One question/thought I have always had when trying to do this in my head is how much of a track record is needed to qualify for a list like this. My feeling is that a family/team needs to have been tending their vines and making their wines for 15-20 years with numerous editions of the standard range released to market in order to establish enough of a resume for consideration. There are also cases where some families tended their own vines and released their own wines, but the wines were made in bulk at the local cooperative. Unitl the early 2000s, the entire village of Écueil was like this. Savart, Maillart, and Lacourte-Godbillon all currently make dynamite wines from Écueil and have a history, but it is only the most recent releases that are their own work.
Also, with so many classical ‘growers’ now officially ‘negociants’ for various reasons do you simply draw the line at smaller producers and include classical negociants like AR Lenoble and Jacquesson? What about the smaller, but more serious cooperatives like Mailly and Palmer?
Completely agree. There are many wines that I personally don’t find to be my favorites, but that are undeniably top notch. To me, it isn’t about liking a wine as much as it is about respecting, appreciating, and understanding. It just like people and life in general - you don’t need to be buddy-buddy with everyone, but there should be proper respect and recognition. Not everyone is going to choose to drink Selosse or Egly, but you cannot deny that both belong at the upper end of any grower/small producer ranking.
Bereche also purchases fruit. Such are reasons that I have disdained the term grower and have focused more on referring to such producers as Small House Champagne. There are shitty growers and amazing small producers that buy fruit and vice-versa
I think looking and treating Champagne in a Bordeaux hierarchy sense is infinitely difficult. So much has changed even in the last 5 years, nevermind 20. I know it can be daunting to look at a Champagne section and wonder what to choose. The great thing right now is that you can almost certainly grab a random bottle of small house champagne and get something really damned good. There will naturally be champagnes that don’t fit your palate, but I think a great many will in a variety of ways.
Damn, you’re so right and I totally forgot. I’ve only had one of their nego wines and didn’t find it to have the same level of intensity that wines like Rive Gauche, Le Cran and Les Beaux Regards have.
Bereche has done a number of things to raise funding in order to improve facilities and grow. It wasn’t just buying grapes, they actually bought finished, bottled Champagne made by others that was still on the lees from second fermentation. They then disgorged, dosed, labeled, and released the wines as the Raphael and Vincent Bereche Cru Selectionne series. For a few years, it was the only way for them to grow as they waited (and, in some cases, are still waiting) for Champagne from their newer projects (land acquisitions and purchased grapes) to be ready for release.
I personally don’t think that’s possible with grower Champagne even if it may be in other categories. Everyone’s taste is so idiosyncratic, grower by grower, wine by wine. This is to the extent that personal friends like Jay and me, whose tastes align to a very high degree, can’t even agree whether certain Champagne growers are even making good or attractive wine at all. I could get into which ones we disagree on, but it’s a bit beside the point.
One exception maybe I’ve seen: Vilmart. And really Roederer is basically grower Champagne at a very high level.
Per my response to Sarah, I just can’t agree on this point for grower Champagne. It does not jive with my experience, and I’d like to think of myself as open minded and appreciative by nature.
and Ployez-Jacquemart also purchases fruit and they make some delicious champagne. More my point was to highlight some smaller producers that plenty of people love for their quality do purchase fruit and is why I don’t like to look at it through just the lens of RM=good and NM=just okay. It also makes putting together a Bordeaux-styled growth system nearly impossible.
It sounds as if you are arguing that objective standards of quality can exist for some categories of things, but not for other categories. Or that some categories are too diverse or complex for any objective standards. I can’t agree. Objective standards of quality exist, even if they are sometimes difficult to parse.
This is a tangent but since I’m only an occasional Champagne drinker, the comment about Egly made me think of a question I have, and there’s a bunch of Champagne devotees reading this thread who might have an answer.
I had some really wonderful bottles of Egly, probably around 1995-2005, back when Berkeley Wine Co imported it. (It was also pretty cheap, like a lot of good wine back then.) Everything I tried from them was open for business with great complexity, really good stuff. They dropped off my radar for a while, then a local distributor brought them in here a for a few years recently, and everything I’ve tried has been pretty closed and inscrutable…high quality for sure but not something I’ve enjoyed drinking.
Has there been a stylistic or generational change there? Or maybe my preferences and taste have changed.
Agree to disagree then. I don’t believe that objective standards of quality are in any sense universal or must exist to the extent that members of a category like this can always be systematically ranked or tiered in a principled way.
That asshole. A few days after the election (when the results were sure) I opened a 2015 Cédric Bouchard Roses de Jeanne Les Ursules, NV Vilmart & Cie Champagne Premier Cru Grande Réserve, and a 2012 Mousse Fils Champagne Terre d’illite Blanc de Noirs. The Mousse Fils blew me away and was, by far, the WOTN. Granted the Bouchard probably needs much more time and Vilmart Grand Reserve doesn’t compare with their other bottlings. More that particular Cedric Mousse bottling, I’d put in the upper echelon of great Champagne.