A perpetual champagne, built one year at a time
ALL most people need to know about champagne is how to safely uncork a bottle. Pouring and savouring the wine are the easy parts.
Few champagne drinkers will interrupt their holiday celebrations to dwell on the laborious process of creating this wine, which can feel so elegant, refined and delicious.
But in the Champagne region of France now, many producers are adapting a new element to their production method. They see it not only as a significant improvement in non-vintage champagnes, the vast majority of the bottles produced each year, but as a major hedge against the effects of climate change, which for many producers has altered both the way they farm the grapes and how they make the champagne.
First, a bit of background on how non-vintage champagnes are created, or, to use the term that many Champenois prefer, multi-vintage champagnes.
These cuvees are, as the name suggests, blends of several vintages. To create one, producers will use as a base wine from the most recent harvest, itself most often a blend of different grapes from different areas within the region. To this base, producers add wines from older harvests that they’ve kept in reserve, experimenting and tasting until they find what they consider the best possible blend.
Aiming for stylistic consistency
Why do they do this? Blending wines and vintages permits a producer to aim for stylistic consistency while hedging against the highs and lows of single harvests. While vintage champagnes vary from year to year, reflecting the characteristics of the growing season, multi-vintage wines are intended to transcend the nature of any single year.
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Small producers who have limited storage space and resources may only have a few vintages on hand to blend. Big houses, especially the most prestigious such as Krug, have access to far more reserve wines and so are able to create more complex blends.
Here’s where the new method comes in. Instead of storing their reserve wines separately and discretely, by vintage or even plot by plot, a growing number of producers are blending significant portions of their reserve wines together, creating what they call a perpetual reserve.
Each year, producers will add wine from the most recent harvest to this store, while removing an equal amount to use for the next multi-vintage cuvee. Over time, this perpetual reserve will get more and more complex as more vintages are mixed in, and the wines removed for the next multi-vintage cuvee will likewise gain complexity.
Most obviously, the perpetual cuvee aids small producers, giving them a tool to create more multi-faceted reserve wines. Not surprisingly, it was small producers who first developed and adopted this method.
But big producers are also embracing it, most prominently Louis Roederer, which, under Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, the executive vice-president and cellar master, has become a progressive leader among the big champagne houses.
“The perpetual reserve gives you the ability to make a consistent wine in an inconsistent place,” Lecaillon said during a visit to Roederer in late November. “You create a sense of champagne, neutralise the climate impact and emphasise the soil impact.”
Climate change has created more extreme conditions in many years, he said, resulting in higher levels of alcohol and lower levels of acidity. He called the perpetual reserve a strong tool for mitigating these extremes.
“The risk for champagne is to get too ripe, to lose minerality and freshness,” he said. “Perpetual reserve is a tool for bringing minerality. I want the wines to be as much about the soil as fruity. The climate is increasing fruitiness. I had to rebalance.”
Roederer started its perpetual reserve in 2012, adding a proportion of the new vintage to it each year, generally half chardonnay and half pinot noir, two of the three major grapes of champagne, along with pinot meunier. It’s stored in 1,000-hectolitre steel tanks, each the equivalent of about 26,400 gallons.
Each time Roederer creates a multi-vintage cuvee, it will typically comprise 55 per cent current vintage, 35 per cent perpetual reserve and 10 per cent other reserve wines, stored separately in oak casks.
“That equates to: 55 per cent vintage character, 35 per cent champagne character, 10 per cent Roederer character,” Lecaillon said.
Before the perpetual reserve, Roederer’s multi-vintage champagne, Brut Premier, was a fine, reliable wine. Its composition included about 15 per cent reserve wines.
Now, the multi-vintages made with the perpetual reserve are called Collection and labelled by number, representing the number of multi-vintage cuvees issues since Roederer was founded in 1776. With reserves making up 45 per cent of the blend, they have gotten much better, more complex and chalky, rich yet paradoxically light-bodied and elegant. The first to incorporate the perpetual reserve was Collection 242, issued in 2021. Collection 245 is now on the market.
Among those who use a perpetual reserve, Roederer is a relative newcomer. Billecart-Salmon started its perpetual reserve in 2006 and actually has three different ones going, one with chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier, another just with pinot meunier and the third solely of pinot noir. About 35 per cent of the blend in Le Reserve, its primary multi-vintage champagne, is made up of perpetual reserve wines.
Most influential grower
Far more small growers than big houses are using perpetual reserves, and they’ve been doing it longer. Few agree on which grower was the first to employ the technique, but most say the most influential was Anselme Selosse of Jacques Selosse, the ground-breaking grower-producer whose champagnes now go for hundreds of dollars a bottle.
One of the Selosse cuvees, Substance, is composed entirely of a perpetual reserve from a single chardonnay vineyard that includes wines going back to 1987. His reasoning in starting this reserve, he said in 2008, was to emphasise the qualities of the vineyard by eliminating variables such as the effects of weather.
“It takes all the different years – the good, the bad, the wet, the dry, the sunny – and neutralises the elements to bring out the terroir,” he said.
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