Polisy Millésime

Jacques Beaufort stopped spraying his vines in 1971 because the chemicals had made him ill, and every bottle the family has released since is a consequence of that decision. This is the vintage cuvée from the Beauforts' second holding at Polisy, in the Barséquanais corner of the Côte des Bar, about 80% Pinot Noir and 20% Chardonnay by the house's usual recipe; the merchant Cave des Sacres gives the same split for the 1996, on Kimmeridgian clay, with a dosage of 9 g/l for its own stock. The estate registered for organic conversion in 1994 and 1997 was its first certified vintage, so the 1996 was made in the conversion years, on vines treated with essential oils since 1974 and homeopathy since 1980.

The house describes its cellar on one page, for all its wines, and the method is as stubborn as the vineyard: pressing with the cuvée kept apart from the tailles, at least twelve hours of settling, a first fermentation with indigenous yeasts in casks or tanks, malolactic left to happen when spring decides, a tirage with unrefined cane sugar or concentrated grape sugar. The bottles stay on their lees until they are sold, are disgorged by hand à la volée, and take an expedition liqueur of concentrated grape sugar. Vintage wines get three years on lattes at the minimum, and the house says they only begin to open after five.

This lot waited far longer. It is marked 96P and was disgorged in March 2023, more than 26 years after the harvest, and it is not the first of its kind: CellarTracker records lots of the 1996 disgorged in October 2007 and April 2012, which is how a Beaufort vintage tends to travel, a few hundred bottles at a time over decades.

The year it came from was a hard one to farm and a great one to keep. The Union des Maisons de Champagne's record of 1996 opens with minus 20 C on 22 February, then March frosts, April heat, a May frost on about 250 ha and a cold snap on 19 June that delayed flowering. Picking opened on 14 September in the Sézannais, with the Côte des Bar following in the last ten days of the month. The report calls the pairing of potential alcohol and acidity unmatched since records began in 1950, and names the wines of the Côte des Bar among the best of the year.