Wine of the Week: Jacques Selosse V.O. Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs

The reason my Wine of the Week is on Sunday this week instead of Friday is because on Friday I was drunk and disoriented, not to mention on a different continent, and I simply forgot that it was Friday. (The reason it's on Sunday, two days later, instead of Saturday is pretty much the same one.) Since it’s a decadent sort of week, I’ve picked a wine that’s a little more decadent than usual.

I had brought a bottle of Jacques Selosse Version Originale with me from Paris to share with friends, as this wine can be somewhat difficult to procure here in the United States. The V.O. comes from Avize, Cramant and Oger, and is a blend of three different vintages (in this case 2002, 2001 and 2000), aged for three and a half to four years on its lees and released without dosage. It's been a while since I've drunk a bottle of this, and it was extremely satisfying to spend several hours watching it evolve: I considered decanting it, but instead we just opened it and drank a bunch of other wines while monitoring its progress.

There’s a deep core of richness that persists on the palate throughout the long, sleek finish, its body and breadth amplified by its vinification in wood. Like all of Selosse’s wines, this possesses a distinct personality and a confident, self-assured character, but the most striking element about it is the way that it seamlessly balances its complexity and richness. There are other champagnes that can be rich — weight, after all, is easy to acquire if that's all you're looking for, even in a northerly region like Champagne — but none do it as stylishly or as harmoniously as Selosse, and most attempts to emulate him are doomed to failure.

My friend Pete, upon seeing this bottle, generously went downstairs to his cellar and brought up a bottle of Selosse's 1988 vintage, and while it was a terrifically thrilling wine, it was still severely intense and wound up. It made the V.O. look downright gentle, although comparing the two eras of winemaking, I did feel that the V.O. showed more fine-ness and elegance, especially in the way that it harmoniously fit all of its parts together.

Jacques Selosse is imported into the United States by The Rare Wine Co., Sonoma, CA, and the suggested retail price for the Version Originale is $130.

Jérôme Prévost, Gueux

It’s virtually impossible to be a hip wine bar or wine store in Paris, or indeed, anywhere in France, if you don’t have champagne from Jérôme Prévost. Selling a Prévost wine, or ordering one at a wine bar or restaurant, has become almost a badge of honor, a secret sign that affirms your initiation into an exclusive club of those in the know. Unfortunately, with an annual production of only about 13,000 bottles, Prévost’s wine is not always easy to obtain.

Prévost doesn’t come from a family of winegrowers. His two hectares of vines in the vineyard of Les Béguines (La Closerie is the name of the estate) were inherited from his grandmother, who didn’t cultivate them herself, but rather rented them out en mettayage to be worked by others. Prévost took over the vineyards in 1987, and sold his grapes to the négoce until the 1998 vintage, when his friend Anselme Selosse convinced him to begin producing his own wine. As Prévost had no cellars of his own, Selosse offered to share a corner of his cellars in Avize. The 2002 vintage was the first to be vinified in Prévost’s own cellars in Gueux, although it was bottled in Avize; since 2003, all the production takes place in Gueux.

Prévost’s two hectares of 40-year old meunier vines are all located within Les Béguines, although he does have an additional 20 ares in another adjacent parcel, co-planted with meunier, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot blanc. As these vines are still young, they are currently blended with the meunier, although they may be used to produce a different cuvée in the future. The soils in this area, just west of Reims, are a mix of sand and calcareous elements, due to being a seabed around 45 million years ago, and they’re filled with lots of tiny fossils, as you can see in this photo.

In general, Prévost makes only one wine, which, ignoring the aforementioned 20 ares of co-plantation, is always from a single variety (meunier), a single vineyard (Les Béguines) and a single vintage. Emphasis is firmly placed on the vineyards rather than the cellar, with work done according to natural rhythms, and without chemical pesticides or herbicides of any sort. “The important thing for me is to harvest ripe grapes,” says Prévost, who doesn’t chaptalize his wines. He adds, however, that he sees ripeness as “less about sugar richness than physiological maturity,” and that the average alcohol level is about 10.5 degrees at harvest. The winemaking is as natural as the vinegrowing: the wines are fermented and aged in 450- to 600-liter barrels, fermentation is always with indigenous yeasts, and the wines are bottled late (usually around July), with a minimum amount of sulfur and without fining, filtering or cold-stabilization. The wines are all disgorged at once, about 18 months after bottling, and spend a total of three years sur lattes before release.

The current vintage on the market is 2004, and although it’s marked Extra Brut on the label, like all of Prévost’s wines it’s non-dosé. Tense and energetic, it shows a yeasty, bready youthfulness, alongside nutty notes of macadamia and almond. There’s a wonderful feeling of texture and densely-knit richness on the palate, as if inscribed with unusually high DPI. While still adolescent, it shows more harmony right now than the 2005, which is firmly backwards and unformed, needing time to put its components together. The interaction of saline minerality and appley fruit in the 2005, however, is mouthwateringly intriguing, and I’m looking forward to checking back on this in another year or two.

In 2003, Prévost produced two different bottlings: Les Béguines and another wine subtitled “d’Ailleurs”, which is exactly the same wine except that the base wine was aged in barrel for an extra year, bottled in July of 2005. (Incidentally, this was also done in 2000: a cuvée called “Une fois pour tout” was also held in barrel for an additional year.) The 2003 Les Béguines is outstanding, combining rich depth with a graceful and saline minerality and finishing with long, spicy fragrance and impeccable balance. D’Ailleurs is more vinous, more ample in feel, with deeply authoritative flavors on the palate and a lovely, supple texture. I can’t really say it’s a “better” wine, but they are definitely different in character, making for an intriguing comparison.

I’ve always felt that Prévost’s wines need a lot of post-disgorgement aging to show their best. Unfortunately, as with many grower champagnes, most of the bottles are drunk too young. My favorite Prévost of all time (so far, anyway) was the 2000 — I drank my last bottle with friends in NYC about two years ago (four years after disgorgement), when it was just beginning to develop real resonance and depth. Tasting this wine again with Prévost last week, I immediately regretted that I didn’t stash a case of it away when I had the chance. Expansive and harmonious, with a subtle, soil-driven fragrance and finesse, this is breathtaking wine, demonstrating an intense and captivating sense of expression, completeness and poise. Without a doubt, this 2000 is the greatest pure meunier I have ever tasted (coming from someone who actively seeks out pure meunier to taste). It also confirms the need for bottle-age: ideally, I would purchase a case of Prévost every year and not touch the first bottle for another three to five years.

I have never actually seen a bottle of Prévost for sale in the United States, but he is in theory represented by Thomas Calder Selections, and distributed by Triage Wines in Seattle, WA. Needless to say, if you do happen across a bottle you ought to buy it, as Prévost’s champagne is an experience not to be missed.

Why Aren’t There More Soleras?

People in Champagne, especially négociants, are always talking about blending for consistency—how many times have you heard that a non-vintage blend is designed to erase the effects of the millésime and provide a continuity in house style from year to year? Some brave people even go so far as to say that if you can see a difference in their non-vintage brut each year, they’re not doing their job correctly.

Here’s what I don’t get: many houses don’t have large enough stocks of reserve wines to be able to account for more than ten to 20 percent of the blend (and I’m being generous here). That means that at least 80 percent, and probably more, is from a single harvest. How is that supposed to provide a consistent product? Clearly it doesn’t, as there is a difference in a given house’s NV from year to year, no matter what anybody says. (No comment on anybody’s job performance.)

So I’ve been thinking, why don’t we see more soleras in Champagne? A solera would provide the ultimate blending solution—wine from this year is added to the first criadera, containing a blend of young wines, while a portion of that criadera is added to the next, slightly older one, and so on and so forth, until the solera that you draw from at the end is composed of a great number of vintages, providing as consistent a wine from year to year as you can possibly hope for. In addition, the longer you keep the solera the more consistent it becomes, as the fractions become increasingly smaller and the number of vintages involved more numerous.

In fact, there are a number of growers using soleras for selected cuvées, most notably Anselme Selosse, who started his solera for Substance (previously called Origine) in 1986; for Contraste, his pinot noir from La Côte Faron in Aÿ, he uses what he calls a “mini-solera” (no criaderas) that he began in 1994. Serge Billiot of H. Billiot Fils started the solera for Cuvée Laetitia in 1983; Bereche et Fils makes Le Reflet d’Antan from a solera begun in 1990.

Obviously a solera in Champagne would be terrifically expensive to initiate on a large scale. A solera is, in effect, all reserve wine, and wine held in reserve is wine that isn’t making you any money. But like these growers have done, it could be started on a small scale and slowly built up over time as a special cuvée. If you truly want to talk about “erasing” the effects of the vintage, why stop at a puny ten percent of reserves? Go all the way.

Champagne and Terroir: Jacques Selosse

There was a recent debate on Wine Therapy (link here, but you’ll need a password to access it) about, among other things, whether or not sparkling wine is intrinsically less terroir-expressive than still wine because of its process: i.e. does the méthode champenoise, as we used to call it, remove the wine farther from its terroir?

I was visiting Anselme Selosse yesterday afternoon with some folks from the Franciacorta winery of Uberti (Silvia Uberti, pictured in this photo, was a stagière here in 2003), and this same question was posed regarding still and sparkling wines. Selosse’s response was more or less identical to mine in Wine Therapy. “There is no answer to that question,” he said. “The minerality is clearly present in champagne; the terroir is obviously expressed. You can see it.”

Later, I thought about this idea again as we were tasting various wines. We had tasted a recently disgorged (3rd of March) version of Substance, which was forceful and almost severe in its soil expression, possessing a fierce, naked intensity of terroir that few wines made anywhere, of any type, can achieve. Substance comes from two vineyards in Avize—the shallow, clay-rich Chantereines and the steep, chalky Marvillannes—and the tremendous accomplishment of this wine was that both soil types were clearly and distinctly expressed, harmoniously intertwining yet not at all blurring each other.

Afterwards, Selosse poured me a sample of the solera that Substance is made from, which currently contains wines from 1986 through 2007 (the finished wine that we tasted was 1986-2001), and the curious thing was that as vin clair, this was so much quieter and less expressive than in bottle. The components were all present, but there was clearly something about the “champagnization” that amplified and completed the wine, expanding the aromas and bringing the elements into focus. Obviously I shouldn’t have been surprised, as vin clair is always less aromatic and less forthcoming than finished champagne, but to see the two together side by side was a striking comparison.

Now, I realize that this actually says nothing about whether a still or sparkling wine is more terroir-expressive. I do think, however, that in this region the champagne process makes a more complete wine, which is why it continues to be used, and in becoming more complete I believe that the wine has the potential to become more expressive. Champagne, at any rate, is obviously a terroir-expressive wine. All you have to do is taste.