L'Étonnant Monsieur Victor Edition MK.09

The Péters family made this wine to argue with the fashion of its day. While Champagne was falling for single-vintage, single-parcel bottlings, they set out to make the finest multi-vintage blend they could, the old Champagne craft of assemblage taken as far as it would go. They named it after their son Victor, who draws the labels, so every edition wears his artwork.

Half of the blend comes from the family's perpetual reserve, which reaches back to 1988 and is kept in stainless steel, concrete and large casks. The merchant The Finest Bubble gives its foundations as the 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1996 harvests. The other half is wine from the latest harvest, from the best parcel the family farms in Les Chétillons, and the two go together in almost equal parts. The house compares it to a solera: the old wines educate the young one, and the young one brings energy and freshness to the whole.

The house ages each edition on its lees in its own cellars under a natural cork, and puts the time at six years. Each bottle is numbered and carries a QR code that opens its own record: the base year, the disgorgement date and who it was prepared for.

The code on the label names two things. MK is for Takashi Murakami, whose style Victor parodied for the first six editions, and later ones turned to TB, for Tim Burton. The 09 is the base year, the 2009 harvest, which makes this the first edition of the cuvée. The Wine Advocate, reviewing it in 2016, called it the first release of a newly created top Chardonnay cuvée.

Some bottles of every MK edition stayed on their lees far longer. The Finest Bubble later offered one hundred wooden cases of all six MK editions, MK.09 to MK.14, disgorged together on 11 January 2021 and packed with numbered lithographs of their labels. For a wine built on a reserve, it was a fitting way to keep one.