The Old Vintages of Guy Vallois

Over the last few years, Diebolt-Vallois has put several old vintage wines onto the market: 1976, 1979 and 1985, which wear the gold vintage label, as well as a pure 1982 in a green label that is labeled Mise en Cave en 1983. They can be terrific wines, even if the package is a little misleading: these wines weren’t made by Jacques Diebolt, but rather by his father-in-law Guy Vallois, in the village of Cuis.

I’ve tasted all of the above wines on multiple occasions, but one that I’ve never seen is the 1973, which Richard Juhlin mentions in his book 4000 Champagnes. I’m particularly keen on champagnes from this year not only because it was a relatively decent vintage in the region, but also because it’s the year of my birth. On a visit to Diebolt this week, we were enjoying a bottle of 1997 Fleur de Passion and talking about all sorts of topics, from increased sulfur in non-malolactic wines to 17th-century tapestries (antiques are Jacques Diebolt’s grand passion), when the conversation turned to old champagne. Since I’ve been wanting to ask him for a while, I cheekily ventured the question of whether or not there were any more bottles of 1973 available. He admitted that there were a few left in the cellar, but warned that they are extremely variable, which is why he doesn’t sell them. “Perhaps one in six or eight is any good,” said Diebolt. “The problem is that they were stored sur pointe in a dirt cellar, not on cement, so many of the corks were attacked by mold.”

Nevertheless, after drinking the better part of that fabulous bottle of 1997 (which, by the way, is just beginning to come out of its shell and develop some real complexity), Diebolt asked, “Do you want to taste the ’73?” We returned to the cellar and fetched one of the 21 bottles remaining, bottled with a cork rather than with capsule for the secondary fermentation. He proceeded to disgorge it, and upon pouring a glass for himself to taste, he smiled and said, “You are very lucky. This is one of the best bottles of this wine that I have ever tasted.” We spent the next hour drinking the rest of the bottle, which continued to expand and develop with air, revealing crisp, energetic notes of citrus and almond under more mature aromas of praline, honeycomb, roasted coffee and black truffle. While it was clearly a mature wine, it was still astonishingly fresh and vibrant, much more so than any of the other Guy Vallois bottles that I had ever tasted.

It’s an experience that I am likely never to repeat, even if I am fortunate enough to partake of one of the 20 bottles that are left. However, other vintages are commercially available, and they are worth seeking out. As I write this I am drinking a bottle of the 1979, which is deliciously opulent, feeling creamy and rich even while demonstrating the forceful acidity of both the vintage and the village (like all of these old Vallois wines, this is 100 percent Cuis). I’ve had other bottles of this that have shown even more complexity, and overall this is my favorite (non-’73!) of these. The 1976 is even more luscious, although I’ve experienced greater bottle variation in that wine than in the ’79. When the ’76 is good, though, it’s very, very good, with an expansive complexity and surprising acidity for the vintage, thanks to being grown in Cuis. The 1985, like its siblings, is unusually rich for a Cuis wine, although it shows a more forceful structure, with the minerality very prominent, and doesn’t possess quite as much complexity. However, like all of these it also shows a higher than average amount of bottle variation, so it largely depends on your luck. As the famous quote goes, “There are no good wines, only good bottles.” Still, you’ll never know unless you give it a try. There are far worse things to gamble on than old Vallois wines.

Wine of the Week: H. Billiot Fils Brut Rosé

I am a huge fan of the Henri Billiot estate in Ambonnay, and I find all of their wines to be well worth buying, from the richly expressive Brut Réserve to the vivid and complex Cuvée Laetitia. I have a particular fondness, however, for Billiot’s Brut Rosé, one of my favorite rosés in all of Champagne.

Billiot’s rosé is based on their Brut Réserve, although it’s released one year earlier. The Brut Réserve is usually about 75 to 80 percent pinot noir, with the rest chardonnay, and like all of Billiot’s wines, it’s 100 percent Ambonnay grand cru. To make the rosé, Billiot adds a small percentage of older red wine, aged in barrique: the exact proportion will vary from vintage to vintage, depending on the wine. “It’s a function of color,” explains Laetitia Billiot. “We usually add between four and eight percent of red wine, depending on how strong the color of the wine is in barrel.”

The most recent release of the rosé is based on 2004, with reserve wines from 2003 and 2002, and contains six percent of red wine from 1999. Everything about this wine is immediately alluring, from its delicate, pale salmon color to the fragrantly perfumed aromas of spiced plum, red cherry and fresh pear. On the palate it’s creamy and rich in texture, showing a concentrated burst of red fruit aroma that lingers through the long and ample finish. Its sleekly balanced acidity serves to both elongate and expand the flavors, and the overall feel is one of finesse, refinement and detail. My only complaint about this wine is that it really ought to be bottled in magnum only, as 750 milliliters disappears entirely too quickly!

By the way, you’ll find a lot number on the bottle (L 02, for example), but unlike with some other estates, this has nothing to do with vintages or bottling: it’s simply an indicator of the cuvée (Brut Réserve is L 01, Rosé is L 02, et cetera). Thus it’s not easy to predict what vintages are contained within the particular bottle that you’re drinking, although the bottles in the United States usually have a disgorgement date printed on them, which helps.

Henri Billiot is imported into the United States by Terry Theise Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, NY, and the suggested retail price for the Brut Rosé is $70.

Champagne Stoppers

I’ve noticed that one reason people don’t buy more champagne or sparkling wine is that they often feel obligated to drink the entire bottle. With a still wine, you can just put the cork back in, but with sparkling wines, there are the bubbles to worry about.

There’s actually nothing to fear — all you need is a good champagne stopper. At home (alone, alas), I typically drink half a bottle of champagne a day (I’m not nearly as big a lush as some people believe), and save the other half for the next day. This is partly to moderate my consumption, but more importantly, I find that many young champagnes are actually more interesting after being opened for a day. Even when I owned a wine bar, I was never afraid to pour champagnes by the glass, as I found that young champagnes could easily last two or sometimes even three days if properly stoppered (although between the guests and the staff, they rarely lasted that long!)


There are several different types of inexpensive stoppers available. In the photo above, the big blue one at the top is the simplest model: you push it down and little teeth inside grasp the edge of the bottle. Going clockwise, the next one is slightly more sophisticated: you push it down and screw it shut, ensuring a better seal. Less aesthetically attractive but perhaps even more efficacious is the clamp model, with a hinged clip that grabs the neck of the bottle, keeping the whole thing firmly in place. (By the way, this is the only one that works on certain irregularly shaped bottles, such as Dom Pérignon or Comtes de Champagne. Not that, you know, we’re putting stoppers on those every day.) Then there’s the bright blue thing that looks like a UFO — it has two arms that swing down to grasp the bottle. My favorite one, however, and the one that I use most often, is the last, which has a tight, spring-loaded rubber seal and two little flanges on the hinged portions that grip the lip of the bottle. Plus it’s made of shiny metal and it’s pretty. You can find these at most wine stores or order them easily online.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad

Last week I was speaking with Caroline Milan, of Champagne Jean Milan, about her relatively new négociant status. While in the past this six-hectare estate was registered as an RM, or récoltant-manipulant, they made the decision several years ago to become an NM, or négociant-manipulant. The reason for this was that they wanted to grow in production, but also wanted their wines to remain exclusively from Oger. Vineyard land in a Côte des Blancs grand cru is simply not available for purchase, and even if it were, it would be incredibly expensive. (People in Champagne often estimate a price of between 1.2 and 1.5 million euros per hectare, although in today’s financial climate that seems suspiciously low to me.) The Milans had some family friends who owned very good land in Oger but who were selling their grapes to a co-operative, and a logical solution seemed to be to purchase those grapes for Milan champagne instead.

The change has worked out very well for the Milans, and the wine they’re making today is better than ever, but Caroline admits to having had some concerns in the beginning. The NM designation can be a sort of stigma, both here in the region and abroad, and the new designation meant that Milan had to leave the Syndicat Général des Vignerons, a major trade organization here in Champagne. Naturally the last thing the Milans wanted was to damage their reputation as an artisanal, family-run estate. “It made people talk,” she says. “Our friends would ask us, ‘Aren’t you afraid about your image?’” It did raise questions among some clients, although the overwhelming majority are satisfied with the explanations and continue to support the estate. And why not? It’s difficult to imagine Milan being any more artisanal than it already is. Caroline takes care of the business side of things, while her brother Jean-Charles works the cellar and vineyards. They have a few employees to help them with the estate’s operations, and while their parents are officially retired, they are still involved with the winery and continue to live on the property. Nothing has changed in the Milans’ outlook or their pursuit of quality simply because they buy a few hectares’ worth of grapes from their friends.

But really, is there anything significant about the designation NM or RM? An NM can refer to a huge array of vastly different operations, from small houses like Milan, who makes 85,000 bottles a year, to giants like Moët & Chandon, who produces, ahem... considerably more. Many young growers, in fact, are turning to the NM option, often to be able to work vines belonging to other members of the family due to inheritance laws, or else simply because, as the Milans found, vineyard land is extremely difficult to purchase.

Also, it’s hardly a meaningful designation in terms of ideas such as artisanality, expression or quality. I am a rabid fan of artisanal, site-expressive, handcrafted champagne, and I supported grower champagne well before it was fashionable to do so. Yet just because a champagne is estate-grown and -bottled doesn’t mean that it’s automatically of higher quality (or, in fact, that it’s any good at all). Nor do RMs have a monopoly on artisanality, even if many of the greatest artisanal-minded producers in Champagne are, in fact, registered as RM.

Jacquesson, for example, is highly artisanal in its outlook, isolating and bottling individual vineyards, separating parcels for vinification, preserving vintage identity in their brut sans année rather than seeking to dominate or erase the character of the year. There are plenty of récoltant-manipulants who don’t work nearly as diligently or as thoughtfully, and in fact, among Champagne’s 3,000 or so growers who produce wine under their own labels, you’ll find much wine that is indifferently made and carelessly grown. It’s true that in the United States and some other export markets the selection of grower champagne is of particularly exceptional quality, thanks to the discriminating palates of outstanding importers such as Terry Theise, Jon-David Headrick or Martine Saunier. That makes it fun, and relatively safe, to buy grower champagne. But it’s important to remember that the quality of these RM wines is due to the commitment and excellence of those particular growers, not to a couple of letters on a label. It’s inane to say, “RM on the label is a sign of quality,” or to proclaim, “I only drink RMs.” Look for the name of a producer that you know and trust — that’s the surest sign of quality that there is.

Quotations: St-Evremond

“Do not spare any expense to get Champagne wines, even if you are at two hundred leagues from Paris. Those of Burgundy have lost their credit amongst men of taste, and barely retain a remnant of their former reputation amongst dealers. There is no province which furnishes excellent wines for all seasons but Champagne. It supplies us with the wines of Ay, Avenay, and Hautvillers, up to the spring; Taissy, Sillery, Verzenai, for the rest of the year.”

—St-Evremond, in a letter to his brother the Count d’Olonne in 1674

Bérèche et Fils, Craon de Ludes

As with any wine region, one of the most exciting things about Champagne is watching a new generation of winemakers emerge. In the village of Craon de Ludes, the 26 year-old Raphaël Bérèche has been working alongside his father at their nine-hectare estate of Bérèche et Fils since 2004, and is slowly but increasingly putting his personal stamp on the domaine.

Bérèche owns vines in three different sectors of Champagne: the area around Ludes and Craon de Ludes; the eastern Montagne de Reims, around Trépail; and Mareuil-le-Port, on the rive gauche of the Vallée de la Marne. The viticulture has been steadily improving — they completely stopped using chemical herbicides in 2004 and have planted cover crops in all of the vineyards, and since 2007 a portion of the vineyard is being converted to biodynamics.

The range begins with the Brut Réserve, composed of roughly equal parts chardonnay, pinot noir and meunier, along with about 30 percent reserve wine from the previous three vintages. It typically shows full, fruity notes of citrus, apple and quince, and as with all of the estate’s wines, malolactic fermentation is avoided. The same wine is released with an additional year of lees aging as the Extra Brut Réserve, with about 1.5 grams per liter of dosage (the Brut is between seven and nine grams); the current release, 2004, is particularly vibrant and energetic, with a lovely, saline minerality.

In 1902, Raphaël’s great-grandfather planted some chardonnay vines in the Ludes vineyard of Les Beaux Regards, and today these are used to make the cuvée of the same name. (These vines are also used as a sélection massale for replanting the rest of the domaine’s chardonnay.) Unfortunately, since the parcel is too small this is no longer a single-vineyard wine, normally including about 30 percent of chardonnay from Mareuil-le-Port. Nevertheless, the resulting wine is always very focused and precise, remaining sleek and racy while showing the bold girth of chardonnay from outside of the Côte des Blancs. While the domaine is sold out of this wine at the moment, the 2005 will be released in October, and it will be the first time that this cuvée is released as a brut nature, having previously been around four grams or so.

There is a tiny quantity of vintage wine made, and the current vintage, 2002, is 40 percent chardonnay, 40 percent pinot noir and 20 percent meunier. It’s a bold, ample wine, with luscious and complex notes of clover honey, quince and dried peach. The previous vintage, 2000, is even creamier in texture, balanced by bright, orange-citrus acidity; the higher proportion of chardonnay (60 percent) keeps it feeling lively and balanced.

The most unusual wine in the cellar is the Reflet d’Antan, made from a solera started in 1990, stored in 600-liter demi-muids and bottled with cork for the second fermentation. Composed of equal parts of all three grapes, this shows a burnished, honeyed richness, its aromas of dried apple and citrus peel complicated by notes of sandalwood incense and exotic spice. There’s a texture and luster about this that gives it a feeling of opulence — I often think that it tastes the way a Peter Greenaway movie looks. Raphaël suggests a pairing with tuna rossini, which would be suitably decadent.

Bérèche et Fils is imported into the United States by Petit Pois Corp./Sussex Wine Merchants, in Moorestown, NJ.