Region
France › Champagne › Côte des Blancs › Avize
Type
white · still · sweet · mistelle
Alcohol
15%
Volume
700 mL
Tasting Notes(1)
4.8
Wow. This is unbelievably delicious. Pine cone jam, white cherry, milk chocolate, grated white plum, dates and rosehip tea, then honey, caramel, tangerine peel and toasted nuts, with dried flowers, lavender and chamomile somewhere behind. It is very sweet and it does not matter, because the acidity is superb and the whole thing sits in balance, soft in outline and vibrant inside. So many faces, and it keeps changing in the glass for as long as you leave it. Not a ratafia, says the label. Whatever it is, I want more.
About
The label says Liqueur, grape must and alcohol, and not the word everyone uses for it. L'Autre Même, the other same, is Anselme Selosse's second fortified grape must, after Il était une fois, a project the Swiss merchant Grains-Nobles dates to 1997. The same merchant gives the recipe for this one: Chardonnay must from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 harvests, fortified with alcohol and kept in cask for no less than twelve years, then bottled in 2022 by Anselme and his son Guillaume, 3,000 bottles in all. A Swedish blog tasted it at a private table in Épernay in March 2024, when it still had neither name nor label; by November 2024 it was on sale as L'Autre Même.
So why not ratafia? Ratafia is Champagne's old kitchen liqueur, fresh must stopped with spirit at harvest time, and since 2015 Ratafia champenois has been a protected name with a rulebook attached. One reason is plain from the numbers: the rulebook requires between 16% and 22% alcohol, and this is bottled at 15%. One degree short, and the old family word is off limits. Selosse does not say which spirit he used or where the must was grown. For the elder sibling, the blog Vinography describes casks left outside the winery in all weather and never topped up as they evaporate, which is about as far from a rulebook as a liqueur can get.
