Champagne, Revisited.

Once again, I am reminded that it takes several experiences, at least, in order to understand a wine. Subtlety can get lost even when drinking a wine calmly with friends over a meal, especially if other wines are present. I had dinner with a few friends on a recent night and one of them very generously brought along a bottle of Cedric Bouchard's Blanc de Blancs called La Bolorée. Here is what I wrote about this wine in August of 2011:

La Bolorée is an unusual wine. It is an old vines Pinot Blanc grown on chalky soils in the Aube, there's nothing else like it. It was very smokey and mineral, and quite rich with honeyed flavors on the finish. I appreciated the quality of this wine but it was my first time drinking it and I must say that I didn't really understand the wine, it was simply too far away from what I know of the aromas and flavors of Champagne. I'd love to drink it again, but this is not an easy thing to do as quantities are small and the wine retails for about $175.

I've since had the wine twice, and it is a curiosity, for sure. The only pure Pinot Blanc Champagne that I know of, it is quintessentially Bouchard in its clear expression of terroir and its purity of fruit. That time I drank it in August, 2011 at the Bouchard dinner, for me it got lost among the other wines. It is a wine that I imagine would show terribly at a tasting - people would be left shaking their heads at how a wine like that could cost so much money, at how capricious the Champagne hipsters are.

But the thing is, La Bolorée is a great wine. It's also an unusual wine, a Champagne that shows aromas and flavors that have no bearing on what we think of as "normal." It is herbal and green. Not green as in under ripe, green as in tarragon and chervil, green as in the forest in springtime. The wine thrives on its almost impossible fineness of texture and flavor, not on fruit or anything else that's expected or easy for us to latch onto. Honestly, the wine just doesn't taste like any other Champagne. And so, it is easy to miss why this is a great wine.

Peter Liem, a huge proponent of Bouchard and of this wine before it was introduced to the US,  generously opened a bottle this past xmas. Drinking it over a few hours without other wines next to it that would speak louder, I think I understood it. And then on this recent evening even though a few other wines were present, I appreciated it even more, the way its vibrant herbal flavors were layered on a gossamer old vines frame. It seems to me that if one were to draw a large rectangle that contains the world of Champagne, one of the corners of the rectangle would be occupied by this wine - it represents one extreme possibility.

On another recent evening I was in New Orleans at the wonderful Bacchanal, a wine store and bar/restaurant where one can buy a bottle and take it out to the garden in back, order some good food, listen to some shockingly good jazz, and feel happy to be alive. I wandered through the shelves and came upon a bottle of wine I hadn't had in quite some time, René Geoffroy's Champagne Brut Expression. I really like Geoffroy's wines from top to bottom - they are so expressive and joyous and generally offer a great value dollar for dollar. This one was disgorged in 2010, so I figure the base wine is 2008. I was charmed immediately by the harmony of fruit, earth, and vivid chalkiness on the nose and the complexity, particularly on the finish. So much so that I snapped a picture and sent it to Peter, bragging about my outdoor wine affair. 

I thought about this wine over the next few days and resolved to buy some. I mean really - a wine with such such a pure chalky expression of such lovely Pinot fruit, for under $50? I asked Peter if the 2010 disgorgement indicates 2008 as the base wine, and he said that it might be but that there is always a lot of reserve wine here too. Wait a minute! Reserve wine? I thought that Expression is made from a single vintage, but not aged long enough to be labeled as a vintage wine. That's when I realized that the wine I thought I was drinking was an entirely different wine! I mixed up Empriente, the almost purely Pinot Noir single vintage wine, with Expression, the wine that is typically comprised of about 50% Meunier, and perhaps 40% Pinot Noir, the rest Chardonnay.

One explanation here is that I have no idea what I'm drinking, and cannot tell Pinot Noir from Meunier, or my a$$ from my elbow. This is entirely possible, perhaps likely. But I prefer to think that the undeniably chalky essence of both wines renders moot the particular cépage. And that the richness and complexity conferred by the high proportion of reserve wines in Expression allows it to feel just as grand of a wine as Empriente. Seriously, this wine is all about chalk, richness of fruit notwithstanding. This is something that I didn't understand about either wine until now.

If there is a lesson here, aside from the fact that I can be an absent minded schmendrik sometimes, it's that no matter who we are, no matter how often or how grand the wines we drink, it's all too easy to miss the point, to be off-base about things sometimes. Best to allow for that possibility and not to shout too loudly about opinions, and to try to find value, even, in being wrong.

Dinner and the Wines of Cédric Bouchard

Cédric Bouchard is one of the leaders of the new wave in Champagne. He comes from a Champagne family - his father is an old school grower, but Cédric does things differently. All of his wines are single vineyard, single vintage wines, and as Peter Liem write on ChampagneGuide.net, "Bouchard doesn’t use any wood for his champagnes, preferring to ferment all of his wines in stainless or enameled steel...This sensibility corresponds to the rest of the winemaking, which seeks to present the wines in the clearest possible manner: no chaptalization, no fining, no filtering, no cold-stabilization and no dosage. The wines go through a natural malolactic and are racked only once, just before bottling."

There is another aspect to Bouchard's wines that I find particularly interesting. He wants to make wine, and he happens to be doing this in Champagne. So the wines have bubbles, but they are very small and fine, and Bouchard actually bottles at lower pressure (4.5 bars as opposed to 6) to minimize their impact. I think that Champagne in general is underrated as a companion for food, but because of this low pressure bottling, among other reasons, Cédric Bouchard's wines should be particularly good.

Jaime set a lovely table and made a great meal. He said maybe 28 words all night, and they were all worthy of careful attention.

The other night I had the chance to test this theory. Jaime Wolff, one of the owners of Chambers Street Wines, hosted a dinner in which we drank through the entire current lineup of Bouchard's wines, and paired them with his great cooking. As a whole, the wines showed fantastically well, just an excellent group of wines. I hadn't drunk a Bouchard wine in almost a year and it was great to see that they are even better than I remember them to be. These are wines of intense flavors, and they express themselves with great clarity and finesse. They take time to open up, and Peter Liem says that they do well with decanting, particularly the Roses de Jeanne wines.

We started with Jaime's delicious pea soup, which he ladled over a little mound of sauteed mushrooms. With this we drank two different Inflorescence Brut Blanc de Noirs, the 2008 and 2009. Both were excellent wines, approachable in their youth, and both grew in depth over the course of their first hour open. I preferred the 2008 with its rich, resonant fruit and complex depth, its baseline of minerality. It hit a harmonious highpoint after a little over an hour and really is a great value at about $55. The 2009 was lovely too, much more floral and high toned in aroma, more lithe in body, and with a saltier sense to the minerality. The 09 might be more of a wine to drink young, and the 2008 seems to be a great candidate for the cellar.

Jaime then served a squash risotto which which we paired with the 2004 Inflorescence Brut Blanc de Noirs La Parcelle. This is the first version of La Parcelle that was made by Cédric Bouchard - he bought the vineyard from an old family friend and and also bought some of the Champagne stock, selling it under the Inflorescence label. This wine showed very leesy when first opened, somewhat constricted, its bright fruit flavors tightly coiled. After some time it did open up a bit and the risotto dish brought out a savory element. The wine took on more focus with time and although the bright red fruit flavors were delicious, I think this it needs more time in the bottle. It retails for about $85.

As La Parcelle opened up, we decided that this would be a good time to open a magnum of 2008 Roses de Jeanne Blanc de Noirs Les Ursulles, a very exciting event indeed. Roses de Jeanne is Cédric Bouchard's baby - unlike the Inflorescence wines, he owns the vineyards, and these are generally considered to be his top wines. Let me first say that it is not a joke, what they say about Champagne out of magnum. It really does show beautifully, so expansive, so expressive. Perhaps it's also simply the excellent quality of this particular wine - it is fantastic. Deeper gold in color than any of the previous Blancs de Noir, the fruit character is also different, more clearly Pinot than the others and at the same time redolent of pear and quince fruit, atypical flavors for Pinot. But this is the Aube, after all, and the warmer climate in this excellent vintage brings unusual nuance to Pinot wines. I loved this wine, perhaps more than the other tasters, but I thought it was a complete wine, perfectly structured, absolutely harmonious, incredibly intense and also focused and without any excess weight. I don't know what a magnum would retail for, but a 750 ml bottle sells for about $85 and is a great way to spend your vintage Champagne dollars.

Jaime served grilled swordfish atop corn succotash and topped with peeled heirloom tomatoes. In what I thought was a genius twist, on this very hot August evening, he served the fish cool. Yes, it was grilled, and then cooled, and it was juicy and delicious. With this dish we drank Bouchard's wines made from white grapes, the 2007 Roses de Jeanne Blanc de Blancs La Haute-Lemblé and the 2007 Roses de Jeanne Blanc de Blancs La Bolorée. La Haute-Lemblé is Chardonnay from a warm south facing vineyard. I drank a bottle a little over a year ago and it took a very long time to open up, and it's probably too young to show its best now. Still, it was delicious and very fine wine. After the richly fruited Pinot Champagnes, this wine didn't seem to have fruit to spare, and yet it possessed the same exquisite structure, fineness of texture, and perfect clarity as the wines that preceded it, and it worked beautifully the swordfish with ripe corn and tomatoes. La Haute-Lemblé retails for about $100.

La Bolorée is an unusual wine. It is an old vines Pinot Blanc grown on chalky soils in the Aube, there's nothing else like it. It was very smokey and mineral, and quite rich with honeyed flavors on the finish. I appreciated the quality of this wine but it was my first time drinking it and I must say that I didn't really understand the wine, it was simply too far away from what I know of the aromas and flavors of Champagne. I'd love to drink it again, but this is not an easy thing to do as quantities are small and the wine retails for about $175.

We ended our evening with a wine that is very special, even in within the context of these special wines. We drank the 2007 Roses de Jeanne Le Creux d’Enfer Rosé, a saignée rosé that is made entirely of Pinot Noir in only the best vintages. There are only three rows of Pinot in the vineyard and production is tiny and the wine is very expensive - more than $200 a bottle, if you can find it, which is highly unlikely. There are maybe a couple of cases in all of NYC and this has already become the kind of cult wine that typically never actually hits the shelves. We drank the wine with a lovely dessert of fresh berries and vanilla ganache, which turned out to be a mismatch. The wine is not so much about fruit, which is a strange thing to say about a saignée rosé. There is some fruit here, but the wine is a study in savory aromas and flavors, with underlying bitter notes, almost like you'd find in Campari. The complexity and depth really was somewhat astounding, and I cannot give better descriptions of the smells and tastes because they truly were so varied.

Photo of Cédric Bouchard courtesy of Peter Liem at ChampagneGuide.net.

Jaime suggested that the wine would pair well with rare roast beef, and that is something that I sincerely hope to try one day. Someone else suggested a salad of beets, bitter greens, and goat cheese. In the following days I found myself thinking about really good ham with this wine. In any case, this and the other wines were great with the various dishes we ate, and I would say that they are most certainly wines for the table, in the case of the Roses de Jeanne wines, perhaps better as table wines than as apertifs. Cédric Bouchard's wines are very special and well worth a special search. Consider decanting them if drinking them young, and drink them with your dinner.