La Barbette

La Barbette is a single-parcel Champagne from Verzy, the grand cru village on the Grande Montagne de Reims where Yaël and Jonathan Sacy farm. It is a blanc de noirs - a white wine from black grapes, 100% Pinot Noir. The name on the front label is the vernacular one: the back label gives the site as the lieu-dit "Les Champs Saint-Rémy", alias "La Barbette", and places the parcel at the foot of the slope, where their Courtisols block sits at the top of its own.

The bottle is unusually forthcoming about how the wine was made. Fermentation was spontaneous and took place in barrel, the malolactic was allowed to finish of its own accord rather than being blocked, and the wine was drawn into bottle for its second fermentation under cork rather than crown cap. It was disgorged on 3 December 2025 with no dosage at all, brut nature at 0 g/L, neither fined nor filtered, and bottled at 12%. The label declares it made without added sulfites, which is not true of their other Verzy parcel bottlings, and gives 840 bottles available.

Despite farming their own family land, the Sacys are not récoltants-manipulants here: the label reads "élaboré par Louis de Sacy à Verzy" under matriculation NM 292-013, so the wine is legally a négociant bottling made at Louis de Sacy, the older family house in the same village. The small run reflects the size of the parcel rather than a short harvest: 2022 was a generous, healthy year in Champagne, and trade reporting at the time put the permitted yield at 12,000 kg/ha, the highest in ten years, after a hot summer broken by well-timed rain.