Bollinger: 2022 New Releases

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | MARCH 07, 2022

Bollinger fans will want to be sure to check out these new releases. I was quite taken with the Champagnes I tasted recently with General Manager Charles-Armand de Belenet and Deputy Cellar Master Denis Bunner.

This year sees the release of the 2014 La Grande Année and Grande Année Rosé. As I have written previously, 2014 is a vintage that elicited a pretty lukewarm reaction when I tasted the vins clairs in March 2015, but that is now viewed much more favorably. “The year started with a pretty warm winter,” Bunner explained. “We had heavy rain in both May and June. The summer months were quite cool. Then, from about mid-August on, we had dry and stable weather. It was a slow-ripening year. Harvest started on September 15, about a week later than normal. Quite unusually, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay ripened at about the same time, which resulted in a very compressed harvest that took just nine days as opposed to a few weeks.” 

As always, the wines at Bollinger were all vinified in barrel. This is the first year in which the wines were inoculated for malolactic fermentation immediately following the alcoholic fermentation, which results in less handling in the cellar and means the wines were racked only once prior to bottling. I am not sure exactly how that translates into the finished wines, but the 2014s are undoubtedly brilliant.