Ulysse Collin Rosé
de Saignée Les Maillons Vertical

BY ANTONIO GALLONI |&nbsp;JANUARY 02, 2024My most recent visit to Champagne Ulysse Collin was not
especially well-timed. Then again, maybe it was. Olivier Collin had just
finished disgorging his next set of releases, so I could not taste those wines.
Instead, Collin surprised me with a vertical of his Rosé de Saignée Les
Maillons, long one of my favorites here and a wine I have followed since its
debut.&nbsp;Rosé de Saignée&nbsp;is also a style of Champagne I personally enjoy quite a bit, as it is
so well suited to the dinner table.

Champagne Ulysse Collin is one of the great success stories in
Champagne of the last twenty years. Although the family lineage goes back more
than 200 years, the domaine in its current incarnation was launched in 2003 when
Olivier Collin and his wife, Sandra Zaragoza, reclaimed vineyards that had been
under long-term leases to Pommery.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1704213756599-Collin+Cover.jpg">Collin’s Rosé de Saignée Les Maillons across eight
releases. 

The casual visitor could be forgiven for driving past
Champagne Ulysse Collin. The unassuming domaine is located in Congy, a small,
sleepy village in the Côteaux du Petit Morin, just south of the Côtes des
Blancs, in the middle of nowhere, as we might say colloquially. The very
simple, agrarian setting and lack of nearby elite grower estates or famous villages
is quite different from what is commonly found in other regions within
Champagne, even those that are less developed. Olivier Collin seems to like it
that way. Whereas most of his colleagues run in circles of producer
friends/colleagues, Collin is quite happy to be a loner. The same is true of
large showcase tastings and events, which Collin avoids. Instead, the focus
here is on vineyards, the cellar, the wines and the family. That’s pretty much
about it. The results are in the glass.

The Collin family has been active in Congy since the early
1800s, but their modern-day history can be traced to the early 1930s. Georges
Collin, Olivier’s great grandfather, was a well-known grower and member of the Club
des Viticulteurs Champenois (now Club Trésors de Champagne), the first
association of growers in Champagne, comprised at the time of about 20 elite
grower domaines.In the years that followed the Second World War, Olivier
Collin’s grandfather, René, established Champagne René Collin. By the 1970s,
the maison had 18.5 hectares under vine, all of it used for an annual
production of around 200,000 bottles, a large number for the time. Rene’s son (Olivier’s
father) sold Champagne René Collin to Pommery in 1987. About half of the
vineyards went to Pommery as part of that transaction, while a number of other
plots, parcels that various family members had previously leased to Champagne
René Collin, remained within the broader family.

Olivier Collin initially studied law. An early trip to
Burgundy and an internship with Anselme Selosse proved to be formative
experiences. Not surprisingly, Collin’s Champagnes share many stylistic
attributes with those of Selosse, namely vinous intensity and textural resonance
that is a result of picking on the riper side and vinification in wood. Tasting
the vins clairs here is not that different from tasting wines from barrel in
Burgundy. The region changes, but the overall aesthetic is quite similar.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1704216734406-Olivier+Collin.jpg">Olivier Collin in his expansive cellar. 

In 2003, Collin gained control of 4.2 hectares of vineyards
from long-term lease contracts that had expired. It was a brutal growing
season, though, so Collin opted to sell off his entire crop. Estate production
in earnest began in 2004. The following year, Collin took back another 4.5
hectares from expired leases. Since then, the wines have grown notably in
precision and nuance.

More than anything else, what I have always observed in my
many tastings with Olivier Collin are his deeply held convictions on farming
and winemaking. Collin’s views on the speculation that increasingly surrounds
the domaine’s wines are just as strong. “There is no real work behind websites
that simply list wines at very high prices,” he says. “What real work is behind
that? Zero. I want to see work. I am looking for merchants that truly sell
wine, that explain the domaine, that explain the wines. A job for a piece of
the economic pie.”

Les Maillons is a small, east-facing 2.5-hectare parcel in
Barbonne-Fayel, 35 kilometers from the winery in the Côtes de Sézanne, an
intriguing region itself that was first developed in the 1960s and 1970s by maisons
looking for large undeveloped tracts of land that could supply their growing
demand for grapes. Les Maillons was once an open field, as much of the land
remains today. René Collin originally leased this land and planted the vineyards
as he, too, has been forced to look at new regions to grow his business. In
2012, the owner passed away, childless, and left the vineyard to Olivier
Collin.

Collin makes two Champagnes from Les Maillons, a Blanc de
Noirs and the Rosé de Saignée. Blocks used for the Blanc de Noirs are cropped
at 60-65 hectoliters per hectare, while those destined for the Rosé, which sit
at slightly higher elevations, are cropped at just 45-50 hectoliters per
hectare, very low within the broader context of Champagne and closer to what
one might see in the production of the top still red wine. “We have to work the
vines for the Rosé differently,” Collin explains. “Yields must be lower, but
not exaggeratedly so.” The combination of a cool, east-facing site and a search
for ripeness with concentration is one of the most important keys to
understanding Collin’s Rosé de Saignée.<img alt="" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.vinous.com/uploads%2F1704213783769-Collin+cellar.jpg">Reserve wines are aged in cask. Despite the small
production, Collin increasingly holds his Champagnes back for late releases. 

The Rosé is done entirely with destemmed fruit and vinified
as saignée. The first two vintages, 2011 and 2012, included press
fractions, a practice since abandoned. Vinification and élevage take
place in barrel. The wines are bottled in the summer following the harvest and
then spend 36 months on their lees, although that might change in the future.
For example, the 2019 will spend 48 months on the lees. Unlike most of the
other Collin Champagnes, the Rosé has always been a single vintage wine,
although not declared as such. That makes it quite an outlier, as the Collin
Champagnes typically include a significant amount of reserve wines. The dosage
is always around 2.4 grams per liter. “I do not like extremes,” Collin says on
the subject. Production is approximately 3,500 bottles a year. The Rosé has
been made every year since, with 2023 the sole exception.

Even though this was a small vertical, the most impressive
takeaway was the consistency of the wine, even across a number of vintages such
as 2015, 2016 and 2017 that all presented notable challenges. I did not taste
the 2018 for this vertical, as I reviewed it late last year, while the 2019 has
not been disgorged yet.© 2024, Vinous. No portion of this article may be copied, shared or re-distributed without prior consent from Vinous. Doing so is not only a violation of our copyright, but also threatens the survival of independent wine criticism.<hr> You Might Also Enjoy<a target="_blank" href="https://vinous.com/articles/roederer-cristal-full-circle-1993-2015-dec-2023">Roederer Cristal Full Circle: 1993-2015</a>, Antonio Galloni, December 2023 <a target="_blank" href="https://vinous.com/articles/champagne-2023-new-releases-nov-2023">Champagne: 2023 New Releases</a>, Antonio Galloni, November 2023 <a target="_blank" href="https://vinous.com/articles/champagne-jacques-selosse-retrospective-tasting-dinner-jun-2023">Champagne Jacques Selosse Retrospective Tasting &amp; Dinner</a>, Antonio Galloni, June 2023

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