I absolutely love Cristal.
I don’t care what you call it. I prefer to call it whatever keeps the price steady.
Loaded up on some 2008 and 2012.
Outside of Dom Perignon, Cristal’s annual production is actually at the high end of the prestige cuvee spectrum. They are usually in the top five of the highest production prestige cuvees which makes their consistent quality even more amazing. Dom Perignon lives in its own world with multiples and multiples of anyone else’s production and then you have Krug Grande Cuvee and Belle Epoque. After that, Cristal, Grande Dame, and Comtes are normally next in line with Cristal often leading the way and sometimes approaching the numbers of Krug and Belle Epoque depending on the year.
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My comment could have been based on false info. I saw a chart at a champagne tasting a few years ago that didn’t place Cristal in the top rung. Seemed like some of the numbers were magnitudes higher, which is not easily verifiable. I also heard that in 2011 no Cristal was produced and all of that wine went into the 2011 Roederer rose. Anyway, In the past month I’ve had the '08 and '12 Cristal, and both are pretty special. Whether they consider themselves a grower or not - they make fantastic wine. Cheers.
Travis,
Cristal is normally around 500k bottles per year. Some years are higher and some lower. 2012 was a good deal higher. As for the 2011, it was made, but they chose not to release it. I thought the wine was pretty darn good, but it wasn’t in the ballpark of the 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013 that surrounded it. Also, the general stereotype of 2011 being subpar also played a role. They still should have released it IMO.
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Brad,
In these cases what do they do with the wine? Blend it into a lower bottling? Throw some fun staff parties?
Interesting. I’ve only had one 2012 so far and it was really tight and and nowhere near as enjoyable to me as 2009, 2008, and 2007. I still bought a bunch, but honestly that purchase was based on more experienced people predicting it would be great with age. I’m surprised to hear people thinking it is drinking so well now.
Faiveley produced a Domaine NSG LSG for decades and deliberately chose to exchange fruit with another Grower in another location in the vineyard for the 2016 vintage in order to produce what Faiveley felt was a more complete wine than wine produced from their own vines alone.
Mr. Baker,
What is the annual production of Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill? If the wine is only produced from vineyards which were designated Grand Cru during Churchill’s lifetime, I would imagine production is far more limited than aforementioned prestige cuvees.
It’s like how Flaccianello could be classified as a Chianti now. They’d be like, “uh, no thanks.”
Is there a case production that you think of as qualifying a producer to be “grower”? That’s kind of how I think of it. In addition to thinking a grower champagne should be able to show some sense of vineyard origin, which a half a million bottle cuvee cannot do in my mind.
The definition of a grower is a house owning and using their vineyards for the final wine. So, they will naturally have a hard time making big house levels of wine. But, unless something changed, then why on earth are we moving goalposts on the definition when it’s laid out pretty specifically by the champenois?
Because it goes against the narrative. Some people might feel pressured to shave their neck beards.
Alan,
That is why I tend to look at things as small vs. large producers. A producer like Jacquesson or Alfred Gratien is probably the limit of what I would call a small producer at 300k-350k bottles per year. Most growers that we recognize today have owned numerous plots of land in various villages for many years. They traditionally blended them all together in their highest volume and main NV wine. if you are looking towards specific expression, you can look at a blend from a village, but even that doesn’t always work. If you talk to Alexandre Chartogne, he will tell you that part of why he moved towards more single vineyard bottlings was to express something different and unique. He could make a very good wine by blending all of his Merfy plots, but he found that what he made didn’t really stand out in the crowd with a unique personality/expression. He wanted to make wines that didn’t just taste good, but had character that you couldn’t find somewhere else; to do this with his holdings, he needed to move towards single vineyard bottlings. I think this is what you were referring to in regards to showing some sense of vineyard origin. You don’t need to be a grower to make this happen; you just need to bottle from a particular plot/area that expresses something different (doesn’t have to be better) than a larger blend.
With Cristal, the goal isn’t to express a specific terroir. It is to express the style of Cristal (best wine that Louis Roederer can make in a particular year) with a supporting imprint of that year’s climate. Just as a single vineyard can express a unique signature, so can a blend where the farming and winemaking teams work their magic to create a unique signature with their blend - this is what Cristal is to me.
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Emile,
I don’t know the production of Pol Roger’s Winston Churchill. If I had to guess, I would expect it to be somewhere between 50-100k bottles per vintage.
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How about Jadot, Faiveley, Drouhin and Bouchard with respect to the vineyards they own. Doesn’t really matter much to me.
What about Bereche?
Howard,
Bereche has now branded themselves as Maison Bereche to show that they are no longer a grower. Heck, Bereche bought finished, bottled wines from other producers and sold them under the Bereche umbrella. The family has been very clear that they are not a grower and don’t care about being labeled a grower or a negociant. They only work with purchased grapes that either they tend or that are well tended by others and have only bought wines that they happily stand behind. To me, they are a quality small producer and I love their wines.
To Sean’s earlier question, there is a clear line on what a grower is. In general, if you buy more than 5% of your grape needs to produce your own wines, you are not a grower. That is the rule (there are some loopholes around trading grapes with other growers, but for the most part it holds true). Prevost buys grapes from others and it is more than 5% of his total grape volume so his entire portfolio is negociant regardless of how many wines may or may not be from his own vineyards. He could look at starting up different companies to keep things separate and have a negociant and a grower line. Some do that, but it can get messy. The real gray area is when a family decides to divide the business up between members where some are land owners and some are winery owners. In this case, for financial and estate reasons, the family becomes a negociant, but are really still a grower. Normally only a few key members of the family tend the vines and make the wines so they are identical to a normal grower, but that isn’t how the company is structured on paper.
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People don’t have labels like “grower burgundy” but they do “grower champagne”
Grower Champagne was a marketing initiative that worked.
Domaine=grower, right?