I love their Chardonnay’s so this got me intrigued.
If it is labeled Champagne it’s gotta be made in and with grapes from Champagne correct? So this is more of a Pertois-Moriset bottle with input from LiquidFarm I’m assuming.
Looks like MA (marque d’acheteur) Champagne aka. a private label wine. Those can be anything ranging from the basic NV with a custom label to special wines made with significant input from the customer. However, if it’s a one-off product, the odds are that it’s just a wine from the regular lineup, since making Champagne from the harvest to the final bottled wine is a process of many years, so usually those kinds of wines are produced in significant quantities, every year. https://www.elicite.com/blog/understanding-champagne-labels
My understanding is that this has been in the works for many…many…many years. I seem to remember hearing about this about 6 or 7 years ago. Plus, didn’t Jeff used to work in Champagne?
I think he was a market manager in the US for several Champagne houses.
My favorite private label Champagne was a very bling-y bottling called Discobitch with sequins spelling out the name. It was made by Tarlant for the band of the same name and, despite the bling and name, was quite nice (they apparently made more than the band wanted for their own use so it was released at retail). The first version was just the Cuvee Louis with a different label, there were one or two later versions that I think were separate productions from the Cuvee Louis.
Thanks for your post, but I clicked on the link you provided and have a couple of serious gripes, although I’ve always found your previous posts cogent and congenial:
I was really unhappy when the link ‘noticed’ that I was using Firefox as my web browser and asked me to switch or disable Firefox to get ‘full access’. This site is now on my block / ignore / shite list. I have never seen this before and it is extremely offensive. This is…
compounded by their abysmal ignorance of Champagne law and nomenclature. ‘MA’ stands for ‘Marque Auxiliare’, not ‘Marque d’Acheteur’.
I know, I was just joking how many WBers clicked on the thread expecting it to be a California sparkling wine (since it’s Liquid Farm) and to scold the OP for calling it Champagne.
Weird, I use Firefox as well and didn’t get such a notification! If I get such notifications, I immediately blacklist such sites. Are you using an adblocker? I wonder if it was only an ad that was blocked for me?
As soon as I read your comment I remembered seeing the term before and I was about to say right you are! - but not before doing a background check.
Yes, I use an ad-blocker and I don’t turn it off on request.
Over the weekend I’ll dive into the regulations. You may well be right and the law may state that Marque Auxiliare and Marque d’Acheteur are both correct, but I have always seen the legal term as ‘Marque Auxiliare’.
I ordered one today. 900 bottle production.
My allocation was one bottle, just over $100 with a discount for being on their list.
Here’s some information I was able to get about the wine:
100% Chardonnay from Grand Cru Mesnil-sur-Oger vineyards
Their partner/grower is Pertois-Moriset (I see Brad Baker really liked their 2011 BdB)
Non-Vintage (90% from 2017 vintage, 10% reserve wine)
65% aged in French oak barrel (barrique and foudre, primarily neutral), 35% in stainless steel
No malolactic. Bottled on July 26, 2018; Disgorged on October 15, 2020 (812 days, or ~27 months)
3.5 g/L dosage
Jeff knows his Champagne and his chardonnay, so I had no problem giving this a try.
I wouldn’t have posted that but I’m dumb enough to post that I was thinking it well because who has done it in the past really. Cayuse and I can’t think of anyone else? I love effort though to do something like that and would like to try it if they really had boots on the ground in making it happen.