Champagne Academy 2017

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August Gibbs
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1 Champagne Academy 2017 The Champagne Academy in June 2017 was my first trip to the Champagne region and came just after my one-year anniversary as a Wine Buyer for Waitrose. (What a way to celebrate my first wonderful year in the wine trade!) I won a WSET Scholarship to attend the Academy, so unlike my fellow academicians I hadn t worked specifically with champagne before, and I had tasted only a small handful of the champagnes we would be tasting on the trip. A week of wide eyes and tingling taste buds awaited me. When I ran my first marathon the first words my dad said to me (probably after well done ) were, "welcome to the marathon club". This is an exclusive club, albeit with many members. Exclusive because only the people who have actually run a marathon can understand the marathon experience. If you've never run one, you just don t get it. As much as you might admire the marathoners you know, you can t wrap your head around the emotional, intellectual and of course physical journey that is 26 miles of running. Reflecting on it now, I feel the same way about the Champagne Academy. While this was a rather more pleasant marathon tasting, analysing and understanding glass after glass of champagne pacing yourself was still crucial! More to the point, while I can recount the amazing week in minute detail to my friends, family and colleagues, I know that only former academicians can really grasp the impact it has on you. It s like being a part of a secret order. The bonds made between my fellow academicians and I are the kind of bonds you can only make while experiencing a glass of Krug Clos du Mesnil 2002 for the first (and maybe only!) time in your life. So rather than go through the week s itinerary day by day, I m going to select a few of my most sparkling moments from the Champagne Academy 2017 in the hope that it captures some of the magic of the experience and gives a sense of what it might be like to be in this club. The Bollinger cellars Bollinger was the first Champagne House we visited and here we embarked on our first cellar tour of the trip. By the end of the week we had become quite familiar with the cool, dark, and slightly mysterious cellars of Champagne. When you see the endless rows of bottles of reserve wine (around 700,000 magnums in Bollinger s cellars), you start to understand the vital role of time and what a patient art champagne-making is. I had read about just how much reserve wine is stored in the cellars of Epernay and Reims (and how much it is worth!) but seeing it brings it to life and created a lasting impression on me. Bollinger keep their reserve wines under cork rather than crown cap, believing that cork facilitates better development. Every year 150,000 magnums of reserve wine the so-called aromatic bombs of Bollinger are opened by hand and poured into tanks for blending.

Tasting with Olivier Krug We met many, many passionate and dedicated people in Champagne, but listening to Olivier Krug share the Krug story and philosophy was an absolute high point.

The 400 wines wall demonstrates the exhaustive and comprehensive approach taken to blending annually, with 250 wines from the year, and 150 from the library of reserve wines, being used to compose

2 Tasting with Olivier Krug We met many, many passionate and dedicated people in Champagne, but listening to Olivier Krug share the Krug story and philosophy was an absolute high point. Krug s attention to detail is obsessive and unmatched. In the cellars, there are as many tanks of wine as plots of land from which the grapes are sourced, as Krug vinify every single plot separately. The 400 wines wall demonstrates the exhaustive and comprehensive approach taken to blending annually, with 250 wines from the year, and 150 from the library of reserve wines, being used to compose the final blends. We tasted three wines with Olivier Krug 2002, Krug Clos du Mesnil 2002 (recently awarded 100 Points by James Suckling), and Krug Grand Cuvée 158th edition. My tasting notes are rapturous! Krug Grand Cuvée is the only prestige cuvée that has been made for 172 consecutive years, realising the founder s dream of creating a champagne of the very best quality every single year. The 172nd edition was bottled just a few days before we visited. We then had a spectacular lunch which showed what a fabulous food wine champagne is. Fuelled by Michelin starred cooking and many glasses of Krug, proceedings somehow ended

of the trip was in an exquisitely elegant room underground, as pure and pretty as the wines themselves.

3 in us all dancing (our hosts included) to Rag n Bone Man, Human, in the dining room. Surreal to say the least! Dinner at Perrier-Jouët After an evening cellar tour at Perrier-Jouët (where we saw a bottle of what is thought to be the oldest vintage still existing in Champagne 1825), our first sit-down dinner of the trip was in an exquisitely elegant room underground, as pure and pretty as the wines themselves. I sat next to Winemaker Eric Trichard, and we talked about how he lives, breathes, sleeps (and drinks of course!) the culture of the Champagne House. He has worked at Perrier-Jouët for something like 25 years and feels intimately connected to the House and the style of champagne it makes, where Chardonnay is the signature grape. Standing in Clos Saint Jacques On a sun-soaked Monday morning, we stood blinking in one of the few authentic walled vineyards in Champagne Clos Saint Jacques, belonging to Bollinger. The vines that surrounded us were ungrafted, pre-phylloxera vines, with the oldest mother roots in Champagne.

4 Having studied phylloxera in some detail for my WSET, this was quite mind blowing. Why and how did these vines escape the scourge of phylloxera? (And I m not being dramatic calling it a scourge; it wiped out most of the vineyards in Europe in the late 19th century.) The yields of Clos Saint Jacques are tiny now, 4kg per hectare at most, and the must the grapes produce is highly concentrated. We didn t have the opportunity to taste Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises Blanc de Noirs, but when the academicians of 2017 get together for our first reunion we re all contributing towards a couple of bottles, and will toast to the historic vineyard from which it came. Charles Heidsieck Crayères On the Wednesday we visited one of Charles Heidsieck s forty-seven crayères cellars (there are about one hundred in total in Reims), essentially a chalk cavern dug out of the limestone by the Romans. The one we explored, with Chef de caves Cyril Brun, was two thousand years old. Conveniently these chalk pits provide the ideal storage environment for wine. Chalk s capacity to store water naturally regulates the temperature in the cellars, which remains constant at around Celsius all year, with a humidity of around 90%. Every 15 years or so Charles Heidsieck will empty the crayères cellars of bottles in order to inspect the walls. It s a peaceful world, where the wines age for between 3 and 10 years without disturbance. When you stand in the heart of it, looking at the curves of the chalk walls (in one instance forming a bottle-like shape which the Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millenaires case is modelled on), there is a complete sense of timelessness. Learning about blending and base wines Every day started with a lecture, and the lecture that got us most fired up (and asking a thousand questions) was From Blending to Labelling, with Delphine Laborde, Winemaker at Veuve Clicquot. Blending is of course what defines champagne production, the majority being non vintage, and we discovered just how many variables and decisions the process involves. One of the most fascinating aspects was the insight we were given into each Champagne House s unique style not just what that style was, but why that was their style, and how it was achieved through blending.

The first blended rosé champagne was created by Barbe-Nicole Clicquot in 1818, and that evening we did a red base wine tasting alongside the rosé champagnes they would be blended into.

5 The first blended rosé champagne was created by Barbe-Nicole Clicquot in 1818, and that evening we did a red base wine tasting alongside the rosé champagnes they would be blended into. This was a brilliant way of understanding the quality levels of the different crus, and the components of the final product. We tasted Verzy Pinot Noir (destined to become NV Rosé), Bouzy Pinot Noir (Vintage Rosé), and finally Pinot Noir from Clos Colin (La Grande Dame Rosé). The colour, freshness and medium structure of the wine from Verzy was ideal for the NV. The greater intensity of the Bouzy, both aromatically and on the palate, and its fuller body, made it suitable to add enough weight and flavour to the Vintage. Finally, the quality of the Clos Colin stood out as being the finest, with rich and ripe fruit, and round well-integrated tannins, making it the perfect component for Veuve s prestige cuvée rosé champagne, La Grande Dame. There were so many more sparkling moments during the Champagne Academy: trying our hand at sabrage in the vineyards of Cramant, the most famous Grand Cru of the Côtes de Blancs; drinking Pommery Clos de Pompadour 2003 in the Clos de Pompadour itself; a grand dinner at Trianon with Moët; a hands-on cooking class and champagne/food pairing with Ruinart; and, finally, passing the week with Honours and celebrating with Cristal 2009 at Chateau Les Crayères. It truly was the trip of a lifetime and I am very grateful to all of the Champagne Houses that hosted us, and of course to the WSET for this completely immersive and utterly unforgettable experience. If you ever get a chance, do not hesitate to join the Champagne Academy club. With thanks to Presidential House Pommery, Bollinger, Charles Heidsieck, Heidsieck & Co. Monopole, Krug, Lanson, Laurent-Perrier, Louis Roederer, Moët & Chandon, G.H. Mumm, Perrier-Jouët, Piper Heidsieck, Pol Roger, Ruinart, Taittinger, Veuve ClicquotPonsardin, and WSET.

CHAMPAGNE: brilliant stars of now and tomorrow. May 16th - 18th 2018

CHAMPAGNE: brilliant stars of now and tomorrow. May 16th - 18th 2018 Wednesday 16th May Day One Inaugural dinner We meet at the iconic 5* Peninsula Hotel in Paris to kick off our Champagne experience with