Francis Egly shook my hand and asked the purpose of my visit. A perfectionist in the grouchy French farmer mode, he frowned as I explained my interest in his red wine, and how, in the United States, we were seeing a small but growing number of great red Coteaux Champenois—still red pinot noir from Champagne.
“I hope you are not here to write a story about how, with global warming, there will be more Coteaux Champenois,” he said, and turned to look off toward the Ambonnay hills.
It was a question to freeze a journalist’s brain. For Egly, my simplistic observation did not account for the fact that red wine had been made in the region for centuries, and that most of it was thin and acidic. The poverty of that red Coteaux Champenois was a sharp contrast to the wealth generated in the last two centuries by the sparkling wine called Champagne.


Still, a few producers bottle fascinating pinot noir–based red wines, mostly from the chalk-and-clay soils east of Epernay above the north bank of the Marne River, from Aÿ to Bouzy and Ambonnay. The côte in Ambonnay, a little farther from the river, in the Montagne de Reims, reaches an elevation of 925 feet. With vineyards tucked into the rise of that hill, Francis Egly produces one of the most coveted red wines from Champagne—his Ambonnay Rouge Cuvée des Grands Côtés.
I may have come to Champagne because of a hunch about climate change, but I was here with Francis Egly because a friend and I had shared a bottle of Egly-Ouriet 2008, and I was determined to see the land where it had grown, the vines that produced it and to meet the man who made it.
So, I backed off my prepared notes on warming climates, making no mention of how the white cliffs of Dover and other highlands across the English Channel are now growing enough top-flight sparkling wine to put a dent in Champagne’s British market. Nor the fashion for low- or no-dosage Champagne in the US market, a phenomenon that may well be tied to more reliable ripeness in the grapes.
Instead, I told Egly about my encounter with that bottle, at dinner with a wine amateur—in the French sense of the word—at Gramercy Tavern. She wanted Burgundy (and could afford it, though I could not afford any of the Burgundy she would like). After more than an hour passing the wine list back and forth and talking with sommeliers about something we both might drink, we pointed quizzically to a small section of alternative reds, where Egly’s 2008 Ambonnay Rouge was offered at a price just within reach. It elicited a wide smile and a firm “Do it” from Justin Timsit, the restaurant’s wine director at the time.
He decanted the wine, which turned out to be a delicately beautiful red, offering the numinous complexity and sheer deliciousness of grand cru Burgundy on its own dynamic terms. There was something different in the limestone tang of the acidity, more directly oceanic than the gentler continental freshness of a great red Burgundy. In its own way, the wine was as challenging as Egly’s question. But when I told him the story of how my investment-banker friend fell in love with his wine, he mellowed and we set out for the côte.
Most of Egly’s Ambonnay Rouge comes from a small collection of parcels north of his cellars in town. As we drove toward the côte, the contour of the hill was brought into relief by undulating rows of vines, terraced up to the forest at the top. That contour creates a small amphitheater, a sheltered spot of about 50 acres, Egly estimated, the vines protected by the forest to the north and by the hills to the east and west. With a little less of the cold north wind, and with the direct attention of the sun, the spot is several degrees warmer, on average, than the village of Ambonnay, half a mile behind us.
“Everything that’s looking at the setting sun, those are very poor soils,” Egly explained, the ground too white and chalky for the kind of Coteaux Champenois he makes. “The hills that look to the rising sun, those are rich in clay.” He believes a little clay over the chalk is essential to great Coteaux Champenois wine and is one of several criteria crucial to achieving that goal.
“People in Champagne think you can only make red wine in an easy vintage,” he told me. “We turned that idea around and said, we are going to work these parcels and do what it takes to make great Ambonnay Rouge every year. For 25 years, the vines have made Ambonnay Rouge—not because they are great years, but because of the tirage and selection we do.”
Egly joined his father and grandfather at the family’s domaine in 1980; since taking over in 1998, he has continued to sustain the selection of plants that his father and grandfather developed before him. “You need pinot fin,” he said, referring to the selection of pinot noir that some top Burgundy growers have also sustained, noted for its small berries and small bunches. “You need grapes that taste like something.”
By 2008, he was able to modify his cellar, with air-conditioning and new presses, helping to refine a winemaking practice he describes as “infusion,” rather than “extraction.” He allows the grapes and stems to macerate, chilled, before fermentation spontaneously begins, usually after about a week. Then he uses the inclined presses to mimic the action of an old-style vertical basket press in the way it recirculates the pomace, allowing him to “liberate the juice” from the grapes for his press wine. The gentle pressing gets an assist from all the stems in the must. In the ripe and abundant 2018 harvest, he did not destem any fruit, using all the whole bunches in his tank; more typically, he destems between 20 and 40 percent.
Of the 42 acres he farms, he uses a collection of parcels that total 1.7 acres for his Ambonnay Rouge, all pinot fin, the vines between 50 and 70 years old. In 2018, those parcels filled 18 barrels, about 10 to 15 percent new. As he opened the bung of a barrel to thief a taste, he described how the rain in spring and the beautiful summer weather produced an abundant crop. The wine itself felt ample, with generous fruit in colors of deep purple and equally deep red. It also felt silky and long, sparked with energy.
In another section of the chalk-walled cellar, he had seven barrels of 2017 from those same 1.7 acres (volume wise, that works out to be one-third the allowed yield for Champagne). His 2017 was darker in tone than the ’18, but lighter in weight, with floral notes that added to its elegant feel.
“Sometimes, it’s complicated to get the grapes ripe in Champagne, but that works in our favor. Because it’s complicated, it brings complexity to the wine,” he said, adding, “Any grape expresses itself best at its northernmost area of production.”
Then he opened a bottle of his 2009, which he described as an almost perfect vintage with a lot of sun. It had the chalk stink of great Coteaux Champenois, with a silken texture and a flavor that glowed red. That red fruit had a muscular fatness, like a scallop straight from the sea, except it’s red, from clusters of pinot noir.
THERE ARE ONLY A FEW PRODUCERS OF AMBONNAY ROUGE; many more make Bouzy Rouge, from another grand cru village in the Montagne de Reims, just to the west. Last year, our Champagne tastings at Wine & Spirits included a bright 2008 Bouzy Rouge, a wine that had aged gracefully, transitioning from Bing-cherry scents toward woodland flowers and forest floor. Delphine Vesselle made that wine at Domaine Jean Vesselle, where her family has been growing grapes for more than three centuries.
She took charge in 1993, around the time that Paul Bara and several local producers were forming the Académie des Vins de Bouzy, an association of some 17 winemakers who organize an annual tasting of Bouzy Rouge. At one of the old-vine parcels she uses for her red wine, Vesselle recalled the day, in 1995, when she received the official papers acknowledging her succession at the domaine. That night, vandals broke the canes in one of her vineyards, welcoming her by radically cutting her yields for the season. She contrasted that bitter competitive attitude with the Bouzy of today, transformed, in part, by the Académie, whose members visit each other’s vineyards and openly share their challenges and goals. While she describes the range of styles among producers in the Académie— “young, old, with oak, without oak”—she credits the bonhomie of the group with helping her succeed in her own style.
Back at her cellar in town, Vesselle explained that she does not make Bouzy Rouge every year, and when she does, it only makes up five percent of her production. She focuses her red wine on several parcels of old vines, including Le Clos, where some of the vines date to 1902, and Les Brousses, where the average age is reaching 65 years, the vines planted by her grandfather. Her father chose to vinify the wine without oak barrels, and she decided to continue with that style. “I’m a little afraid if I put it in wood, I would lose the cherry-stone flavor, which is very particular to Bouzy,” she said, offering me a taste from the vat of the most recent vintage. She captures that delicate character by destemming her grapes and macerating the bunches for four to five days in cold tanks. She warms them up for fermentation, then, after malolactic conversion, the wine rests on its fine lees in tanks for four or five years. Even without the support of oak tannins, Vesselle’s old-vine fruit has the stamina to age, as witnessed by the freshness of her 2008.




That’s nothing new. Long ago, the elegance and stamina of pinot noir grown in Bouzy appealed to Lily Bollinger, who favored Bouzy Rouge in the 1920s, even as her husband, Jacques, bought up parcels of a vineyard high up the côte in Aÿ, Bollinger’s hometown farther west, in the Vallée de la Marne. By 1933, the family owned all 9.9 acres of that vineyard in Aÿ, the Côte aux Enfants, noted for its steep slopes as well as for its active limestone—called out on a map in 1901 for the particularity of its soil, as locals, replanting after phylloxera, worked to find rootstocks that were sustainable in the chalk.
Before they switched to Aÿ, 1928 is the last vintage Bollinger has on record for their production of Bouzy Rouge. Gilles Descôtes, the cellarmaster, poured the wine at lunch several years ago to mark the inauguration of Bollinger’s Galerie 1829, an underground library of vintages. It was among the most memorable wines of the day, along with some astonishing Champagnes from the 19th century that still held a memory of their bubbles. At lunch, the Bouzy Rouge was an ethereal dream of pinot noir, more than a ghost in its haunting presence of fresh fruit—hinting at yellow raspberries—and in the precision and silken depth of its structure. The dappled light on the white tablecloth showed off the glint in the color of the wine; the naked feel of that 1928 has stayed with me, as there was no excess of flesh or bone, just a young spirit in an ancient wine.
Denis Bunner, the assistant cellarmaster, knew these wines well, having spent several years assessing a cache of old bottles an intern had discovered in Bollinger’s cellars. Tasked with cleaning up an alcove deep within the winery’s 3.7 miles of limestone caves in Aÿ, the intern found an archway where a false wall hid a library of wines. The cache dated back to 1829, when the company was founded. It had been secreted away sometime before the Nazis invaded and was, eventually, forgotten. Bunner’s first job at Bollinger was to inventory and restore that wine for Bollinger’s Galerie 1829; more recently, he spent a May morning opening bottles of Coteaux Champenois, some from that pre-war stash, along with other more contemporary vintages.
Meanwhile, Descôtes, whose first job at Bollinger was as vineyard manager, drove me east out of Aÿ and up the hill toward the forest. The dirt track through the vines had been eroded by water, still running down from the forest in spring; it was four-wheel-drive country, though Descôtes was negotiating the steeps in his Nissan Leaf while pointing out the chalk cliff at the center of the vineyard. There are three slopes surrounding the cliff, he explained. One is underneath, facing south. The other two are above the cliff, one facing southeast, the source for Bollinger’s Coteaux Champenois. The other parcel faces west, providing fruit for the firm’s rosé Champagnes. The slope reaches 40 percent in places, a hillside so steep, legend has it, that only children could work the harvest. “We are quite high up in Aÿ,” he said. “The road above the vineyard is the limit of the village; past that is Mutigny.”
He parked his car alongside the two-acre parcel they use for their Coteaux Champenois, planted 45 years ago with a selection called pinot Moret. “Yves Moret de Rochprise was a vineyard manager at Bollinger,” Descôtes explained. “He selected what is now clone 386; from the beginning, it was a selection from Bollinger.”
As we walked down to the cliff, then followed the road that leads around it, he warned me to avoid the spots where the water washed down from the forest and made it slippery.
“The variation we have in different villages of Champagne is mostly linked to water availability and depth of the topsoil,” he told me. “In a dry year, when you have hydric stress, you can have low levels of nitrogen [in the must]. The yeasts cannot produce the precursors to reveal the fruitiness of the berries and you get a more reductive wine. In 2018, we had very little rain. The sites with very deep topsoil were more stressed than those with thinner soils over the chalk, because the chalk holds water.”
His comments reminded me of something Mathieu Pouchon of Champagne Salon had told me earlier in the week. At Salon’s vineyards in the Côte des Blancs, “the vines in 2018 had enough water, even with the temperature we had,” he said. “We are standing on a big sponge of chalk and water. Inside a square meter of chalk, you can have 200 liters of water. And if the surface dries, it pulls the water up. The clay doesn’t hold water in the same way.” Aside from that, some chalk is hard, like in Reims, where it is widely used in building. In Aÿ, the chalk is soft and crumbles easily; locals build with bricks instead.
Here at Bollinger, Descôtes is focused on a picking date that accounts for peak ripeness while the grapes are still accumulating sugar. He has implemented a system to calculate sugar levels in relationship to the volume of the berries, so if it rains, and the berries expand, he has an accurate measure; or, if evaporation causes sugar levels to rise, he knows it is not due to ripening. “We don’t want overripe grapes,” he said. “We want to pick before the evaporation starts.”
Back at the cellar, Descôtes and I join Bunner for a tasting, starting with the 1928 Bouzy Rouge I remembered from lunch several years ago. Descôtes poured it next to the 1934 Côte aux Enfants, the first vintage Bollinger made from its new monopole, which was a different take on silk, with blackcurrant flavors, and freshness driven by the site’s active limestone underneath. Though I am reluctant to describe the wines as masculine and feminine, it is interesting that the delicate grace of the 1928 Bouzy Rouge contrasts so markedly with the dark, structured fruit of the 1934 Côte aux Enfants. (It’s probably not fair to credit one to Lily and one to Jacques.)
Bunner followed those up with a range of Côte aux Enfants vintages, including a 1989, “proof that, if you have low acidity, you can still have long aging,” he said. It was the most luscious Côte aux Enfants on the table, fleshy, with dark berry flavors. It sent me back to my notes on the 1989 Ambonnay Rouge that Francis Egly had opened in his cellar, a wine made by his father and grandfather that was significantly lighter in color, less concentrated, but with the same sweet expression of the vintage, a beeswax impression of the chalk, and clarity from the chalk.
Bunner considers 1989 one of the great vintages at Côte aux Enfants but admits that others are not so long-lived. Before Bollinger built a new press center at Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, “red-wine production was very artisanal,” he said. “We stopped in 2003, to change the viticulture and the way we were making Côte aux Enfants. Then we started again in 2009. You can’t be a legend and be good one year out of three.” Since the 2015 vintage, they have been working with whole bunches in the fermentations, which they believe will integrate and enhance the wine’s structure for aging. “You have the buzz of the active limestone acidity and you have the stem tannins integrating into a long, dynamic flavor,” Bunner said.
Of the earlier Côte aux Enfants, it was the 1999 that impressed me for its deep color and dark cassis flavors—along with blackberry, pressed flowers, hard tannins and tension. “It’s something typical of Côte aux Enfants,” Bunner told me. “If we don’t have blackberry, elderberry and licorice, it’s not Côte aux Enfants.”




IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME THAT WEEK I thought how odd and fascinating it was to taste delicious red wine in a Champagne cellar. And it wasn’t the last.
In Reims, when I stopped for a vin clair tasting with Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon of Roederer, he opened a bottle of red wine from Charnot, a parcel in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ he had planted in 2002 with the goal of making Coteaux Champenois. He used a massal selection of vines from Guyon in Burgundy and bottled his first vintage in 2015, destemming the grapes and aging the wine in François Frères barrels. “It was too smoky,” he recalled, “velvety, sexy, I would say, but it lacked vertical dimension.”
In 2016, he used 30 to 40 percent whole bunches in his fermentation, in stainless-steel barrels. Like Egly, he says he is going for an infusion, employing only enough pigéage to keep the temperature controlled and the skins and stems surrounded in juice. He aged the wine in a selection of barrels— some of them made with water-bent staves—with the goal of diminishing the smokiness he found in the 2015.
“We are talking here about 1,100 bottles of wine,” he said of Coteaux Champenois at Roederer, where he’s working on developing an array of single-vineyard still pinot noirs. The label for the first, to be released in 2020, is an homage to Camille Olry-Roederer. “Frédéric [Rouzaud]’s great-grandmother loved Coteaux Champenois,” Lécaillon explained. “For us, it’s the next chapter.” It’s a sunny red that pulls pinot noir into the chalk of Champagne.
“Last week, we were digging some holes in our vineyards on a sunny day after a cool, wet one,” Lécaillon told me. “There were 23 inches of topsoil, then we were into chalk. At that level, I felt this oyster-shell cold humidity from the chalk. It’s the Champagne aroma: oyster shell and raspberry.”


Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.
This story appears in the print issue
of October 2019.
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