Region
France › Champagne › Vallée de la Marne › Champagne AOC
Type
white · traditional · sparkling · extra-brut
Grapes
Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir
Alcohol
12%
Volume
750 mL
Disgorged
2023-11-09
On lees
~116 months (~10 years)
Tasting Notes(1)
4.2
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Quinte-Essence is Franck Pascal's vintage Extra-Brut, declared selectively rather than every year - 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014 and 2015 exist, 2006, 2011 and 2012 do not. The estate frames the cuvée in musical terms, a score in which each variety plays its note, which is also where the name points: the quinte, the fifth. It is the base of the house's Pacifiance, made by a solera drawing on several vintages of this wine.
The 2013 assemblage is 78% Meunier, 20% Pinot Noir and 2% Chardonnay - Meunier-led, as the estate's right-bank plantings would suggest - dosed at 1.13 g/L. Both the alcoholic and the malolactic fermentations run spontaneously on native yeasts.
The other defining choice is time. This is a cuvée the estate holds about ten years in cellar: harvested in 2013, aged long sur lattes, disgorged on 9 November 2023, roughly 116 months on its lees.
2013 in Champagne was slow and late. A cold, wet spring pushed flowering back and cost yield to coulure and millerandage; summer came late but hot and dry, and picking began around 24 September and ran through October in cool conditions, among the latest harvests in recent memory. It is generally regarded as a tightly structured year built for keeping, which is the sort of raw material a cuvée held a decade on its lees wants.
