CHAMPAGNE
A singular house style has always been the calling card of Champagne producers’ non-vintage bottlings, but now it is ‘multi-vintage’ blends and their changing character in successive years that’s beginning to take centre-stage
Next to Champagne’s rare treasures, the humble term non-vintage doesn’t exactly stir the passions. Defining something by what isn’t there seems a strange approach. Even the French term ‘brut sans année’ (literally, ‘brut without vintage’) sounds a little apologetic. But these are wines that are worth talking about.
Changes are afoot in the region, and it’s time to re-examine Champagne’s entry level. Non-vintage is the bread and butter of Champagne, accounting for some four-fifths of all Champagne sold, according to the most recent figures from the region’s governing body. The term refers to Champagnes made by blending wines from a base year – the most recent harvest – with reserve wines held back from previous years. The wine must spend a minimum 15 months in bottle for the second fermentation and ageing on lees, in contrast to three years for vintage wines.
CONSISTENTLY INCONSISTENT
The long-held line about non-vintage wines is that this blending process renders them consistent, year after year. In André Simon’s The History of Champagne (1962), the celebrated late author writes: ‘The non-vintage cuvées… are, and are always meant to be, as much as possible the same in type and style, whereas the vintage cuvées of the same firms vary from vintage to vintage.’ Champagne, though, has changed.
‘The idea of non-vintage is consistency in taste,’ explains Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon (pictured, p33), cellar master at Louis Roederer, adding that non-vintage was made to ‘correct poor years’ in an era when Champagne frequently struggle to ripen its grapes. ‘I think it’s a mistake… this is making Coca-Cola,’ he says.
Coca-Cola always tastes the same. The problem, though, is that non-vintage Champagne doesn’t; how could it, when climate change has brought even more unpredictability to the region’s wines? Faced with the extreme rain of 2021, when at Bérêche et Fils it was reported ‘June had only eight days of dry weather’, followed by 2022’s prolonged and troubling drought, how could those base vintages be remotely consistent? ‘Non-vintage is the most difficult wine to make,’ confirms Ruinart winemaker Louise Bryden (pictured, p37). ‘Every vintage is so different right now that we have to adapt our vinifications every year; it’s the trickiest part of our job.’
One solution is to make more information available to inquisitive drinkers by allowing them to track which base year their non-vintage is coming from. ‘We want to talk with more transparency, so in the last five ye
