Having made a zero dosage Champagne as early as the 19th century, it should come as no surprise that Laurent-Perrier launched the category in the modern era; Ultra Brut debuted in the early 1980s, though it is only recently that the house has been emphasizing it in the marketplace.
Brut Force --Champagne goes dryBy LYN FARMERDid Mary Poppins have it all wrong when she said "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?" There are some in Champagne who think the parasol-toting nanny was taking her charges down the wrong path when, helping them with the disagreeable task of cleaning their room, she advised that a bit of something sweet helped one take the bitter. It's advice that Champagne's chefs de caves have followed for centuries, adding a bit of sugar to tame the high acidity of their effervescent wine. That may be changing, because in a fashion culture that says "you can never be too thin," there is an emerging wine culture that seems to say "you can never be too dry."
Think about your morning coffee or tea. Both beverages have high levels of natural acidity; adding a bit of sugar both sweetens the drink and lessens the impact of the acidity. Up to a point, adding more sugar to coffee not only decreases your awareness of that acidity, it also enhances the roundness, or fullness, perceived in the brew. Yet add too much sugar and it's simply a sweet drink. How much is too much is a matter of individual taste; furthermore, the amount of sugar needed varies with the type of coffee one is drinking. A rich, round Sumatra may need little sugar, while a lighter yet crisper Brazilian or Guatemalan might require a bit more to be at its best. The goal is always the same, though: to drink a balanced cup of coffee.
Much the same thing happens in Champagne, where, in fact, vignerons may add sugar as many as three times to get a properly balanced glass of wine. Achieving that balance is not only tricky, but also at the heart of what may be only a fad or an entirely new trend in Champagne: extra brut. For many years, the term "brut," meaning the driest category of Champagne, seemed to be an absolute; there was nothing drier or less sweet than brut. Now there is, but not everyone thinks that's a good thing.
Today's culture is fascinated by ingredients, and not only on soup cans listing dozens of compounds where our parents' generation saw simply "contains chicken." Think about the menu at a trendy restaurant that touts a three-line list of ingredients, many unfamiliar, for every featured dish. Wine culture today is also fascinated with purity, so much so that many producers provide technical data sheets with their bottles or on their Web sites that practically parse every nuance of grape, sugar, acid and barrel stave.
No one denies the wines of Champagne are high in acid. "It is part of our specificity," says Clicquot chef de caves Dominique Demarville, using a word much loved by the French in describing a wine's uniqueness. In the case of Champagne, vines are cultivated at the northernmost geographic area in Europe where vinifera grapes can be grown, and every year they struggle to ripen. "Ripeness and acidity are linked," Demarville says. As a grape ripens, it gets more sugar in its juice and its natural acidity usually decreases. "Less ripeness usually means higher acidity. Our wines in Champagne have a high level of acidity and we need this acidity for the freshness and lightness of our wines, even when the flavors are ripe."
This acidity appears harsh at first, but in synergy with all the other elements in play - the unique combination of soil, climate and tradition; it will yield great results eventually. The geologic evolution of the region, at one time a sea bed, gives Champagne chalky, mineral-rich soil. Its climate promotes a level of complexity in the wines with minerality layered with a multitude of flavors and aromas. "There's only one place you can make Champagne, and it's right here," says Bruno Paillard, one of the region's most influential producers, "We are what every other sparkling wine can never be." And, he is too discreet to add, what nearly every other sparkling wine wishes it were.
But there is the question of sugar, a touchy issue for winemakers almost everywhere. In California, for example, grapes are able to ripen and produce enough sugar in the juice to result in wines of 13 percent alcohol or higher - sometimes much higher. Champagne is fortunate if there are five relatively ripe vintages in a decade. Because the potential alcohol is often barely 9 percent, French law permits the addition of sugar to the grape juice in order to achieve a minimum level of about 10 percent in the initial cuvée. The amount of sugar needed to reach that point changes from vintage to vintage as ripeness levels vary with the weather conditions.
Champagne's makers employ chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier to produce their delicately hued cuvées. The latter two are called "black grapes," though, in fact, their skins are varying shades of purple. Because their pulp is white, if all of the grapes are carefully pressed, the juice will be anything from pale greenish yellow to a faint rose in color, and it tastes surprisingly sweet, the sugar masking the juice's acidity. Let the juice settle, add yeast to ferment and that sugar is converted to alcohol, yielding wines that even the most generous chef de caves calls "tight." This first wine is only a beginning; the sugar added during the initial fermentation is only the first of three dosing "adjustments."
Now comes the fun part: Dozens, even hundreds, of wines from villages all over Champagne are tested and tasted, and in the spring are blended in the "assemblage," the composing of a final cuvée. Still too acidic for drinking pleasure and now bone dry and a bit wimpy at ten percent alcohol, the blended wine goes into bottle with a bit of sugar - addition No. 2 - and a small amount of yeast. The bottle is capped and the wine, now with fresh yeast and a new food source, starts to ferment again. The yeast produces another two percent alcohol and gives off carbon dioxide that, in the capped bottle, dissolves into the wine. And then, in a matter of weeks, its work mostly done, the yeast dies, settles and forms a sediment called the lees.
After a time - anywhere from twelve months to several years, depending on the Champagne style - the lees are disgorged, or removed from the bottle. In the process, a bit of wine is lost so the bottle must be topped off. At this point, the now bubbly, completely dry and still-acidic wine traditionally receives a dosage, enough wine to replace what was lost mixed with a small amount of sugar (addition No. 3) to balance the wine. "The dosage is the last operation of blending," Demarville notes. This is when the sweetness of the wine is determined as well: If enough sugar is added to equal 15 grams per liter (a standard 750-ml bottle is three-fourths of a liter) of wine or less, the wine has traditionally been called brut. If the final level is between 12 and 20 grams per liter the wine is called extra dry (though the overlap between brut and extra dry is curious) and at 17 to 35 grams it is, paradoxically, called dry. The final category generally seen in the market is demi-sec (half-dry) a dessert Champagne with 33 to 50 grams of sugar per liter (see "How Sweet It Isn't" box, page 40).
That sounds like a lot of sugar, but let's backtrack to your morning coffee. Fifteen grams per liter would be just under three grams in a six-ounce cup of coffee - less than half a teaspoon. "And we don't use that much," says Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, cellarmaster at Louis Roederer. "The dosage in our Brut Premier non-vintage Champagne varies between ten and eleven grams." This level would be closer to a quarter teaspoon in a cup of coffee, an amount so low you might not even taste the sugar, though it could curb the coffee's acidity, which is exactly the point of the dosage.
Didier Depond, president of Champagne Salon and its sister house Delamotte, likens the dosage to "a woman using a simple black eyeliner; it is used to accentuate the wine's style; like all [subtly applied] make-up, it should not mask, it must only elevate what is already there. The austerity in Salon is not from the [minimal] dosage; it is because it is a wine that requires longer aging than most."
"The dosage isn't only about sugar," Lecaillon explains. "There is more than sweetness involved when we top off a bottle." To get the sugar in the bottle, it is dissolved in wine to make up a liqueur d'expédition, and many winemakers are much more concerned about the wine they use than about the sugar making up their dosage. "For this liqueur, this finishing touch, we use a very special wine, the best of the best. Our wine is two-thirds pinot noir from Verzenay and one-third chardonnay from Mesnil, both Grand Cru villages, that we age in large barrels for eight years," he notes.
Winemaker Benoit Tarlant, whose family-owned Champagne house goes back several generations, says, "If we have apparent sweetness, it means we have too much dosage. The best dosage is when you have rounder and tender tastes, but you don't feel the sweetness."
Salon's Depond notes that in addition to Champagne's high natural acidity there is also a "perceived acidity produced by its effervescence." He also puts the dosage in the context of other white wines, noting, "Champagne before dosage has close to zero sugar, which in still wine is hardly ever the case, even in the driest of Sancerre, Muscadet or others." In fact, many Champagnes, even with dosage, are at or below the threshold for the human palate to detect sweetness.
Yet with Champagne, some critics have seized on sugar as a villain, arguing that its use goes far beyond being a tool for tweaking balance and is instead a way to mask faults or satisfy the public's sweet tooth while selling insipid wine.
That seems extreme, but one also has to pause a moment and ask how wines can be considered at the same level of sweetness - brut - if you can add anywhere from zero to 15 grams of sugar to a liter of wine? That's not a lot of sugar in absolutes, but in relative terms, it's a broad span. The European Union agreed, and at the beginning of this century it adjusted the sweetness categories. Brut is still 15 grams or less, but a new designation, extra brut, was added to designate a wine with less than 6 grams of added sugar. Many cuvées were already able to meet the requirements for extra brut, and in the last five years there has been a flood of bottles labeled extra brut or bearing proprietary names indicating there is no sugar added at all (though a gram or two of residual, unfermentable sugar generally remains in the wine).
Terry Thiese, the importer largely responsible for the surge of interest in grower Champagnes, says, "Less dosage is not always better. It doesn't make your wine more honest, more pure, more transparent, more sophisticated, or more honorable; it just makes it more dry."
Thiese places emphasis on qualities like fidelity to terroir and purity of flavor. Many of the grower-producers Thiese represents, such as Pierre Gimonnet and René Geoffroy, produce exceptional wines with low levels of sugar in their dosage. There has been a trend toward less sweetness for the last century. "I asked my great-grandfather about this," Tarlant shares, "and he told me when he was making wine in the 1930s, the average bottle was what we would today call a demi-sec, about 30 grams per liter." By the 1960s, the Tarlants were making brut Champagne with about 15 grams per liter, and today they strive for a dosage of 6 grams or less.
"Champagne Drappier was producing only a small quantity of Champagne when the house was founded in 1908," notes proprietor Michel Drappier. "Dosage was then quite high - 20 grams and the word 'brut' did not even appear on the label."
Patrice Noyelle, Pol Roger's chairman, observes that sugar levels are still decreasing. "We are a traditional house, maybe to some old fashioned, but we know our consumer and we move softly, step by step. Eight years ago, our non-vintage Brut Reserve would average a dosage of 12 grams, and today it is between 10 and 11," Noyelle notes.
"Changing taste is part of the shift," Clicquot's Demarville says, "but nature has a hand in this. There is a clear trend of global warming that, in an average year, is giving us riper grapes. If the level of acidity decreases, we can make a lighter dosage."
Defining what is "lighter" is a matter of taste. Alexandre Chartogne, the brilliant young winemaker at Chartogne-Taillet in the village of Merfy, says, "I'll check the sugar levels [in my grapes] after I know from taste that the maturity is where I want it to be. You only learn that from taste, not from measuring sugar, and the same is true at the end of the process with the dosage - it isn't a formula; it is about the balance of your own wine and what the wine demands."
Vincent Chaperon, winemaker at Dom Pérignon, emphasizes, "Dosage is not a correction; it is an enhancement. With the dosage, we can fine-tune a balance, but Champagne is like any wine - if it doesn't have the integration at the beginning, it won't gain it over time. A wine that starts out awkward will always be awkward."
Tarlant laughs, and says, "If a wine is ugly naked, without sugar, I will not like it dressed [with a dosage]!"
Drappier believes consumer taste is behind the success of very dry wines these days. "Look at the trend of 'bitey' Sauvignon Blanc, dry white Bordeaux and dry [still] rosé wines," he offers. More to the point, he says, "Connoisseurs go for wines without makeup, with original flavors which [may] never have been tasted due to the dosage."
Today Drappier makes wines with a range of dosage levels, including an excellent "Brut Nature" with no dosage at all, as does the larger house Pol Roger, which just launched an undosed Champagne called Pure. "We felt a market demand," Noyelle says. "It's a small niche, but it is a demand, and we felt this style of wine was lacking in our range. Pol Roger is not a 'supermarket brand,' but we do keep close contacts with fine restaurants, and we had inquiries from many wine shops and sommeliers who think there is a place for a zero-dosage wine as a match for certain foods. I love it with fish, and especially with sushi and sashimi."
Tarlant concurs, noting, "The fact is, I do sell more Zero Brut Nature in Japan, Scandinavia and [other] coastal markets than anywhere else. Saltiness and the iodine nuance in seafood pairs very well with the wine's natural acidity."
"Our philosophy is that we are wine producers," Noyelle says. "The fact that Champagne is seen as an apéritif is linked to major houses that produce, to my feeling, a sparkling beverage more than a wine with bubbles."
Gary Westby, the Champagne buyer for K&L Wine Merchants' three stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one of the most influential Champagne buyers in the United States, observes, "The trend towards lower dosage is driven by cuisine and a desire by trendsetting wine lovers, many of them in the trade, for something very light and very dry to drink. I think extra brut Champagnes are a counterbalance to the oversize, high-alcohol, ridiculous red wines that get such big scores, but are so tiresome to drink."
Surprisingly, the first of the commercially available low dosage wines emerged more than 100 years ago. Laurent-Perrier was famous in the 19th century for making a "Grand Vin Sans Sucre" when everyone else was making only Champagnes with very high dosage levels. But the wine was eventually dropped from the portfolio. In 1981, now-retired cellarmaster Alain Terrier had the idea of paying homage to Laurent- Perrier's past, while also making a statement about its willingness to innovate by producing a new "vin sans sucre," and Laurent-Perrier's Ultra Brut was born.
"It is a challenge to help the consumer understand this wine," says Laurent-Perrier's international sales director Jean-Pierre Willemsen. "Even the sommelier that is proposing it must explain it because it is so different - if the consumer doesn't grasp the concept, it will not seem right - it will seem sharp until they taste all the nuances the absence of the dosage preserves."
In telling the wine's story, Laurent-Perrier has taken several approaches over the years. "We think of it as brand development, not marketing," Willemsen says. Its most recent and perhaps most successful tack capitalizes on a hot-button trend. Noting the absence of sugar in the dosage, Laurent-Perrier calculated that a glass of Champagne with a conventional dosage clocked in at 90 calories, while Ultra Brut without any added sugar yielded only 65 calories, a fact that made it instantly appealing to diet-conscious imbibers.
With the positive aspects of wine and health much in the news, Laurent-Perrier reached an agreement in 2006 for its Ultra Brut to serve as the official Champagne of Britain's "Glamour Women of the Year Awards." The house then hired Britain's personal trainer-to-the-stars Joe Fournier to develop a diet and exercise program that embraced zero dosage Ultra Brut. Mindful of the overindulgent holiday season, Fournier maintains that, balanced with exercise and hydrating with plenty of water, his clients can drink six glasses of Ultra Brut on two occasions per week and still lose weight and feel fit.
This regimen flies in Britain (by far Champagne's largest export market), but wine merchant Westby finds the concept esoteric here. "I haven't yet sold a bottle based on the lower calorie count; I think Champagne is still a luxury splurge and calories are not on people's minds when they are buying it or drinking it."
In most markets, extra bruts, with their very crisp acidity and overt minerality, have yet to catch on as an apéritif or party wine; they enjoy their greatest success paired with food and their biggest proponents are restaurants. The large cooperative Nicolas Feuillatte recently introduced a zero dosage wine, called Brut Extrem', and emphasized its affinity for sushi with artwork showing a bottle acting as a lure to a jumping fish. Made primarily from chardonnay, it is a work in progress, Feuillatte winemaker Jean-Pierre Vincent notes, "The grape varieties, the crus and the proportions retained will certainly change in the composition of the cuvée through the years," adding that the blend for a wine designed to receive no dosage must be different from a classic non-vintage blend that will receive a dosage.
This is something of a debate in Champagne, however. Ayala, a 19th century pioneer in low dosage wines, disappeared from the U.S. market for many years, then re-emerged on the scene this year after being purchased by Bollinger in 2005. Its first releases in the U.S. market include three zero dosage wines. Ayala's CEO, Hervé Augustin, says, "Our Zero Dosage is kept exactly the same time in the cellars as our NV Brut Majeur; we only keep one stock in the cellar - it is the same blend exactly. We have not needed to make a separate blend." He notes, however, that in place of the sweet liqueur d'expédition, Ayala tops up the bottles with wine that sees a bit of barrel age. "We use the same wine, [but] disgorged a few months earlier. After aeration, the wine will enjoy a nice evolution and will offer a nice impression of maturity."
That approach, however, does not work for most houses. "When we started working on Pure in 2004, we tried bottling our non-vintage Brut Reserve without dosage and we were not very pleased with the results," Pol Roger's Noyelle recalls. "We thought it was too acidic and that it lacked the aromas and fruit we wanted - it was a nice enough wine, but not ideal." For Pol Roger's winemaking team the answer was to keep the same proportion of grapes as their Brut Reserve - one third each pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay - "but we selected different reserve wines, fruitier wines with less bitterness and less acidity" than for the wine that would receive a dosage.
Ayala's Augustin points out that one cannot be dogmatic about zero dosage wines - they aren't always possible. "Of course, this zero dosage route does not apply when the harvest does not allow it. In a year regarded as 'average,' we need to follow all these principles with exactly the same care, but at the end, dosage will be welcome for a final and pleasant touch."
A touch that traditionally came from cane sugar, but European Union law permits producers to use concentrated and purified grape must (given the French acronym MCR) for the dosage in place of the liqueur if they wish. While the liqueur contains wine from the region, MCR is a neutral, flavorless liquid. Detractors say it's the EU trying to use up excess wine production from the south of France where much of the MCR originates, and a number of winemakers believe it gives an unwelcome character to their wines. "Grape sugar concentrate is more consistent," says Tarlant, who has experimented with MCR and rejected it, concluding, "to my taste, it can be syrupy."
Proponents, including Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy of Champagne René Geoffroy, like its neutrality.
"We are against 'technological' taste-trends which jeopardize the original characteristics of our location and the climate," he says. To him, the neutral MCR preserves the characteristics of his wine, and any syrupy note disappears with some bottle age after disgorgement.
There seems to be a similar range of sentiments from many of Champagne's chefs de caves, all of whom always seem happy to talk about dosage and the role it plays in supporting their wine.
At Mailly Grand Cru, perhaps the most unusual cooperative in all of Champagne because it makes wine only from the single Grand Cru village of Mailly and counts more than one-third of the growers in the village as members, winery director Jean-François Préau conducts me through his pristine operation, which produces nine cuvées of very good quality, including one extra brut. Resting in the cellar are some Bordeaux barrels with a familiar name stamped on them. Préau quickly explains, "We buy barrels used for one or two years by Chateau Margaux for their white wine Pavillon Blanc. It gives us an added dimension to the liqueur de dosage, a very subtle but important nuance."
"Oak can bring something to Champagne without your smelling oak or feeling it in some obvious way," concurs Louis Roederer's Lecaillon. "The oak gives support and complexity to the liqueur and to the finished wine." As we speak, a group of his cellar workers are preparing a batch of liqueur, lugging 25-kilogram sacks of granulated sugar. At harvest and bottling time, there is more sugar stacked in a winery than a pastry shop. (Lecaillon finds it deliciously amusing when acknowledging that the most popular brand of sugar in Champagne is called "Cristal.")
He employs a dosage that averages 11 grams of sugar per liter of wine in his non-vintage Brut Premier and some of his vintage wines, but only about four grams in the prestige cuvée Cristal. "That is an aspect of the blend of the original wine and a factor of the age of the wine - while Brut Premier is aged for four years, Cristal is usually six to seven years old."
"Older wines generally need a lower dosage," agrees Pommery winemaker Thierry Gasco, who is also the chairman of the Union of French Oenologists. He cautions that "Dosage cannot be a constant formula - it varies with the blend and the year, but we have some general guidelines that fit our house style. I want a neutral liqueur for my dosage, wood is for the table." He likes to use chardonnay from the Grand Cru village of Avize, and contracts a lot of it, using the same wine across his range of Champagnes. His non-vintage Brut Royale, aged two-and-a-half years, generally receives 10 grams of sugar per liter of finished wine, while "for our prestige Cuvée Louise, which we age seven years, the maximum is six grams per liter."
Bruno Paillard says restraint isn't only applicable to prestige cuvée wines. "It is the same for a multi-vintage wine like my Brut Première and vintage wines as well. Because I age my multi-vintage wine several years and I use a very high percentage of older reserve wines in the blend, I need a dosage of only seven to eight grams. Older wines may only need four grams."
Paillard is fascinated by flavors that develop as the wine rests on the lees, as well as qualities that come with bottle aging after disgorgement. He has cataloged what he calls "Five Ages of Wine," each three to four years in length, during which different qualities come to the fore on the nose and palate. "A wine emphasizes fruit and purity in its youth, and then flowers, spice, toasted elements and, by the end of the cycle at perhaps 15 years, shows candied fruit." These are elements he thinks would be masked by too heavy a dosage.
Dom Pérignon's Chaperon says "With time, you reach a natural balance within a well-made wine. Aging on the lees gives many nuances to a wine. I especially think the yeast over time contributes not sweetness, but the impression of sweetness" and so less dosage is required. "I think the reason for this is umami," the fifth taste.
A generation ago, biology students were taught that there are four basic perceptions: sweet, bitter, salty and sour. Yet the Japanese have long believed that there is something far more ethereal than the saltiness of a potato chip or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry, identifying this fifth taste as umami, meaning "deliciousness." (It is a maddeningly hard-to-describe quality, but foods like Parmesan cheese and porcini mushrooms, both naturally loaded with the chemical compounds identified with umami, embody the savory quality of the fifth taste.)
Part of the process of autolysis, in which the dead yeast cells break down over time into amino acids and other compounds," Chaperon says, "is the creation of a great sense of umami in Champagne. And the more of that sense of richness from the umami, the less we need from the dosage." This quality comes as a wine ages, and is different from blending a young Champagne from carefully selected low-acid component wines to achieve a balance that minimizes the need for dosage. Yet both approaches yield wines that are notably drier than Champagnes of the past.
As for extra brut as a viable category, Pommery's Thierry Gasco still isn't persuaded. "For me, 'Brut Sauvage' is a commercial concept. Everyone wants to talk about it, but without a very careful blend - a wine prepared from the beginning to receive no dosage - it won't work." Clicquot's Demarville adds "Only a small percentage of the overall production in Champagne [is suited to] zero dosage."
Jean-Baptiste Cristini, export director for both Champagne Salon and Champagne Delamotte observes, "I find that there are too many half-hearted attempts [at zero dosage wines] in Champagne to take the category seriously across the board." He finds "many with acidity that is too high and characteristics that lack depth." Though the wines of Salon and Delamotte are relatively low in dosage, he says "our vineyard sources are too restricted to La Cote des Blancs and winemaking too reductive and straightforward to make wines with no dosage. I do not see why [a zero dosage wine] with too much acidity and no sugar is any better than a wine that has high residual sugar and no acidity."
Salon's Depond sums up the feelings of most producers, "What is important is that there are not two perfect dosages of one same wine, a wine is either good as extra brut, brut nature or brut. Brut nature is a wonderful ideal in Champagne, but I think that the objective, to make good, balanced wine, is sometimes lost in translation with the limelight that brut nature attracts."
In terms of quantity of production as well as concept, extra brut and zero dosage remain niche markets. At the moment, the CIVC, the quasi-governmental overseer of the regulation and marketing of the Champagne region, reports zero dosage and extra brut wines account for less than one percent of Champagne exports, but the numbers are rising steadily. Increasing consumer interest leaves the door open for potential expansion. Chefs and sommeliers already love these food-friendly styles.
Whether the "drying up" of Champagne is a trend or a fad remains to be seen, but who among us doesn't want purity of flavor and crisp structure that marry amazingly well with food?
Senior Editor Lyn Farmer received the 2003 James Beard Journalism Award for magazine writing and was also nominated for the award in 2004 and 2007.
Ayala
While most Champagne houses insist a special blend is required for a zero dosage cuvée, Ayala is a rarity because it does not subscribe to that philosophy. Instead, it releases several cuvées both with and without dosage from the same base wine. In tasting two versions of the same wine side by side, the relatively low dosage of 8.5 grams made a welcome difference not only in flavor, but in aroma and texture.
Ayala Zero Dosage NV (0 g/l) - $52: Pale straw hue. Bright aromas of fresh white flower and hawthorn. Very crisp, clean attack with wet stone minerality, and light, rather narrowly focused flavors of honey and pear. Score: 87
Ayala Brut Majeur NV (8.5 g/l) - $45: Pale straw hue; very active mousse. Light white flower aromas with appealing citrus overtones. Not noticeably sweeter than the Zero Dosage, this wine has a rounder mouth-feel, a broader palate, feels more complete and offers a longer finish. Score: 89
Ayala Perle d'Ayala Nature 2002 (0 g/l) - $160: Pale lemon-yellow hue. Crisp, assertive bouquet marked by minerality and fresh brioche. Elegant, toasty palate with warm red fruit and great length marked by a note of pink grapefruit on the long close. Score: 92
Chartogne-Taillet
Elisabeth and Philippe Chartogne have run this small grower house in the northern part of the Montaigne de Reims for many years, and are now turning over the reins to their son Alexandre. He is a proponent of viticulture raissonée (akin to our "sustainable agriculture," which employs organic fertilizers, beneficial insects and other nature-friendly growing practices) and is making subtle changes in the cellar based in part on his post-university apprenticeship at Champagne Jacques Selosse under the tutelage of Anselm Selosse, one of the most admired (or controversial, depending on one's point of view) figures in the region. Like many grower-producers, the Chartognes prefer minimal dosage, with many of their wines hovering around 5-6 g/l, just on the cusp of extra brut. Their prestige cuvée in two vintages shows clearly that a properly made wine can age well with a low dosage.
Chartogne-Taillet, Cuvée Fiacre 2002 (7 g/l) - $80: Pretty, medium-straw hue. Quite round and rich, but not at all ungainly. Aromas of smoke, pear and red apple. Balanced mouth of sweet fruit, faint nuttiness and minerality. A lovely example of how discerning fruit selection can minimize the dosage. Score: 94
Chartogne-Taillet, Cuvée Fiacre 1996 (4 g/l) - $N/A: Lovely medium straw hue; tiny bubbles and excellent mousse. The nose is redolent of cocoa and reduced red fruit. Hints of cocoa and cherry explode on the palate, followed by a profusion of white flower notes. A perfectly balanced wine. Astounding length with succulent red fruit and crisp minerality continuing through the close. Score: 96
Champagne Drappier
While the major houses focus their attention and publicity on the three main areas - Vallée de la Marne, Montaigne de Reims and Côte des Blancs - Drappier is one of the few houses in the U.S. market from the Aube region, south of the Côte des Blancs. Its cuvées prove that careful winemaking can create memorable wines here.
Drappier Brut Nature NV (0 g/l) - $41: Lovely medium straw-gold hue. Soft aromas of warm red fruit and lemon curd. This 100 percent pinot noir betrays no signs in the nose or the palate that it carries no dosage, thanks to the roundness of the carefully selected fruit. Very well balanced on the nose and palate. Notably fresh and elegant; great vinosity gives it length and a restrained minerality fills in the back palate with exceedingly dry citrus on the finish. An excellent wine. Score: 94
Henri Billiot Fils
Henri Billiot Fils is another grower-producer in a generational transition, with Laetitia Billiot gradually taking over from her father, Serge. The house is located in Ambonnay, one of the most celebrated Grand Cru villages in the Montaigne de Reims. The wine Serge named after his daughter remains the house's prestige cuvée, and is made in the manner of a Spanish solera with fresh wine added to casks, mingling with wines from previous vintages. Laetitia notes that the current cuvée contains upward of 20 vintages.
H. Billiot Fils Cuvée Laetitia Multi-Vintage (2 g/l) - $120: Beautiful pale gold hue with a fine mousse. Very forward bouquet carrying notes of banana, gingerbread spice and bread dough. Creamy mouth with a broad palate of sweet red fruit compote. While the wine is so loaded with fruit that it conveys an impression of sweetness, the finish is nonetheless very dry and long. A unique cuvée. Score: 93
Henri Billiot Brut Reserve (5 g/l) - $70: Sweet spice and Christmas cake on the nose with lots of red fruit in the mouth combined with well defined mineral notes and a good balance of fruit and acidity. The wine has a long, lovely mineral finish. (80% pinot noir, 20% chardonnay, Grand Cru all from Ambonnay) Score: 92
Jean Lallement
Jean Lallement is based in Verzenay, where a picturesque windmill makes it the most photographed of the Grand Cru villages. Production is small (just 1,700 cases per year) but quality is always high. Lallement is consistently among the most successful in blending wines that are so ripe and well rounded that they require little or no added sugar.
Jean Lallement Brut Reserve Vintage 2004 (0 g/l) - $78: Medium straw hue and a very active mousse. Blossoming aromas of red fruit backed by luscious tangerine and quince scents. Red fruit is echoed on the palate along with biscuit notes, carried forward with considerable structure, racy minerality and a very long finish. This is as opulent an example of a zero dosage wine as one is likely to find. Score: 94
Jean Lallement Brut NV (0 g/l) - $66: Medium straw color, very active with a fresh nose of brioche and red apple. On the palate, the wine is quite dry with a vaguely distracting dustiness. Round and full-bodied with mineral and malt notes on a long finish. Not as focused as the Reserve. (80%pinot noir, 20% chardonnay; 80% 2005, 20% 2004) Score: 89
Laurent-Perrier
Many houses have produced zero and low dosage wines for decades for private consumption, but Laurent-Perrier was the first of the major houses to create and commercially market a Champagne with no added sugar in 1981. Alain Terrier was the winemaker then and said the house benefitted from very ripe chardonnay from Sézanne, an area in the southern part of Champagne. With fruit like that, he felt confident that he could produce a blend with sufficient roundness to "run the risk" of adding no sugar. Since then, Ultra Brut has become a Laurent-Perrier icon. The house will not say how much of it is produced, yet a major commercial commitment has been made to the wine.
Laurent-Perrier Ultra Brut NV (0 g/l) - $80: Straw-yellow color shimmers in the glass. Uplifting aromas of lemon zest and pear. Reticent aromas of white flowers slowly emerge. Crisp and clean with remarkable freshness despite four years of age before release. Extended aging gives the wine very small bubbles that provide a creamy texture. Clean mineral and citrus flavors carry through to a very long, perfectly balanced close. A remarkable achievement in freshness. Score: 93
Nicolas Feuillatte
This is one of the rare Champagne brands that goes back decades rather than centuries. Nicholas Feuillatte founded a brand in the mid-1970s, and in 1986 sold it to a large cooperative that began marketing all its wines under his name. Today the Centre Viticole-Champagne Nicholas Feuillatte includes 82 cooperatives pressing the grapes from nearly 8 percent of all the vineyards of Champagne.
Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Extrem' (0 g/l) - $40: Pale straw hue with lively bubbles. Lovely hazelnut and candied citrus aromas with biscuit overtones. Mineral-laden palate with some red fruit, but rather hollow on the mid-palate. Fades quickly on the finish. Score: 87
Pierre Gimonnet
With an annual production of more than 17,000 cases, Gimonnet is one of the largest of the top-level grower-producer houses in Champagne. Importer Terry Thiese brings seven of its wines into the U.S. market, including its dynamic zero dosage beauty.
Pierre Gimonnet Oenophile Maxi Brut 2000 (0 g/l) - $82: Light straw-gold hue. An entrancing bouquet of sweet candied lemon with soft mineral undertones. Lovely, silky and creamy-textured in the mouth with steely minerality augmented by hawthorn and a touch of lime peel on the back palate. Very long, elegant finish. Score: 91
Pol Roger
The family-controlled house of Pol Roger, one of the most venerated in Champagne, is rather under-recognized among the major houses. It has maintained its independence in an age of consolidation and remains completely focused on quality and style, yet it doesn't always receive the attention it deserves. The wines are always terrific and, alas, in such demand they sometimes can be hard to find. Pure, it's zero dosage wine, is a brand-new release.
Pol Roger Brut Reserve Pure (0 g/l) - $57: Vibrant pale straw-yellow hue. Zingy, refreshing hawthorn and citrus on the nose; subtle but inviting. On entry, the wine starts out lean and crisp with upfront acidity that mellows with impressive mineral, green apple and white peach flavors unfolding in succession. Baked apple notes emerge on a long, slightly lean finish. Score: 92
Champagne Pommery
Several changes in ownership, most recently in 2002, have been visited upon this house (today the firm is called Vranken-Pommery). With longtime chef de caves Thierry Gasco remaining in charge, however, there isn't a hint of the commercialization that some observers feared. The portfolio has expanded, but the Pommery style - light, flowery and somewhat restrained - is still very much on display. The wines usually carry an average dosage level of about 10 g/l, yet its prestige cuvée never reflects more than 6. Gasco held the 1990 Cuvée Louise on its lees an extra two years so it could be disgorged in 1999 for the millennium. After the extra aging, he decided the wine required no dosage, so when it was released, Cuvée Louise qualified as a brut zero. Now, nine years after disgorgement, the wine in magnum is showing as beautifully as when it was initially released.
Cuvée Louise 1990 (0 g/l)- $675: Medium straw hue. Pretty, mellow yellow fruit notes on the nose with a hint of balancing mineral scents. In the mouth, the wine has lovely length with warm biscuit, light red fruit and chalky minerality, admitting a touch of candied lemon at the conclusion of a very long finish. A warm and very appealing wine. (Magnum) Score: 94
Salon
Among the more unusual Champagne houses, Salon makes only a single wine in exceptional years, Cuvée S, a blanc de blancs. Quantity never exceeds 60,000 bottles in a vintage and it is aged a minimum of seven years before release. Grapes are procured exclusively from the Grand Cru village of Le Mesnil sur Oger from 19 small plots (the vines are at least 40 years old) specified by the house's founder, with the balance coming from the house's own single-hectare Jardin de Salon vineyard. The resulting wine, unique in every respect, is a true prestige cuvée that can take many years to display its full potential. Although its dosage is always low (from four to six grams), because it spans the demarcation between extra brut and brut, it never bears "Extra Brut" on the label.
Salon 1997 Cuvée S (5 g/l) - $500: Medium straw-yellow color and tiny bubbles. The gorgeous bouquet shows a wonderful hazelnut component with white flower aromas, a bit of honey and orange and yellow fruit. The wine has a creamy entry, beautiful structure and focused flavors of candied citrus, subtle Christmas cake spice, honey, acacia and peach. Layers of flavor are framed by a cleansing mineral quality. Chalk and graphite lend structure to the appealing fruitiness evident on the very long, intense finish. A simply wonderful wine. Score: 97
Champagne Tarlant
Benoit Tarlant is the 12th generation of his family to grow grapes or make wine in Champagne. Like Alexandre Chartogne, Benoit is a strong proponent of viticulture raissonée. Under his stewardship, Champagne Tarlant makes nearly a dozen Champagnes of great complexity and finesse, more than half of which are very low or zero dosage.
Tarlant Cuvée Louis Brut NV (2 g/l) - $90: Aged in oak for 13 months, then given seven years on its lees before disgorgement, this is Benoit's prestige cuvée. Medium straw hue with small bubbles and elegant mousse. Elegant aromas of red fruit and Christmas spices, with the spice continuing subtly on the palate along with biscuit, brioche and sweet red apple notes. A bit of welcome minerality emerges in the very long finish. An enchanting wine. Score: 94 - LF
How Sweet it isn't
Degrees of sweetness can seem rather contradictory to the most informed Champagne devotée. By French law, a producer must designate how sweet the finished Champagne is on the label using specific terms that reference grams of added sugar per liter (g/l) of wine. This figure does not include the infinitesimal amount of unfermented sugar that may naturally remain in the wine.
To smoothly navigate from dry to sweet, it's helpful to break down the official French terms:
Brut Nature or Brut Zéro (or Pas Dosé): No added sugar and less than 3 g/l, including any residual sugar from fermentation. Most zero dosage wines, in addition to the legal designation, also bear a proprietary designation such as Laurent-Perrier's Ultra Brut and Pol Roger's Pure.
Extra Brut: Less than 6 g/l; this category encompasses Brut Nature as well.
Brut: Less than 15 g/l and by far the most popular category.
Extra Dry: 12 to 20 g/l (overlaps with the Brut category). It is somewhat perplexing that the category is called Extra Dry, but a century ago, when Champagnes were much sweeter than today (the Russian court favored 150 g/l or more!), these wines were, relatively speaking, very dry. This category is appealing to newcomers to Champagne; Moët White Star is its most famous incarnation.
Sec: 17 to 35 g/l, sec is French for "dry," and while it isn't dry at all by today's drier palate standards, it was a very popular category well into the 1950s.
Demi-Sec: 33 to 50 g/l. While the semi-dry category is generally viewed as a dessert Champagne, it is also a surprisingly apt companion for some spicy foods because it is perceptibly sweet, but not overpoweringly so.
Doux: Literally "sweet" with more than 50 g/l; seldom encountered in the U.S. market.
- LF
