A perpetual champagne, built one year at a time

REIMS, France – 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 also as a major hedge against the effects of climate change. For many producers, climate change has altered both the way they farm the grapes and how they make the champagne.

First, a bit of background on how non-vintage, or multi-vintage, champagnes are created.

These cuvees are, as the name suggests, blends of several vintages.

To create one, producers will use 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 have kept in reserve, experimenting and tasting until they find what they consider the best possible blend.

Hedging against highs and lows

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.

Small producers which have limited storage space and resources may have only a few vintages on hand to blend. Big houses, especially the most prestigious like Krug, have access to far more reserve wines and so are able to create more complex blends.

Here is 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 that first developed and adopted this method.

But big producers are also embracing it, most prominently Louis Roederer, which, under Mr 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,” he 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 is stored in 1,000-hectolitre steel tanks.

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,” Mr 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 cuvee 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 that 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 with just 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.

Cuvees made entirely of a perpetual reserve

Far more small growers than big houses are using perpetual reserves, and they have been doing it longer.

Few agree on which grower was the first to employ the technique, but most say the most influential was Mr 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.

Mr Selosse’s 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.

Few producers are that idealistic. More typically, the perpetual reserve permits producers to keep a steady supply of reserve wines with a consistent character, regardless of the ups and downs of particular vintages.

Many of my favourite growers use the perpetual reserve. Lelarge-Pugeot, which makes excellent natural champagnes, says it hedges against both climate change and market fluctuations.

Ruppert-Leroy, another natural champagne producer, makes 11, 12, 13 ..., a cuvee made entirely of a perpetual reserve started in 2011. Dhondt-Grellet, Bereche et Fils, Etienne Calsac, R. Pouillon and the mid-sized house Bruno Paillard are among those which use perpetual reserves.

One that I particularly like is Memoire by Hure Freres, a cuvee made entirely from a perpetual reserve. The reserve was started by Mr Raoul Hure in 1982 because, his son Pierre Hure said, he did not have room to store the different vintages of reserve wines separately.

After Pierre and his brother Francois took charge of the estate in 2007, they kept tasting the perpetual reserve and loved it.

Finally, they took a portion of it to store in two foudres – big oak vats – rather than steel tanks. They used the reserve in the foudres to bottle their first Memoire in 2010.

Each year now, they take out 20 per cent of the foudre wines for the Memoire and add back a similar proportion from the latest vintage.

The result is a fresh, savoury, complex champagne with great depth and finesse that is a pleasure to savour. And each year it gets even more so.

Champagnes made with a perpetual reserve

Bruno Paillard: The Premiere Cuvee (US$75 or S$102) is a graceful champagne of great finesse.

Billecart-Salmon: Le Reserve (US$65) is elegant and refined.

Dhondt-Grellet: Dans Un Premier Temps (US$85) and Les Terres Fines  (US$110), a blanc de blancs, are excellent.

Hure Freres: Invitation (US$65) is lively and harmonious, and Memoire (US$110) is superb.

Lelarge-Pugeot: Tradition (US$60) is delicate and subtle.

Louis Roederer: Collection No. 245 (US$65) is fresh and chalky.

Pierre Peters: Cuvee de Reserve (US$70) is energetic and exquisite, while Reserve Oubliee (US$140) is savoury and complex.

Ruppert-Leroy: The naturally made 11, 12, 13 ... (US$90) is lively and deep.

Terms to know when buying champagne

Blanc de Blancs: Champagne is ordinarily a blend of some combination of three grapes. Two, pinot noir and pinot meunier, are black grapes, ordinarily used to make red wines. One, chardonnay, is a white grape for white wine. A blanc de blancs, literally white from whites, is made solely from chardonnay and tends to have great elegance and finesse.

Blanc de Noirs: “White from blacks” is a champagne made only of black grapes – often, but not always, just pinot noir. It is more robust than blanc de blancs and much rarer.

Disgorgement: After the wine is fermented and bottled, a little sweetness and yeast are added to the bottle before it is sealed. This starts a second fermentation in the bottle, which produces the carbonation. Before the champagne is finished, the sediment left by the dead yeast is expelled, or disgorged, from the bottle.

Disgorgement date: Two bottles of non-vintage champagne, if they are disgorged at different times, will taste like different wines. That is why more producers are adding the disgorgement date to the back label. The information is especially helpful if the dominant vintage in the blend is also identified, so consumers can know how long the wine aged before disgorgement. Sometimes, this information is not on the label but is available by scanning a QR code.

Dosage: After disgorgement, the champagne is generally sweetened a bit before it is corked to balance the often searing acidity of the wine.

Brut: The amount of the dosage determines how dry the champagne will be. Brut is the most common designation, indicating a wine that can range from 0 to 12g of residual sugar a litre, though nowadays, most bruts are 6g to 10g.

Extra Brut: Indicates a very dry champagne, 0 to 6g of residual sugar a litre.

Brut Nature: Indicates no dosage, though, technically, it can have a small amount of up to 3g of residual sugar a litre. Synonyms include brut zero.

Extra Dry: Paradoxically, this indicates a much sweeter champagne than brut, up to 17g residual sugar a litre. Demi-sec is even sweeter.

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