. The estate includes significant holdings on the Montagne de Reims in Ambonnay and Mailly. There are vineyards in Chouilly and northern Sézannais, as well as a contiguous huge parcel of 45ha in the Aube. On the Côte des Blancs there are also vineyards in Avise, Mesnil-sur-Oger and Cramant. Vine renewal on the estate they control is 95% selection massale and there is a programme to reduce vigour with green alleys between the vines and reduce treatments with more accurate micro-management of vine health in individual parcels.
The Brut NV and other non-vintage wines are made conventionally, generally with full malolactic and in stainless steel tanks. Ten per cent of the Brut NV, presumably because of shortage of their own plant capacity, is made for Taittinger by the large coop Union Avise, although of course to Taittinger’s specification at every step, including the crucial liqueur d’expédition (dosage). But important fractions of oak maturation are used in the more prestige cuvées and this is detailed in the listing of all the wines below.
In 1983, Taittinger launched the Taittinger Collection – a series of vintage wines with artist-designed, highly colourful whole-bottle coverings. The design is a printed plastic wrap, slightly tacky or highly tasteful, depending on your view. You can see the designs here. At the time in 1983 it was certainly seen as innovative. The initial vintages may have been special cuvées for the series but apparently for some time these offerings have been the same bottling as the Brut Millésimé for the vintage in question. The full listing of the 12 launch years, artist and vintage (in brackets) is as follows: 1983 Vasarely (1978), 1985 Arman (1981), 1987 (Masson) (1982), 1988 Viera Da Silva (1983), 1990 Lichtenstein (1985), 1992 Hans Hartung (1986), 1994 Imai (1988), 1996 Corneille (1990), 1998 Matta (1992), 2003 Zao Wouki (1998), 2007 Rauschenberg (2000), 2011 Amadou Sow (2002).
The Wines
Brut Réserve NV Tasted on many occasions. 40CH 35PN 25PM Reserve wines are added two to three years old – to about 25-30% of the cuvée. Some 45 crus are used including a proprtion from the Aube. 95% of the cuvée is used, along with a little of the ‘taille’ pressings. Some 4.5-5m bottles per annum are made. Age on lees is 3.8-4yrs, but 3 yrs minimum. Dosage is currently9g/L. This is never a powerful or very structured champagne but always fresh, with camomile and lily notes but quite honeyed. Creamy and quite a ripe impression and often very baked apple notes. Light and easy; fairly elegant, with crunch, cream and butter. A straighforward introduction to the Taittinger discreet style.
Prestige Rosé NV Tasted on a good few occasions. 70PN 30CH Addition of 15% PN from the Montagne and Les Riceys (Aube) Light red fruits, easy drinking. This is usually such a slight wine it would be down my list of choices amongst rosé champagnes, though it is fresh enough and often with a lick of leaf and spice. In my view, the weak link in the Taittinger offering.
Brut Millésimé Generally 50PN 50CH. The 2000 in 01/07 was elegant, crisp and young. Creamy palate and medium long. Good. In magnum in 10/08 the 2000 was pale gold with developed Chardonnay nose and toasted hazlenuts. Lovely open ’00 texture, mouth filling and medium length. In 11/08 the 2000 was mid-pale gold; very intense developed autolytic, coffee and licorice nose; rather ‘sweet’ but well-balanced palate. Concentrated and long. Cinammon and spices. Quite a bit of bottle age here.
Prelude Grands Crus 50CH 50PN Some 100-120k bottles made. First launched in 1996. All grands crus, only cuvée used, five years on lees. The fraction from Mailly gives important mineral expression and backbone to this wine. In 05/08 this was creamy, with real presence and depth. Poised but powerful. Lovely texture and a crisp finish. The last bottling was mainly 2003 with some 2002. The latest is wholly 2004 but it is not dated on the label. In 12/11 this had less creamy substance than in past – more linear and great finesse – a real note of hazlenuts. 2004 was a record yield year – over 23k kilos/ha. But a lot of charm too.
Nocturne Sec Launched in 2005. This is 40CH 60PN/PM with 17g/L RS hence the ‘sec’. In 02/08 this had real substance and full weight. Would be great with foie gras, Asian foods but apparently is aimed at late night sipping.
Les Folies de la Marquetterie NV A bit of a triumph this, though still one of Champagne’s relatively secret inside track cuvées. Launched 2002. 45CH 55PN From a 3.5-5ha parcel of the 8ha single vineyard of the Pierry chateau south-west of Epernay. ‘Les Folies’ because the vineyard is steep and hard to work and ‘Marquetterie’ because it is planted with the two varities in alternating blocks and they look like a chequerboard in summer. Launched as a new cuvée in 2002. 20% is aged in oak foudres; five years on lees in bottle. In 11/09 this was mid colour. Quite a perfume of amber and flowers. A full and round texture with noticeable rich sweetness; modest mousse. Balanced but not starkly acidic. Quite a gorgeous, even slightly gaudy array of exotic dried peel and crystallized fruits, muted by some lovely oaty-mealiness. Silky and quite elegant in a satiny gown way. Apparently based wholly on ’04. Again in 11/09 soon after the first: reasonably opulent, tighter and severe, less exotic, compared to the previous example. Just a little earthy. In 02/11 Lovely, amber, sleek, contemplative note. Seems gentle mousse. Dried peel and exotic note. A lovely wine and a favourite of mine in all Champagne.
Comte de Champagne ’89 Taittinger’s prestige cuvée was launched with the 1952 vintage - one of Champagne’s senior top drops. 100CH All from grands crus – Avise, Chouilly, Cramant, Oger and Mesnil-sur-Oger. 5% of the vins clairs aged in new oak for four years, one third renewed each year in a solera-type technique. Minimum 8-10 years of lees maturation in bottle before disgorgement. 66% of the year is disgorged at the first release. In 03/99 this was roundly unctuous, with hazlenut notes but still very poised and young. Impressive. A fuller wine than Heidsieck’s lighter weight Millénaire when it appeared at the same tasting. The 1990 in 12/11 was full gold – the darkest wine of a vertical by a power. But pretty oxidised. Not a great ager really. Very old toffee shop this bottle. But has a good streak of freshness behind. Orange and peel, slight aldehyde and tokaji note – botrytic. The 1995 in 12/11 was quite long since d/g – over 6.5 years ago and gained depth. Evolution but no reduction and very well etched and detailed texture. Very compact and elegant . Oaty note –floral too. The 1996 in 12/11 showed a lovely balance and very fresh. Beginning to show some burnt and toffee notes on nose but palate still pretty linear. But shows nutty and intense celeriac and green olive note. Umami too. The freshness makes the aged notes very vivid and dynamic. VV gd.
In 01/07 the 1998 was pale and elegant but with a wonderfully (as yet tight) driving impression of honey, butter and nut complexity. Very good indeed. Still a baby. In 10/09 the 1998 was very intense and a touch of mild aldehydes. Young. Apple and biscuit. Powerful follow through and undeveloped. The faintest hazlenut and Chardonnay notes. All to come. In 12/11 the 1998 was more closed on nose than the 1999 which followed but very ripe and intense biscuit. Not as clear a linear streak as expected. Quite lush. But note 11/06 d/g.
In 10/09 the 1999 was gold, green touch. Vinosity but green on palate. Huge power to come. Hardly begun to work yet. Lovely texture and length – all just shelled nuts and sliced fig. Real potential! In 02/11 the 1999 was tight yet. Lovely sweet, herbal, rapier line. Great line and concentration and length. Very good. And in 12/11 the 1999 was very open and quite developed – in the Chardonnay sense of intense char and biscuit. Quite recent d/g. Advanced, but not all loose or as low acid as some report.
2000 In 12/11 this showed a floral nose, lily and smoke; sweet celeriac and biscuit. Lemony. Very ripe and developing. Gd crunch. The 2002 in 12/11 has the high Chardonnay showing very obviously. Very sleek. This has chalky texture behind the roundness. Almonds and hazlenuts. Very complex. Very driving – has the forceful character of 2002.
Champagne Taittinger
9, Place St Nicaise, 51100, Reims 0033 03 26 85 45 35
www.taittinger.com
 January 1st may be an arbitrary date to assess the state of Planet Wine but with wine under pressure from global recession in 2012, any time may be good for those who love wine to think about and discuss it more. Here are my 10 points about wine 2012, no doubt unavoidably from a UK vantage point.
1 The mass market and the connoisseur market are two different planets. The most important division in wine is between the mass market of cheap, dull branded wine made in factories and a much smaller market of high quality wine, usually in the UK for instance, costing over £10 a bottle at the bottom end and up. It is this ‘connoisseur’ market that concerns wine enthusiasts who drink, study and discuss wine as a serious hobby. It is hard to assess quite how big this serious constituency is. It may be no more than 100 thousand people worldwide, although I am sure it is growing. This small group also appreciates, but cannot always afford ‘fine’ wine – that is the top wines of the international classics usually sold through the auction and en primeur market and usually costing over £30 a bottle UK, but this group is not limited to or defined by ‘fine’ wine alone. It often includes those who work professionally in wine. The ‘serious’ group obviously pursues serious channels of wine information and debate. But these channels are less and less the mainstream print newspapers or magazines and wine books and more and more the ‘blogosphere’ and a few other serious wine internet sites. There may be movement and overlap between Planet Serious and Planet Mass Market. But not much and it’s time wine commentators made it clear which segment of wine drinkers they are interested in and addressing. In all honesty, I have no interest in mass market factory wine. It’s not elitist or snobbish to say that, just ‘specialist’ and it means that serious interest in wine is probably only an interest in about 10% of all the wine made.
Mainstream wine columns and books are dying in part because the mass of regular wine drinkers do not care enough about wine any more to bother with them because they think they have learnt ‘enough’ basic stuff about wine to cope, have little deep interest or engagement in wine and can sort out ‘what they like’. They may scan short ‘shopping list’ wine articles in mainstream print journals but with little engagement. This is partly because so many of these columns are policed by and written to editors’ orders who have decided the reader they want has only a passing ‘beverage’ interest in wine and may also have other priorities for spending £30-£100 regularly on ephemera like tickets to sports events, meals or concerts. Apart from a golden few, wine books never sold that well and were often the first to appear in remaindered shops. In their nature they were often out of date as soon as they hit the shelves. The 1995 end of the Net Book Agreement and Amazon-type discounting now makes small run publishing riskier than ever. Expect even fewer wine books and more of them self-published and lacking an editorial eye. This is not to say we do not need new in-depth authoritative wine books. In particular, the serious wine person nowadays sorely lacks new up to date studies of some key wine regions.
The near complete ‘beveragication‘ of the wine mass market in the UK has been caused by the grip of the supermarkets and the fact most wine columns have centred on the ‘cheap and cheerful’. Many wine commentators and educators have unwittingly fanned this process by declaring their commitment to ‘demystify’ and ‘democratise’ wine involvement which is often no more than a commitment to dumb down what can be a complex subject which also demands training in ‘tasting skills’ at the serious end. As a result, ‘serious’ wine involvement may be less fashionable and respected and is more the object of cynicism than it was. Being serious about wine, although of course it is serious fun and enjoyment, now confers as little status on anyone as any other hobby, and it can demand deeper pockets and commitment than many. The signs I discern are that this situation will not change much and may even deepen in the recession. ‘Serious’ about wine in 2012 is increasingly under the radar.
The conclusions are simple: those who commentate seriously on wine need to stop talking about wine in general or imply they speak to a mass market. They don’t. They should cater more to serious enthusiasts, although it is a more competitive ‘virtual’ market for wine information and probably not at all lucrative, except possibly for those who sell the wines in question. Expect even more wine blogs, more wheat to sort from chaff. But the serious wine blogger has to contend with the fact that the reputations of the best names in current wine sites were made worldwide before the internet took off, from print books or titles. Expect a core of high quality sites to emerge from the morass of wine blogs. And you never know, fashion could change and bring serious wine interest back to the fore. But I don’t expect to see it in 2012.
Of course, I would like the wine trade, including the supermarkets, to concentrate more, even in a recession, on getting the consumer to trade up and rely less on discounting. The future for wine (in the UK at least) possibly depends on getting people to seriously consider spending over £10 on a bottle of wine quite often, even if they do it less often than they presently spend £4.99 on a bottle which has about 65p’s worth of wine in it.
2 ‘Natural Wine’ is not a tsunami of mass concern or demand. Nor, often, is the wine of serious interest. The critical distinction is between wine made in factories of little interest or distinction and wine that has finesse, no chronic faults and which reflects its terroir and shows all the taste characteristics of high quality. The term ‘natural’ is a bit of a misnomer since growing grapes and making wine, by definition, is a huge and unnatural intervention in nature. The great shame is that many who push ‘natural’ wine seem more to argue that a wine is good or bad by how it is made rather than how it tastes. Many ‘natural’ wines are very good, but the best seem made by people who have been making them for a long time before the term was coined. And I just don’t get some wines which ten years ago would have been sent back to the wine waiter and gladly replaced with a less faulty bottle, but which are now lauded by some commentators to the skies.
3 The rise and rise of China. Sales of wine in China are now over $7 billion in US dollar terms. Yet consumption per head is still tiny compared to mature markets. Imported wine is only 10% of all wine drunk in China. China is already number 7 wine-consuming nation worldwide. I presume that those who make and sell wine to the world have these facts burned into their brain and have an advanced China plan. If not, they should not be in business.
4 The exaggeration of social media and wine. Unless you are a genius of a self-publicist like Gary Veynerchuk, the social media of websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the ‘user-generated content’ theory of Web 2.0, is often over hyped by some wine commentators. It has some important relevance to ‘serious wine’ (see above) where there are and need to be forums of discussion between wine geeks which the the main media does not cater for. Serious wine is often wine whose producers have little cash for conventional marketing and PR spend, so social media becomes part of a marketing plan because it is still cheaper than advertising and PR if you have the time to do it. But 90% of wine, mass factory wine, is bought by people who have little interest in ‘getting with the big conversation’. They just want to get the stuff down their neck and feel better with friends. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t expect them to spend hours on Facebook discussing wine.
5 Hurrah for the Sherry renaissance It’s not completely clear how far the signs of a fashionable upturn in sales and interest in sherry and Sherry are a passing hipster fad or more lasting, nor how far it is a US and UK London metrosexual thing, rather than in other countries too. My feeling is it is still a minute number of regular wine drinkers who genuinely are interested in drinking good sherry. But more than almost nothing is good. Long may it continue and take off. I remember the ad I saw in London 10 years ago – a very attractive young woman with no top and arms crossed for modesty with the strapline: You Do Not Have to Wear A Cardigan to Drink Sherry. Quite so.
6 South African wine still has a big image problem in the UK – and elsewhere. There are of course, some fabulous quality South African wines, world number 8 producer. But serious wine people in the UK and elsewhere find it hard to take too many wines seriously. This is probably caused by the over reliance of S African wine exports to the UK on mediocre plonk factory wines such as the 30 million plus bottle operation of Kumala and the poor image conveyed by the continuing conditions most black vineyard workers labour under. Meanwhile wine commentators mumble on about ‘rubbery’ flavours in S African reds and viruses in the vineyard. Can any of these problems begin to be sorted out in 2012? I hope so.
7 Get alcohol levels down in many still wines. I was reminded of this problem when tasting Wild Hog Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley, USA recently. It was 16.4%abv. And then a French winemaker the other day mentioned that Chateauneuf du Pape was routinely 15% these days. That’s true of many wines from southern France, Spain and Italy too. Many right bank wines in Bordeaux in hot 2009 were 15%. This is not just a new world problem. Wine journalists often excuse such wines by saying that the concentration of the wine ‘hides well’ the level of alcohol – you do not notice. To me that is half the problem. The other half is that almost invariably these wines are spiritous fruit bombs that have a sweet jam palate and a warm, heady burning finish. Almost every still wine 14.5% and over is quite horrible to me. A kind of syrupy light vodka jelly often with a high flamed smoke oakiness thrown in for a wild ride. Yet they are now two a penny. And if two people share a bottle and finish it, they drink over 5 units each in one sitting, akin to half a bottle of sherry each, which I presume worries many doctors even if it does not worry the drinker. Techniques in the vineyard and cellar exist to avoid this excess. Please use them.
8 Single estate champagne surely deserves better promotion Single estate or domaine champagne is called ‘grower’ champagne by most, a term I do not like as it seems to perpetuate the peasant image of horny handed sons and daughters of toil and leaves the sophisticated imagery to the big houses. Much as I admire his passion, I wish Terry Theise, the US commentator, did not call it ‘farmer fizz’. Of course, just because a champagne is made by a single estate does not automatically make it good. There are plenty of so-so and worse grower (ooops!) champagnes and there are plenty of great wines made by houses too. But the better single estate champagnes give the houses a real run for their money. But though the biggest importer of champagne, the UK is almost totally hipped on the big brands. I wish wine journalists would stop promoting them only as ‘good value’ or cheap fizz. That’s not the point; the good ones are very good as wines, better than many mass-produced house brands and they can cost as much and more. They can be connoisseur wines. The UK should get with single estate champagne more because it is often top wine. Stop being a snob and thinking a £30 spend on a bottle of champagne is only worth it if your friends spot a well-known brand label. If they haven’t heard of Larmandier-Bernier it’s their fault not yours.
9 The continuing crisis for German wine in the UK Top German wine is still a fine thing for wine geeks and almost exclusively geeks. No matter how much journalists and the wine trade have banged on about Riesling, its charms, profundity and potential longevity seem to pass even some wine enthusiasts by. Nor do branded popular riesling wines have much charm to many in the mass market. I wish wine commentators would write at more length about the German places the wines come from and get people to glory in the geekiness of the linguistic nomenclature. Please stop calling sweet wines ‘fruity’ as if you want to hide the fact they are sweet and please promote dry German wines more often. Tell people that if they want to be seen as serious about wine they need to get into classic German wine, one of the vinous world’s great glories.
10 Please, all wine regions, promote wine tourism more. It makes me choke to see the millions Bordeaux spends each year on glossy pictures of young people looking sexy and drinking claret, when Bordeaux city is now a refurbished wonder to behold (see pic above) and yet actually visiting a chateau is still a royal pain in the butt for the average punter to try and organise. Or take Champagne, the world’s most successful wine region yet one which makes it hard for tourists to visit and learn much from, unless you think queueing for the mindless promo film and cellar tour at Moët et Chandon in Epernay to be told that ‘Dom Perignon invented the second fermentation’ is a great and sophisticated experience for the discerning wine lover. Visiting and talking to the people who make wine can be the most effective way to make people love that wine for life. You would not think so from the experience of trying to be a tourist in many wine regions.
|
