Champagne: New Releases and Collectibles

Champagne is one of life’s essentials. We take a look at the first of this year's crop of new releases plus collectibles as we kick off our spring Champagne coverage.

My annual spring trip to Champagne this past March was fabulous. I had a chance to taste a wide range of 2013 vins clairs, along with a number of new releases and older wines. Although 2013 was a challenging harvest, there are a number of places where the young wines are highly promising. I take a look at some of the highlights in Champagne: The 2013 Vins Clairs. Another topic of discussion at many houses was 2004. I have always adored this vintage, especially for Blanc de Blancs. It was a year with abnormally high yields, even by Champagne's standards, but the best wines have always shown terrific focus and cut, qualities that are even more apparent today than they were a few years ago. Readers will soon start to see NV Champagnes based on the 2011 vintage. While I have not tasted a large representative group of wines yet, I have seen a few examples with green, vegetal characteristics similar to those found in some red Burgundies. It will be interesting to see if those are isolated cases or not. 

As always, I was struck by the sheer diversity that Champagne offers the consumer. One afternoon I spent several hours with Vincent Laval, tasting every wine in the cellar from barrel, followed by a number of bottled wines. Laval’s tiny, cramped cellar looks like something right out of Burgundy. It is the diametric opposite of the image of luxury that is often associated with Champagne. From there, I went to the Hautvillers abbey, where I tasted a large number of vintages of the most famous of all Champagnes, Dom Pérignon. The two tastings could not have been more different. And yet they were both great experiences I will treasure forever. This, in a nutshell is what makes Champagne so fascinating; the constant push and pull of two totally different cultures and philosophies.

Tasting the 2013s from barrel at Laval