Dubbed “just impeccable, especially within its peer group” by Galloni, Laherte’s Meunier-led ‘entry-level’ Champagne is from eight different parcels across the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay and Vallée de la Marne. The blend of 60% Meunier, 30% Chardonnay and 10% Pinot Noir represents the diversity of the estate’s plantings. Some 40% of the blend these days is drawn from the two preceding vintages. The juice naturally fermented in a mixture of vessels, including two 50-hectolitre Rousseau tronconique casks, old barrels, foudre and concrete. Regardless of vessel, the wines are always aged on lees, and there is partial malolactic conversion (around 60-70% on average). Based on the 2022 vintage with 40% reserve wines from 2021 and 2020, this bottling was disgorged with a dosage of 4.5 g/L (extra brut). 

Meunier. Les Barres is one of Chartogne-Taillet’s best-known plots and with good reason. This small plot of ungrafted Meunier was planted in 1952, and the vines dig deep (up to three metres) into the chalky subsoil. The low-yielding output results in some of the most powerful wines in the stable. Alexandre uses 228-litre old barrels and allows heightened exposure to oxygen. This promotes the mineral nature of the wine and allows the salty nature of the plot to shine through. The barrels aren't topped up for the first few months of maturation. The dosage 1-2 g/L. 

The Bérêche brothers purchased this magnificent plot in 2011. It’s the estate’s first and most prized Grand Cru. Situated between Ludes and Verzenay in Montagne de Reims, Mailly’s chalky subsoil and predominance of north-facing slopes bring out a unique mineral freshness in Pinot Noir. Vincent and Raphaël are no strangers to Mailly; previously, as much as 70% of their Montagne cuvée was drawn from this Grand Cru. Raphaël describes his decision to jump on the offer of a 0.4-hectare parcel of 60-year-old Pinot Fin vines rooted in the rich clay and chalk of the Les Chalois vineyard as the easiest of his life.

The wine was vinified with indigenous yeasts in oak barrels up to 600 litres in size. It spent 48 months under cork before disgorgement. The dosage was 3.5 g/L. This wine is the only independent bottling of the Mailly Grand Cru we have come across, and it gives us a taste of what we have been missing. In style, it’s an incisive and super-pure Champagne with an array of flavours stretching out over citrus oil, stone fruit and herbal notes, as well as a distinctive blood orange note.

Vintages: 2017 (50%), 2016 (50%)

Bottling: 2018

Disgorgement: July 2024

Time on lees: 72 months

In some ways, this is the emblematic wine of the domaine. It was Michel Bettane, the influential French critic, who encouraged Francis Egly to bottle this single-vineyard wine separately, with the first release based on the 1989 harvest. This latest offering was bottled after the 2017 base had spent close to one year in cask before blending with 50% reserve wines from the 2016 vintage. The vinification and aging for both vintages took place in barrel.

The fruit comes from old Pinot Noir vines in a single terroir known as Les Crayères. The vines here were planted in 1946, so they are now 75 years old (vines of this age are extremely rare in Champagne). The soil is barely 30cm deep, then it’s chalk, hundreds of metres down—hence the name of the site (craie is French for ‘chalk’; crayères references chalk quarries which likely once existed here). Les Crayères is situated mid-slope with a full south-facing exposure, not far from the estate’s cellars. The old vines are deeply rooted, giving the wine a classic mineral energy that weaves its way through the powerful, layered Pinot Noir fruit. The deep concentration is a product of the ripeness and low yields that the site and its ancient vines confer.

The 2017 base is a tribute to the greatest sites of Ambonnay and the Egly-Ouriet domaine. Houses that emphasise blending may consider a 100% old-vine Ambonnay like this to be too intense; Egly gives it to you full throttle! This release has both profound depth and incredible finesse. It’s still early days for the nose (if you open it now, give it time), while the palate is already stunning: a layered yet chiselled, mineral mouth bomb. The dosage is only 2 g/L, and it’s invisible. As always, this unique expression of a singular terroir is built for food and aging. Give it two to three years, and it will be even better.

Disgorged June 2025. Minéral is blended from two adjacent vieilles vignes plots (50-plus years old) on the border between Avize and Cramant, where the vine roots plunge straight into the chalky bedrock. The fruit from Le Champ Bouton in Avize fermented in tank, while the component from Les Bionnes in Cramant was vinified in 600-litre oak casks—“barrels for the expression of minerality and tank of the precision,” as Pascal put it. The wine spent over five years on lees and was dosed at 3.5 g/L. Typically the saltiest, most mineral wine in the Agrapart range, it is also incredibly iridescent and vinous this year—Burgundy-like but with an iodine/salinity that is uniquely Côte des Blancs. A thrilling and seamless release of this wine; it fizzes across the palate like Margot Fonteyn.

Disg. March 25. First released in 1998, long before the concept of single-vineyard Champagnes became popular, this Blanc de Blancs was historically labelled Vieille Vigne de Cramant. Little has changed, save for the name, which is now inspired by 1960-planted Bourron du Levant, the vineyard from which most of the grapes come. The balance comes from a 0.5-hectare holding in the neighbouring terroir Le Fond du Bâteau (with 85-year-old vines).

Both plots are at the heart of Cramant’s southeast-facing slopes on the flanks of the Butte de Saran. Basking in the first rays of the morning sun, these vineyards give wonderfully ripe, layered wines. The old vines’ deep root system combines with the terroir to bring a wine of glowing density and opulence. It offers a fascinating, concentrated and stone-fruited contrast to the other Larmandier cuvées (not to mention other producers’ Cramant wines). It remains a super-mineral wine, but you have more flesh, weight and body here.

The winemaking is similar across each of Larmandier’s single-terroir wines. Here, it is spontaneous fermentation and malolactic fermentation, 12 months in large Stockinger barrels and no filtration. This cuvée, however, spends at least eight years in bottle on lees. The 2015 was disgorged with 2 g/L dosage.

The most northern of Suenen’s Oiry parcels, La Cocluette is also home to the domaine’s oldest vines (planted in 1925), a site where the ancient roots bury deep into the dense Campanian chalk (the younger plantings from this site go into the Oiry Blanc de Blancs). Vines of this age are as rare as hens’ teeth in Champagne, giving tiny yields of concentrated berries. The land here is largely flat with a somewhat northern exposure.

The base wine fermented naturally and aged for nine months in one 700-litre concrete egg and one 600-litre Stockinger barrel (the same one is used each year). It then aged sur lies for 60 months in bottle until disgorgement in June 2023, when it was dosed with 3 g/L.

Suenen explains that the wines from this vineyard express themselves with great finesse. “The energy brought by this calcium-rich terroir makes the mouthfeel richer through a silky bubble. With time, the finish lengthens on a salivating mineral vibrancy.” Put another way, this is a more intense and complex expression of this region’s naked-chalk terroir than the NV Oiry. The 2017 harvest produced less than 2,000 bottles.

True to its vintage, this is loaded with racy white stone fruit flecked by traces of smoke and iodine. It’s underscored by a piercing core of chalky minerality, turning more linear and pointed on the long, lemon oil and kaffir lime-scented finish. It’s in a class of its own and a fine successor to the brilliant 2016.

Fidèle is 100% Pinot Noir grown on Kimmeridgian limestone soils. This includes roughly 5% reserve wine from a perpetual blend started in 2001 and stored in two large old foudres. The Fonnet vineyard, located in a small, enclosed valley, forms the heart of this cuvée. Sorbée provides much of the balance, topped off by Châtel—a rocky, limestone-rich vineyard with 20-plus-year-old Pinot Noir vines. Overall, the vines average 30 years of age. After pressing in a traditional vertical Coquard press, Fidèle is vinified—without added yeast or chaptalisation—in used Burgundy barrels for 10 months (these came from Domaine Arnaud Ente in Meursault). The wine then spends 15 to 20 months on lees in bottle after secondary fermentation and is disgorged with zero dosage. Gautherot describes this as “a dangerous wine”—the bottle disappears so quickly—and this description could not be more apt. Dry, savoury and super mineral!