It’s close to a unicorn wine. Champagne from two small parcels of ungrafted pinot noir vines in the town of Aÿ. It might be better to consider it an acre of roots, rather than vines, as these plants have no visible trunks. Bollinger, known for its rich style of barrel-fermented, pinot-driven Champagne, tends these roots on either side of their château. Their workers mound the earth over them each year, tying the new canes that grow up out of the ground to posts, harvesting the fruit, then looping the canes back into the ground to create new roots. The ancient method of viticulture gives the wine its name, Vieilles Vignes Française, which Bollinger first bottled in 1969.


These two parcels, still graced with the absence of phylloxera, were likely planted in the 1950s (Bollinger could not confirm the precise date). There were originally three blocks, including one in Bouzy, but those vines succumbed to the root louse in 2005. So the latest release, the 2005 Vieilles Vignes Française, is the first vintage to come purely from the two neighboring plots in Aÿ—and, for the first time, Bollinger did not add any dosage to the wine before bottling.
This past June, Jérôme Philipon, CEO of Bollinger, opened one of the 90 bottles allocated for the US over dinner with Jeremy Noye, CEO of Morrell & Co., and Ed Zimmerman, a collector. The wine, a naked evocation of Aÿ terroir, provoked a discussion about single-site Champagne. We tasted it next to Bollinger’s 2005 Grande Année, which is 70 percent pinot noir and 95 percent grand cru. Though Bollinger’s style is rich, it is not sweet; even so, in the context of the dosage-free wine from Aÿ, it is possible to feel the dosage in the Grande Année (six grams of sugar)—a creaminess to mellow the strength of the structure, making the wine softer, more welcoming. In contrast, the Vieilles Vignes Française has a gripping structure, something rare in Champagne, superseding the bubbles and expressing a particular kind of acidity. Noye said, “It has a smokiness, a mineral, smoky element that I don’t recall picking up in the wine before [from previous vintages].”
“Krug Grande Cuvée is the sort of wine we were trained on. You get the chardonnay, the pinot noir, the chalk, the spice from the oak. It’s super classic.”
—Jeff Taylor
While Bollinger hadn’t set out to make a single-site “terroir” Champagne, the 2005 Vieilles Vignes Française comes at a time when single-site wines are changing the landscape of Champagne. It’s a style of wine you might expect from a grower, whose small estate is subject to the fickle weather in the region, with none of the benefits of blending. But as global temperatures have continued to rise over the last decades, grapes ripen more reliably in Champagne, which has prompted a small boom in wines focused on one place and wines with no dosage. The 2005 Vieilles Vignes Française joins that contingent, as does the 2006 Louis Roederer et Philippe Starck Brut Nature.
We gathered three pairs of wines to consider how houses, established on classic blends, are approaching what might be a philosophical fork in the road. Our panel included Mariko Kobayashi of Vintry Fine Wine, Sarah Looper, former sommelier of Mas [farmhouse] and Jeff Taylor of Betony in NYC.
Louis Roederer
2006 Champagne Brut Cristal
2006 Champagne Brut Nature Louis Roederer et Philippe Starck
Maisons Marques & Domaines USA, Oakland, CA


Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon considers Cristal the first terroir Champagne: When Louis Roederer created the wine for the Russian Tsar in 1876, he selected the fruit from pure chalk soils. When Lecaillon collaborated with Philippe Starck on a new wine in 2006, they chose to focus on a single slope in Cumières, the vines planted on deep, cold clay soils. They harvested pinot noir, meunier and chardonnay at the same time (focused on the moment of ripeness for the pinot noir) and co-fermented the fruit, half in large oak, half in stainless steel; they eventually bottled it with low pressure (4.5 kilos of pressure rather than the typical six), and without any dosage.
The 2006 Cristal fills the mouth with chalkiness, its fruit integrated into the wine’s earthy intensity with a touch of sweetness. The Brut Nature is more austere, crisp-lined, yielding hints of tangy red fruit and yellow fruit. Cristal is a bold stroke of Champagne, a flavor that integrates many into one; the Brut Nature is more vinous, a character that expands out from a single place.
Taittinger
2006 Champagne Brut Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs
Champagne Brut Les Folies de la Marquetterie
Kobrand, Purchase, NY


Comtes de Champagne is Taittinger’s prestige cuvée, first released in 1952. The Blanc de Blancs is 100 percent chardonnay from five villages in the Côte des Blancs; adding to its richness, five percent of the wine ages in new oak casks. In contrast, Les Folies is a single vineyard, neighboring the Château de la Marquetterie in the town of Pierry, near Epernay. The vineyard includes both chardonnay and pinot noir, which make up 45 and 55 percent of this blend, respectively.
Surprisingly, even though these two wines come from different terroirs and are completely different blends, our panel found the differences between them to be not as marked as in the first flight, where the wines might have come from two different houses. Here, the house style is the strongest element, the wines both sharing a round texture, the Blanc de Blancs finishing dry and austere, Les Folies ending with a touch of apple-scented sweetness.
Krug
Champagne Brut Grande Cuvée
2003 Champagne Brut Blanc de Blancs Clos du Mesnil
Moët-Hennesy USA, NY


In 1971, when Henri and Rémi Krug purchased the Clos du Mesnil, an ancient, walled chardonnay vineyard in the village of Mesnil-sur-Oger, they didn’t intend to make a single-vineyard bottling. The history of the house—and all the training of Henri Krug—was in blending. The Krugs set Grande Cuvée as their signature wine, an intricate blend tuning a vast range of individual lots from their grower network into the harmony and flavor depth of their long-aged reserve stocks. The Krugs had begun purchasing land to enhance that grower network, and after working with the Clos du Mesnil for a decade, they decided to bottle the Clos alone in 1979—a single variety from a single vintage and a single site.
The 2003 vintage was notoriously hot, an outlier in a region that is notoriously cold, a season that was the opposite of classic. Even so, the wine has a structure built on firm acidity, the dense smoky power of its chardonnay coming through in the ornate richness that ties it to Krug. The Grande Cuvée stands with it, holding the same bracing, oak-aged power, but its range of flavors are deeper, more complex, symphonic in the style set by Henri Krug during his long tenure at the house. As Jeff Taylor notes, “Grande Cuvée is the sort of wine we were trained on. You get the chardonnay, the pinot noir, the chalk, the spice from the oak. It’s super classic.”
Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.
This story appears in the print issue of Fall 2015.
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