Three Champagnes

By Chris Weed

I recently attended to a Champagne tasting (read: a mid-day New Year’s party featuring 30-odd Champagnes and assorted other treats) in Long Beach hosted by a local Champagne boffin/mensch/agent provocateur, and I feel impelled to call out a couple excellent producers.  If you happen already to be immersed in a serious Champagne habit, you and your wealth manager surely know these names well by now.

The Lineup 

Ployez-Jacquemart Liesse d’Harbonville Brut 1996 saw unanimous applause.  It was stunning, exploding from the glass, smoky, racy, of so finely filigreed detail, sternly structured, gorgeously moussed, and cortex-numbingly persistent, rounding out with suggestions of ginger, orchard fruits, exotic fruits, and wet-stone minerality.  A purebred.  Ployez-Jacquemart is an eighty-some-year-old producer based in Ludes, on the northern side of the Montaigne de Reims between Chigny-les-Roses and Verzenay, and works Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier in Ludes (1.8 hectares, 40-year-old vines, Premier Cru) as well as in Mailly-Champagne (1 hectare, Grand Cru) about 3 kilometers to the east on the D26.  Grand Cru Chardonnay to round out the assemblages is of course sourced elsewhere, usually including Mesnil-sur-Oger and Cramant and other villages.  The winemaking is marked by the following: fruit is harvested by hand, only traditional yeasts are utilized, the wine is pressed traditionally, only the first cuvée press is incorporated (the taille is always sold off, even for the NV), two débourbages are practiced, oxygenation is encouraged, the bottle fermentation is preferred to be exceedingly cold (i.e. slow, at around 11°C, allegedly yielding Ployez’s legendarily fine mousse), a minimal 3-4 g/L dosage is preferred, and a light filtration is applied only to those wines that see the inside of a vat.  The Liesse d’Harbonville is a selection of top fruit produced entirely in Burgundian 225L fûts and always at a blend of 70% Chardonnay and 30% Pinot Meunier and Noir.  It does not undergo malolactic fermentation and is typically bottled 6 months post-harvest.  The combination of oak and a suppressed malolactic can occasionally be too tightly wound, mildly oaky, and admittedly awkward when young, but as with, say, Vilmart’s wines, the oak and malic can pull together nicely with time when handled judiciously.

Cédric Bouchard’s Roses de Jeanne La Haute Lemblée Blanc de Blancs Brut 2008

 I was forced to hide Cédric Bouchard’s Roses de Jeanne La Haute Lemblée Blanc de Blancs Brut 2008 to allow it to open up, as revelers were taking a bit too much of a shine to it (and only a few hundred bottles of this stuff were produced).  Upon opening, it was exceedingly delicate, skittish, recondite.  It took a couple hours to pull together to a really profound and surprisingly accessible mineral attack with green and red fruits, iodine, oyster shell, crushed vitamin, and grapefruit and orange zest in reserve, and featuring deadly serious acid tension stretching out the finish.  Incredibly playful and vivacious on the palate (green apple pop rocks?).  His wines’ mot juste is ‘purity’ – such purity!  This wine has plenty of time ahead of it, though perhaps not as much as other vintages.  He prefers to bottle at a very low pressure, yielding a very subtle carbonation and mousse that offer just enough to delight the palate and to remind of the requisite acidity-balancing texture of Champagne, but no more.  Cédric Bouchard is perhaps too humble for his own good – you may have seen his wines in the hands of some of your more responsible winemongers but not have known it, as his name is printed in such an absurdly small font, and sideways on the label.  Rather, you may have seen his two labels by their other names: Inflorescence, representing wines made from vines owned by his father but which he still farms nose-to-tail himself, and Roses de Jeanne, representing the vines he owns.  The former will be discarded in the coming year or two as he assumes ownership of his father’s vines.  All told, Bouchard farms less than three hectares (≈ 7 acres) of vines, so his lieux-dits are largely farmed at the fractions-of-hectares scale (his La Haute Lemblée is something around one-eighth of a hectare, his La Preole is something around one-fortieth of a hectare, etc.).  He is located in Celles-sur-Ource, which is located off the A5 precisely in the middle of nowhere, southeast of Troyes, near Chaource, the motherland of that glorious, eponymous cheese.  Nota bene – Celles-sur-Ource is much closer to Chablis than to Épernay; fitting, as his wines bear absolutely no resemblance to the docile, blended, brioche-y Négociant brands.  He farms organically, crops to very low yields, harvests by hand, crushes by foot, exclusively utilizes indigenous yeasts, applies no dosage, does not filter, and does not fine.  His bottlings are all single-variety, single-lieu-dit, and single-vintage, and, refreshingly, they feature disgorgement dates (I did not record this one, though it must have been some time in Spring 2012).  These wines are extremely serious and extremely age-worthy and extremely pleasurable, and if more Champagne were produced in this moonstruck manner the world would be a happier place and there would be no war.

Tasting in Épernay in May 2009

And R. H. Coutier’s Henri III 2002 proved exceedingly fine.  And it was quite different from the wines mentioned above.  This glorious Pinot Noir hits some lower-register savory, smoky, nutty, and falling-off-the-tree-ripe orchard notes, boasts a rollicking, provocative, kaleidoscopic nose too big for the Pinot-bowl featuring red fruits, white flowers, yeast, green apple, and what comes across as a whiff of diacetyl, and closes the curtain with an extremely persistent finish – a broadly-built, but still very elegant, wine.  Great stuff, and it’s even affordable.  Coutier’s domaine is also quite small, only producing a few thousand cases annually.  He is located on Rue Henri III in the famed Grand Cru Pinot village of Ambonnay on the south side of the Montaigne de Reims, about 20 km (east) from Épernay and 30 km (southeast) from Reims.  Here, the more southerly-facing vineyards and the somewhat higher proportion of water-retaining clay help to yield more powerful, sumptuous wines relative to, say, the more acid-structured wines coming from the northern side of the Montaigne around Mailly, Verzenay, and Verzy.  Coutier’s mere nine hectares (≈ 22 acres) of vines are planted, however, to one-third Chardonnay (with the balance to Pinot Noir), René’s father having been the first to plant Chardonnay in Ambonnay in 1946.  Most of his fruit is sold to the local co-op: he retains only the best for his labels.  His fruit is harvested by hand, the wine is pressed traditionally, only some of the wines undergo malolactic fermentation, and all of the wines are done in stainless steel – with the exception of this tête de cuvée, Henri III, a good proportion of which always sees oak, and which is 100% Pinot Noir and ages for at least four years prior to release.  Only very low dosages are applied to Coutier’s wines – generally 6 g/L or less, if I’m not mistaken.

This went on longer than I expected, so I’ll cut it short.  Perhaps I’ll have to revisit the Agrapart, the Jean Milan, and the Diamant Bleu 1985 in a future post.  So, more anon.