Blanc de Blancs Millésime

The Vazarts have been picking grapes in Chouilly since 1785, and this bottle is what the family does with a year it does not want to let go of. The Millésime is the house's vintage Blanc de Blancs from the village's Grand Cru slopes, and Vazart-Coquart keeps such vintages asleep on their lees in its own cellar, disgorging them only when someone asks; the house advertises that service for vintages from 2009 on, which makes this one a private indulgence rather than a catalogue item.

It went into bottle in April 1997 and was woken in June 2025, 28 years later, with 2 g/l of sugar and not a gram more. Nothing about the recipe is exotic. As the house's importers describe it, only first-press juice is used, the base wines live in stainless steel because Jean-Pierre Vazart would rather you tasted the village than a barrel, malolactic is usually allowed, and the dosage stays low. The family's 30 parcels lie across the great sites of Chouilly, Montaigu among them, with vines averaging about 44 years.

The year did the rest. The Union des Maisons de Champagne's record of 1996 opens with minus 20 C on 22 February, then March frosts, record April sun and a May frost on about 250 ha. A cold snap on 19 June stretched the flowering and left the Chardonnay with millerandage, and picking began on 21 September in the Côte des Blancs. What came in had both potential alcohol and acidity far above average, a pairing the record calls without equivalent since 1950; Tom Stevenson puts it at 10.3% potential alcohol with 10 g/l of total acidity. That is the tension a wine needs to spend three decades on its yeast and come out the other side still awake.