New Vintage Champagne Releases

There has been quite a bit of hype for the 2002 vintage in Champagne, and while I did find a number of wines that live up to the vintage’s strong reputation, plenty of others fall short of my idea of great Champagne. The best wines are deeply concentrated (the crop was very low, in general) and have the structure to reward cellaring, but a number of them show signs of evolving rapidly. One possible explanation is that the chardonnay in much of the region was low in acidity. Buying Champagne with an easier structure is not necessarily a mistake, unless you’re planning to bury your bottles in the back of your cellar next to, for example, your 1996s. There’s no shortage of superb 2002s—more than in a typical vintage, for sure—but I’m less sanguine about the universal excellence of the year than many observers.