1996 Dom Pérignon

This wine was part of a retrospective tasting 1996 Champagne – For The Ages.

Over the last few months I have had the chance to revisit a number of Champagnes from the celebrated 1996 vintage. My first retrospective on the 1996s, published last year, found many of the wines in great shape. Today, only a year later, a number of bottles are finally beginning to show hints of their ultimate potential. Many of these wines have been on the market for some time but only now, fourteen years after the harvest, is it possible to taste a complete range of the tête-de-cuvées from all of the major houses.

This wine was tasted during collector Bruce Fingeret's birthday party, July 2010

1996 remains one of the great modern-day vintages for Champagne. The wines possess a combination of bright acidity and high sugars that is extremely rare. The best 1996 Champagnes are bold, racy and exuberant, in both absolute and relative terms, something that has also come across in numerous recent tastings, including verticals of Dom Pérignon, Cristal, Krug and Dom Ruinart. For all of these houses 1996 is one of the more powerful, extroverted vintages of the last 15 or so years. To be sure, the vintage also has its critics. Those who are skeptical of the vintage claim that some producers harvested too early and that a number of wines possess excessively austere and lean personalities that will never soften. My experience with the Champagnes below and others, however, has mostly been extremely positive and I am convinced the best wines have enough balance of fruit and acidity to age gracefully, in some cases for decades.

When I was a child my father gave his best customers bottles of Dom Pérignon as a holiday gift. From an early age, to me Dom Pérignon was virtually synonymous with fine Champagne. I imagine many people feel the same way, as Moët et Chandon has done a remarkable job in building Dom Pérignon's prestige around the globe. While some of the large production Champagnes often give emphasis to style over substance, there can be no denying that at its best Dom Pérignon is more than just a brand. There is something quite magical about Dom Pérignon, especially in strong vintages. This recent tasting with Chef de Caves Richard Geoffroy and Winemaker Vincent Chaperone provided a great opportunity to check in on handful of new and past releases. It was quite fitting that on this cold day we tasted in the abbey at Hautvillers, where the Benedictine monk and cellarmaster, Dom Pérignon, advanced a number of viticultural and oenological techniques that were incredibly forward-thinking for his era, some 300 years ago. One of the things that is most remarkable about Richard Geoffroy is his artistic, introspective personality. While so many winemakers in Champagne consistently rave about how great their wines are, Geoffroy is not afraid to talk about mistakes and lessons learned along the way, something that makes him rather rare among his colleagues. Geoffroy describes Dom Pérignon as a wine of paradoxes. “Dom Pérignon is perceived as quite traditional and classic in the minds of consumers,” says Geoffroy “but the reality is quite different. As opposed to the traditional, oxidative style some houses pursue, Dom Pérignon is made in a more modern, reductive style aimed at maintaining acidity and freshness.” Although Geoffroy uses only natural yeasts for Dom Pérignon, he says the real secret is in the blending of vineyards and grape varieties, much of which remains top-secret, as do production numbers. Geoffroy describes his winemaking as striving to bring out what he calls “grey” tones that remain an element of freshness rather than the more oxidized, honeyed aromas and flavors, which he classifies as “brown.” He talks about the Pinot elements requiring time to emerge, while the Chardonnay components are rather evident from the outset. Over the years, Geoffroy has also moved to lower dosage levels for his wines. For example, the 2000 Dom Pérignon saw just 6 grams of dosage, which is decidedly towards the lower end of the spectrum for the large production Champagnes.