Blanc de Blancs Magnum

Bruno Paillard printed the disgorgement date on his bottles before anyone else in Champagne, and this magnum is the reason the habit matters: it says January 2012 on a wine that was born in 1996 and spent fifteen years in the cellar before that. The vintage Blanc de Blancs of 1996 is Chardonnay from two Grands Crus of the Côte des Blancs, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger and Oger, in a proportion the house does not give, from the first pressing only, the first 50 cl of juice from each kilo of grapes, as with every wine of the house. The release ran to 7,052 bottles and 2,984 magnums.

This magnum's disgorgement was one of at least two tranches; merchants also list a July 2007 one. The house rests every bottle after disgorgement, from five months for the youngest wines to 12 to 18 months for the oldest, so even the freshly disgorged lots never went out raw. The front label says Brut. The house's own statement today is that all its wines are Extra Brut with dosage capped at 6 g/l, and the importer's sticker gives 3.6 g/l of residual sugar for this bottle.

Then there is the picture. Since the 1981 Blanc de Noirs, the house has given each vintage cuvée a word and commissioned a painter to answer it. For the 1996 Blanc de Blancs the word was Profondeur, depth, and the painter was Sandro Chia, whose female figure sinking through rolling waves is on the label. WineNews, reporting the release in 2009, called it the first label Chia had painted for a winery outside Italy; until then his label art had gone only on his own Castello di Romitorio.