Best Champagne Choices For Easter
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Most Champagne wines are blended.
The blenders artfully combine wines with different sensory characteristics to create a single wine that’s designed to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Most Champagne wines are a blend of the three main grape varieties, various years and crus (villages), but they can also be produced as Blanc de Blancs (made with 100 percent white grapes, mostly Chardonnay) or Blanc de Noirs (made with either, or both, 100 percent Pinot Noir and Meunier).
These wines are crafted to express the distinctive qualities of a single cru (vineyard), a lieu-dit (named vineyard plot), or a clos (walled vineyard).
Most Champagne is a white wine made from both white and black grapes, but these iconic wines can also be vinified as rosés.
Additionally, they can be produced with varying levels of sweetness (dosage), ranging from brut nature (bone dry) to doux (sweet), depending on the level of dosage added.
Dosage is the addition of a small amount of a liquid mixture of sugar and wine, which contains 500 to 700 grams of sugar per liter. It’s added to Champagne just after disgorgement.
The driest wines don’t receive any dosage, but most receive at least a small amount to help balance the wine.
The tiny, sustained, delicate bubbles in a glass of Champagne speak volumes.
Distinguishing between pétillant (sparkling), which connotes bubbles fizzing at the surface, and mousse, which describes a creamier confluence of bubbles, the wine professionals of Champagne prefer the term effervescence to describe the distinctive bubbles in their wines.
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2012
95 Points
$255
From the Grand Crus of Avize, Chouilly, Cramant, Mesnil-sur-Oger, and Oger, the 2012 Champagne Blanc De Blancs Comtes De Champagne comes back swinging after last year’s release and assumes a more noble and layered profile.
Displaying a bright golden yellow hue, it has fantastic aromatic complexity, with wonderful custardy and classic aromas of lemon curd, crème brûlée, shortbread, and honeysuckle.
The nose is hard to resist, and on the palate, it’s full-bodied, with a refined and pillowy mousse and a delicate warmth on the finish.
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Cedric Bouchard Roses de Jeanne Blanc de Noirs La Presle 2017
94 Points
$325
Unfurling in the glass with notes of lemon oil, warm bread, anise, Asian pear, crushed chalk and white flowers, framed by hints of beeswax and spice.
The wine is medium to full-bodied, racy and saline, with an elegantly textural attack that segues into a deep and sapid mid-palate.
Concluding with a long, saline finish, this will evolve immensely gracefully in the cellar.
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill Brut with Gift Box 2013
94 Points
$350
With its splendid intense golden hue and lovely bright tints, this wine is captivating to the eye.
The first nose is subtle and opens with scents of dried flowers (rose petals) delicately mingled with peppery notes, revealing a lovely freshness.
After breathing, a few hints of vanilla and candied fruit come through to complete a well-developed bouquet.
On entry to the palate, the wine is well balanced and underpinned by a hint of citrus fruit, confirming the intense freshness found on the first nose.
It then shows itself to be enchanting and luscious, revealing notes of zesty citrus fruit, quince and green tea, magnified by deliciously elegant bubbles, characteristic of this wine of power and character.
The high proportion of Pinot Noir in the blend lends the wine structure and length as well as a perfect balance of generosity and elegance.
The Sir Winston Churchill 2013 is a veritable symphony of sensations.
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Louis Roederer Cristal Brut 2015
96 Points
$375
A perfect combination of softness and concentration, matched by a masterful maturity.
The 2015 Cristal Brut delivers intense and delicious aromas with a superb energy and a magical vibration.
This is a timeless champagne with a chalky temperament, sustained by its soils, freed from the sunny character of the vintage.
The nose begins with hints of yellow fruit, toasted almonds and wheat from the Chardonnay, combined with the juicy red fruit of the Pinot Noir.
Then comes the great surge of energy from the wine’s structure, a vibratory intensity that transforms into a gentle caress, a silky texture interwoven with fine flavors of candied citrus and iodized spices.
The vintage’s chalky character thus bursts forth in a bracing, vertical effervescence, with an insistent, precise and finely honed freshness.
The finish is underpinned by subtle oaky, sappy and saline notes, which creates the ultimate sensation of delicacy and concentration.
Cristal 2015 remains a wine of supreme balance and measure, resonating from the chalky nature of its soils rather than the sunny character of its vintage.
A perfect Cristal, intensely of the 2015 vintage, with enormous ageing potential.
Blend: 60% Pinot Noir, 40% Chardonnay
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Dom Perignon P2 Vintage 2004
94 Points
$585
For each vintage and from its inception, a limited number of bottles are set aside in the cellars, predestined for longer maturation.
With this extra time, the inner activity in the bottle increases. The yeast transfers its energy to the wine… a mysterious transfer of life.
After close to 15 years, expansion of energy reaches its peak and Dom Pérignon rises to an apex of essential, radiant vitality in its state of Plénitude.
Elevated to new heights, it unfurls across every dimension – wider, deeper, longer, more intense – and gifted further with an extended longevity.
The 2004 fruit remains discreet, yet more clearly defined in this second life of the Vintage.
Citrusy notes of pink grapefruit and blood oranges gently cede to figs.
The additional time on the lees elevates the minerality of the vintage with the sublime maturity that is Dom Pérignon’s signature.
Cocoa, mocha, roasted nuts, brioche and honey.
The wine balances on the edge with immediacy and surprise, evolving between tension and weightlessness.
It has an extreme, tactile precision, deep and sculptural.
The sensations come together in a persistent and elegant finish, underlined by sappy, licorice notes.
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – Charles Heidsieck Champagne Charlie 2017
96 Points
$700
The Champagne Charlie legend is intertwined with the soul of a man who bequeathed so many new ideas to his House, and who knew what it was to be an entrepreneur, a gentleman and an innovator.
Free-spirited and adventurous, his inspiration was enough to encourage his heirs today to recreate a cuvée in his name and, more particularly, in his nickname.
Cyril Brun, cellar master, has recreated the Champagne Charlie cuvée, relaunched on the occasion of Charles Heidsieck’s bicentennial.
Close to 80% matured réserve wines and 20% wines from 2016.
Blend: 48% Pinot Noir, 52% Chardonnay
Best Champagne Choices For Easter – 2008 Pierre Peters Cuvee Speciale ‘Les Chetillons’ Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru Brut
95 Points
$750
Aromas of iodine, tangerine oil and citrus zest mingle with nuances of smoke, crushed chalk, walnut oil and freshly baked bread.
A full-bodied, tensile and tight-knit wine that’s much more linear and incisive by comparison with the broader, fleshier 2009 that preceded it.
Long, intense and searingly chalky, this is still a few years away from drinking at its peak, but its quality is already apparent.
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