Cuvée Editorial

## The Language of Large Formats  A standard Champagne bottle holds 750ml. Everything above that has a name — and most of those names come from the kings of the ancient world. **Magnum (1.5L — 2 bottles)** The magnum is the most important format in Champagne. It is not simply larger — it ages differently. With a lower ratio of oxygen to wine, the secondary fermentation proceeds more slowly and the wine develops greater complexity over time. Many producers, including Krug and Bollinger, regard the magnum as the ideal format for their prestige cuvées. Salon 2008 — arguably the greatest Champagne of the modern era — was released exclusively in magnum. **Jeroboam (3L — 4 bottles)** Named after the first king of Israel, described in the Bible as one who "made Israel to sin." In Champagne the Jeroboam holds 3 litres. In Bordeaux, confusingly, a Jeroboam holds 4.5 litres. The formats diverged historically and the naming never reconciled. **Rehoboam (4.5L — 6 bottles)** Jeroboam's son and successor. Rarely produced. Spectacular at a large dinner table. **Methuselah (6L — 8 bottles)** Named after the biblical patriarch said to have lived 969 years. In Champagne this format is also called an Imperial. Dom Pérignon produces a Methuselah for exceptional vintages. **Salmanazar (9L — 12 bottles)** Named after the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. The equivalent of a full case of wine in a single bottle. Produced in very limited quantities, primarily as showpieces. **Balthazar (12L — 16 bottles)** One of the three Magi. Extraordinarily rare. Requires two people to pour. **Nebuchadnezzar (15L — 20 bottles)** The largest format in regular production, named after the king of Babylon. At this scale, the secondary fermentation becomes almost impossible to control consistently — which is why most producers fill Nebuchadnezzars by transfer rather than by secondary fermentation in bottle. --- Why does format matter to a collector? Because the same wine, in a larger format, is a different wine. The pressure, the rate of oxidation, the surface-to-volume ratio — all change. A magnum of Krug Grande Cuvée will almost always outperform the same release in a standard bottle, given ten or fifteen years of cellaring. This is not marketing. It is chemistry.

 ## The Forgotten Grapes of Champagne Most Champagne drinkers know the big three — Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier. But the appellation actually permits seven grape varieties. The other four have almost vanished from modern Champagne, yet a handful of growers are quietly bringing them back. **Arbane** originates from the Aube, where it was once widely planted. Slow to ripen and prone to disease, it was largely abandoned after phylloxera. Today perhaps a dozen producers still work with it. Its contribution to a blend is striking: extreme acidity, floral aromatics, and a herbaceous mineral quality that no other variety can replicate. **Petit Meslier** is even rarer — fewer than 10 hectares survive in the entire appellation. It produces wines of extraordinary freshness and citrus precision, particularly prized in the Marne Valley. At full ripeness it can contribute something almost saline, a quality the best growers describe as "the taste of chalk itself." **Pinot Blanc** is the most approachable of the four — rounder and more textural than Chardonnay, without the austerity of the grands crus. It ripens reliably and adds body to blends without dominating. Some producers use it as a quiet backbone in their NV cuvées. **Pinot Gris** — called Fromenteau in Champagne — is the most mysterious. Golden-skinned and oxidative in character, it produces wines of unusual richness and depth. It appears in very few cuvées today, usually as a tiny percentage in field blends from very old parcels where it was interplanted with other varieties generations ago. The most extreme expression of all four is found at Agrapart & Fils in Avize, whose *Complantée* cuvée is co-planted with all six authorised varieties in a single parcel — harvested together, pressed together, fermented together. Pascal Agrapart's philosophy: the terroir of Avize will always speak louder than the grape. These varieties won't replace the big three. But for enthusiasts willing to seek them out, they offer a window into a Champagne that has largely disappeared — and may be slowly coming back.

 Champagne is often celebrated as the ultimate French luxury — but its invention owes more to England than France is comfortable admitting. In the late 17th century, wine from the Champagne region was shipped to England in barrels. The English bottled it themselves, added sugar and spices as was the custom of the time, and inadvertently triggered a second fermentation in the bottle. The carbon dioxide had nowhere to go. The bubbles were born. France had the grapes. England had the bottles — and the accidental genius to seal them.

 Ask anyone who invented Champagne and they will say Dom Pérignon. Ask a historian and the answer becomes more complicated. Pierre Pérignon, the cellar monk at the Abbey of Hautvillers, almost certainly did not invent sparkling wine — the English got there first, accidentally, by bottling still wine from Champagne with residual sugar. What Pérignon did invent was something arguably more important: the art of blending. He was almost certainly the first person to deliberately combine grapes from different villages to create a wine greater than the sum of its parts. That practice — assemblage — remains the foundation of every non-vintage Champagne made today. The bubbles were an accident. The blending was genius.

 In 1890, a tiny insect arrived in Champagne and began eating the roots of every vine it encountered. Phylloxera vastatrix had already devastated most of France's wine regions. Within 30 years it had infected half of all vines in Champagne. By 1911 the situation was critical — and it triggered not just an agricultural crisis but a political one. Growers in the Aube, historically part of the Champagne region, had been excluded from the appellation boundaries. Desperate and furious, they revolted. The riots of 1911 were some of the most violent France had seen outside of wartime. The eventual resolution — grafting European vines onto American rootstock immune to phylloxera, and redrawing the appellation boundaries to include the Aube — permanently changed both the viticulture and the politics of Champagne. Every vine you encounter in the region today, with a handful of exceptions, grows on American roots.

 The most important person in any Champagne house is rarely the owner. It is the chef de cave — the head winemaker responsible for one of the most cognitively demanding tasks in all of gastronomy. Each January and February, after the harvest, the chef de cave tastes through hundreds of individual base wines from different villages, different grape varieties, different parcels, and different years. At a large house like Krug or Bollinger, this can mean tasting over a thousand individual wines in a matter of weeks. From this ocean of components, they must construct a single blend that tastes identical to last year's version — despite the fact that every ingredient has changed. They are not making a wine. They are replicating a moving target, year after year, using a different set of raw materials each time. It is less winemaking and more jazz: structured improvisation at the highest level.

 Brut nature sounds like the simplest Champagne to make — no sugar added, nothing to hide behind. In reality it is the most demanding. When a winemaker adds dosage — the small amount of sugar dissolved in wine that tops up the bottle after disgorgement — they are not just sweetening the wine. They are balancing it. Dosage smooths sharp acidity, fills gaps in the mid-palate, and bridges the transition from the mousse to the finish. Remove it entirely and every flaw in the base wine is exposed. There is no safety net. A brut nature that works requires grapes of exceptional ripeness, perfectly executed fermentation, and lees ageing long enough to build the textural weight that dosage would otherwise provide. The best brut natures — Tarlant's Cuvée Louis Zero, Philipponnat's Blanc de Noirs, Vouette & Sorbée's Blanc d'Argile — are extraordinary precisely because they make the impossible look effortless.

 Blanc de Blancs and Blanc de Noirs are not just stylistic labels — they describe fundamentally different approaches to what Champagne can be. Blanc de Blancs means white wine from white grapes, almost always 100% Chardonnay. It is the variety of the Côte des Blancs — Avize, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Cramant — where deep chalk soils produce wines of crystalline precision, lemon and white flower aromatics, and a mineral salinity that can age for decades. Blanc de Noirs means white wine from black grapes — Pinot Noir, Meunier, or both. The juice of black grapes is colourless; the colour lives in the skins. Pressed immediately and carefully, the result is a white wine with a fundamentally different personality: broader, rounder, with more body and red-fruit depth. The best Blanc de Noirs — from Bouzy, Aÿ, or Ambonnay — have a vinosity and textural weight that Chardonnay rarely achieves. Neither style is superior. They are answers to different questions.

 In 1908, the French government drew a line on a map and told the winegrowers of the Aube that they were on the wrong side of it. Despite centuries of producing wine under the Champagne name, the Aube was excluded from the newly defined appellation — officially designated a "second zone" and forbidden from calling its wine Champagne. The Marne growers, who had lobbied hard for the boundary, were satisfied. The Aube growers were furious. By 1911 the anger had boiled over into open revolt. Winegrowers marched, cellars were stormed, and bottles from "foreign" grapes — sourced by some Marne houses from the Loire and Languedoc — were smashed in the streets. The French army was deployed to restore order. The eventual compromise redrew the boundaries to include the Aube, but the tension between the two departments never fully disappeared. It surfaces to this day in debates about terroir, identity, and who has the right to call themselves Champenois.

 Champagne has been fought over, literally, for centuries — but no period tested the region more severely than the first half of the 20th century. During the First World War, the front line ran directly through the vineyards. The city of Reims was bombarded for four years. Winegrowers harvested under shellfire, and the deep chalk cellars beneath Reims served as both wine storage and military shelter. By the end of the war, only 6,000 hectares of vines remained. The Second World War brought German occupation and a different kind of pressure. The Nazis appointed a Weinführer — a wine controller — to manage requisitions. Otto Klaebisch, who held this role for Champagne, was himself a former sparkling wine producer; accounts of his tenure range from exploitative to quietly protective depending on who is telling the story. Through both wars, the houses continued to produce, continued to sell, and continued to age wine in their cellars. By 1958, recovery was complete. The area under vine had returned to 11,500 hectares and was growing fast.

 Champagne produces around 300 million bottles a year from approximately 34,000 hectares of approved vineyard. Global demand has risen steadily for decades. The logical solution — plant more vines — is not as simple as it sounds. The entire approved area is already under vine. Yields per hectare in Champagne are already among the highest of any French wine region, and they have been deliberately reduced every year since 2009 to maintain quality and price stability. The only realistic path to more Champagne is expanding the appellation boundaries — a process that is politically explosive and legally complex. A list of 40 new villages was proposed in 2007 as candidates for inclusion. Some were accepted, others rejected, and the financial crisis of 2008 slowed the entire process. The value of a single hectare of Grand Cru vineyard in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger now approaches €2 million. The stakes — for existing owners, for aspiring ones, and for the integrity of the appellation — could not be higher.

 For most of Champagne's modern history, Pinot Meunier was the region's most widely planted grape. It ripens early, tolerates frost better than its siblings, and produces generous, immediately appealing wine — qualities that made it invaluable in the cold, difficult growing conditions of pre-climate-change Champagne. Its reputation, however, never matched its prevalence. The conventional wisdom held that Meunier was a blending workhorse — useful for adding roundness and early-drinking appeal to non-vintage Brut, but incapable of the complexity or longevity of Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. That view is changing. A growing number of grower-producers — particularly in the Marne Valley, where Meunier dominates — are vinifying it as a single-variety wine and ageing it seriously. The results are often revelatory: richer and more textural than Chardonnay, with a distinctive spice and red-fruit character that Pinot Noir rarely achieves at the same price. Chardonnay has now surpassed Meunier in total planted area for the first time. Whether that is progress or a loss depends entirely on who you ask.

 In almost every wine region in the world, mechanical harvesting has become standard. It is faster, cheaper, and increasingly precise. In Champagne, it is banned. Every grape — across all 34,000 hectares, across all 300 million bottles — must be picked by hand. The reason is not tradition for its own sake. It is chemistry. The moment a grape skin is broken, its juice begins to oxidise and, in the case of the region's black grapes, to extract colour from the skins. Champagne's winemakers need whole, intact clusters to reach the press without damage. A mechanical harvester cannot achieve this. The harvest window in Champagne has compressed dramatically with climate change — from two or three weeks to around ten days in many recent vintages. That means thousands of pickers, working at speed, across some of the steepest and most awkward vineyard slopes in France. It is one of the reasons Champagne costs what it does, and one of the reasons it tastes the way it does.

 After the Second World War, the wooden barrels that had fermented and aged Champagne's base wines for centuries were replaced — first by cement and enamel tanks, then by stainless steel. The reasons were practical: stainless steel is easier to clean, easier to temperature-control, and does not impart any flavour of its own. For a region obsessed with consistency and house style, it was an obvious choice. Since the 1990s, the pendulum has begun to swing back. A growing number of estates — particularly among the grower-producer movement — have returned to oak fermentation. The argument is not that oak flavour improves Champagne; the best practitioners use old barrels precisely to avoid that. The argument is that oak fermentation, through the process of controlled micro-oxygenation, produces base wines of greater complexity, texture and longevity than stainless steel can achieve. Krug has never stopped using small oak barrels. Bollinger ferments its prestige wines in oak. Among younger growers, Domaine Vincey and others work exclusively in wood. The debate — steel for precision, oak for complexity — is one of the defining technical conversations in Champagne today.

 Every wine undergoes alcoholic fermentation — the conversion of sugar into alcohol. Most Champagnes undergo a second, very different process called malolactic fermentation, or MLF. Where alcoholic fermentation is driven by yeasts, MLF is driven by bacteria, and it converts the wine's sharp malic acid — the same acid found in green apples — into softer lactic acid, the acid found in dairy products. The effect on the wine is immediate and significant: less piercing acidity, more roundness, a creamier texture, and often a subtle buttery or brioche note. For the vast majority of Champagne production, MLF is allowed to happen naturally and is considered desirable. But a growing movement of winemakers — particularly those working with Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs — deliberately block it, using temperature control and sulphur additions to prevent the bacterial conversion. The result is wines with higher, sharper acidity, greater freshness, and longer ageing potential. Both approaches are legitimate. The choice reveals everything about what a winemaker believes Champagne should be.

 Non-vintage Champagne is defined by its consistency — the same taste, year after year, regardless of what the harvest delivered. Achieving that consistency when every vintage is different requires one tool above all others: reserve wine. After each harvest, winemakers set aside a portion of their best base wines and store them separately. These reserves — sometimes spanning decades of vintages — are blended into subsequent non-vintage releases to smooth out the variation of any single year. The proportion of reserve wine in a non-vintage Brut varies enormously: a basic commercial Champagne might use 20-30%, while Krug's Grande Cuvée typically contains wines from ten or more different years. At the extreme end sits the réserve perpétuelle — a perpetual blending solera in which reserve wine from every vintage is added to a single large vessel that is never fully emptied. Forget-Chemin's Réserve Perpétuelle spans vintages from 1991 to the present day. The wine in your glass contains over thirty years of Champagne history.

 The second fermentation that creates Champagne's bubbles takes place inside the sealed bottle. When it is complete, the wine is sparkling — but it is also cloudy with dead yeast cells that must be removed. This is the problem that riddling and disgorgement were invented to solve. Riddling — remuage in French — involves gradually tilting and rotating the bottle over several weeks until the yeast sediment collects in the neck. Traditionally this was done by hand on wooden racks called pupitres, a skilled job requiring thousands of small movements per day. Today, the vast majority of producers use gyropalettes — computer-controlled metal cages that riddle hundreds of bottles simultaneously in a matter of days. A handful of small producers still riddle by hand, usually as a deliberate quality statement. Once the sediment is in the neck, disgorgement removes it: the bottle neck is frozen, the crown cap removed, and the plug of frozen sediment is expelled by the pressure inside the bottle. The small volume lost is topped up with the liqueur de dosage — the sugar solution that determines the wine's final sweetness. From brut nature to doux, everything rides on what goes into that tiny addition.

 The label on a Champagne bottle tells you its sweetness level — but the terminology is counterintuitive enough to confuse even regular drinkers. The scale runs from driest to sweetest as follows: Brut Nature (zero added sugar, also called Zéro Dosage or Non Dosé), Extra Brut (up to 6 grams of sugar per litre), Brut (up to 12 g/L and by far the most common style), Extra Sec (12–17 g/L, despite "sec" meaning dry), Sec (17–32 g/L), Demi-Sec (32–50 g/L), and Doux (above 50 g/L, extremely rare today). The practical implication: most of the Champagne consumed in the world is Brut, which allows up to 12 grams of sugar per litre — equivalent to roughly two teaspoons in a standard bottle. That is not a lot, but it is enough to round out sharp acidity and make the wine more immediately approachable. In the 19th century, when Champagne was first popularised, Doux was the dominant style — wines contained up to 200 grams of sugar per litre, closer to a dessert wine than anything we would recognise as Champagne today. The move toward drier styles is one of the most significant shifts in the region's history.

 The distinction between vintage and non-vintage Champagne is often described as a quality hierarchy — vintage good, non-vintage entry level. This misses the point entirely. Non-vintage Champagne is not a lesser product. It is a different philosophical project. The goal of non-vintage is consistency: a wine that tastes the same every time it is opened, regardless of the year on the calendar. Achieving this requires extraordinary skill in blending, and the finest non-vintage Champagnes — Krug Grande Cuvée, Billecart-Salmon Brut Réserve, Pol Roger White Foil — are among the most technically complex wines produced anywhere in the world. Vintage Champagne, by contrast, is a portrait of a single year. The base wine comes exclusively from that harvest; only reserve wines used for dosage are exempt. A great vintage Champagne captures something unrepeatable — the specific character of that growing season, in those vineyards, made by those hands. It ages differently from year to year and rewards patience in a way that non-vintage rarely does. Neither is superior. They are answers to different questions about what wine is for.

 Cuvée de prestige sounds like a regulated quality designation. It is not. Any producer can use the term for any wine at any price. There is no legal definition, no minimum standard, no official oversight. In practice, the term is used to describe the top wine in a house's range — typically a vintage Champagne sourced from the finest Grand Cru parcels, aged significantly longer than the legal minimum, and sold at a price that reflects the producer's ambitions rather than any external standard. The category includes some of the greatest wines made anywhere: Dom Pérignon, Krug Grande Cuvée, Salon Le Mesnil, Cristal, Comtes de Champagne, Belle Époque. It also includes wines of considerably more modest achievement sold at similar prices. The prestige cuvée market is, in large part, a branding exercise. What separates the genuine article from the pretender is not the label but the contents — and developing the palate to tell the difference is one of the most rewarding journeys a Champagne lover can undertake.

 Almost every guide to Champagne recommends serving it at 7 to 9 degrees Celsius. This advice is appropriate for cheap, simple sparkling wine — and actively harmful for anything serious. At 7°C, aroma compounds are suppressed, complexity is hidden, and the wine's texture is flattened by the cold. You are essentially paying for a great Champagne and then preventing it from being one. For a non-vintage Brut of reasonable quality, 9 to 10°C is a more honest serving temperature. For a serious vintage Champagne, a prestige cuvée, or anything that has spent significant time ageing, 11 to 13°C allows the wine to open fully — the nose becomes more expressive, the palate more textured, and the finish longer. The practical approach: take the bottle from the fridge 15 minutes before serving. If it has been stored in a cellar at 12°C, it needs no chilling at all. The idea that Champagne must be served ice-cold is a marketing habit from the era when most Champagne was mediocre and coldness was the kindest thing you could do to it.

 Before Champagne was sparkling, it was still. The region's still wines — now sold under the Coteaux Champenois appellation — were once the primary product of the Marne Valley, and the red wines of Bouzy, Aÿ and Ambonnay had genuine reputations in the courts of Europe. The triumph of sparkling wine in the 19th century pushed still production to the margins. Today, Coteaux Champenois represents a tiny fraction of the region's total output — produced in small quantities, usually from parcels not destined for the prestige cuvées, and priced at levels that reflect their rarity rather than their consistency. The white Coteaux Champenois from Chardonnay-dominant villages can be exceptional: tense, mineral, and long-lived in a way that resembles Chablis Grand Cru more than Burgundy. The reds are more variable — in cool years thin and austere, in warm years producing something closer to a serious Burgundy than most drinkers expect. Climate change is making the latter more common. Roederer released its first Coteaux Champenois rouge in 2021. The category is quietly attracting serious attention for the first time in over a century.