Artisan Champagne: a new golden age

“This is a great time to be a Champagne lover”, says Davy Żyw, our Champagne Buyer at Berry Bros. & Rudd. “We’re seeing wines and individual sites expressed in ways that simply weren’t possible before”.

Climate change, improvements in viticulture and increasingly confident winemaking have combined to create opportunities which would have seemed unlikely even a generation ago. The result is a new age of wines that express place with remarkable precision.

A focal sense of place

Terroir has long been a key component of the world’s great wine regions, but Champagne has historically been associated with blending. The great houses built their reputations on consistency, combining fruit from multiple villages, vineyards and vintages to create recognisable house styles.

That remains true, but among artisan growers there’s been a decisive shift towards the expression of individual places. “Certain sites historically needed to be blended with others to achieve balance”, Davy explains. “Now they're producing extraordinary wines on their own. That’s one of the reasons this is such an exciting time.”

To oak or not to oak?

For decades, oak has been associated with prestige. It was an expensive material and embraced by some of the most prestigious wine regions including Bordeaux and Burgundy. Great wines spent time in barrel, gaining texture, complexity and layers of flavour. Yet Davy explains that “some of the great wines in Champagne are fermented in steel or cement”.

This is to maintain the purity of the terroir. “They want to mitigate any oxidation and not add roundness, richness or additional body,” Davy explains. “Historically, steel might have been viewed as the practical option. Now we’re increasingly seeing producers choose steel specifically because it allows them to express terroir more clearly.”

A striking example is the Grand Cru Terre de Noël by Champagne Crété Chamberlin from a 100-year-old plot in Oger. After decades of supplying fruit to a co-operative, it’s now being bottled independently by brother and sister Mathieu and Blandine Crété.

Conventional wisdom might suggest “putting it in an oak barrel and giving it the full treatment”, as Davy describes it. Instead, the wine is vinified in steel. “The quality, the richness, the depth is all down to the terroir.”

A quiet revolution in dosage

Perhaps nothing better illustrates changing attitudes in Champagne than dosage.

A small addition of sugar after disgorgement can help balance Champagne’s naturally bracing acidity. This remains an important tool today, influencing texture, structure and flavour development. Yet throughout his recent visit to the region, one trend was unmistakable to Davy: dosage levels have fallen dramatically.

Where Champagnes of 10-12g/L were once the norm, many of the wines Davy tastes today contain only 3-4g/L, while some contained none at all.

Partly, this is due to climate change. Warmer seasons make for riper grapes, which means growers no longer require as much dosage to soften the sharp acidity. Improvements in vineyard management have also helped.

Davy considers it to be more philosophical. “Lower dosage reflects confidence,” he says. “Confidence in the fruit, confidence in the vineyard and confidence in the winemaking”. For artisan producers, particularly, dosage is increasingly viewed as something to support a wine rather than define it. Excessive sweetness can obscure distinctions between sites, vintages and growers. Lower levels allow those nuances to emerge more clearly.

A region looking forward

Across Champagne, growers are becoming increasingly focused on revealing what makes their vineyards unique. The great Champagne Houses are moving in similar directions, albeit often more gradually. However, the changes are often most visible among artisan growers, where decisions can be made quickly and philosophies can evolve rapidly.

For wine lovers, this presents an exciting opportunity. Never before has it been possible to explore such a diversity of place, style and personality within Champagne. “Site is king”, as Davy puts it. “Producers have never been in a better position to express their vineyards.”

For anyone passionate about Champagne, that makes this a truly golden age.