Simultaneously capturing euphoric freshness, refined elegance and exacting fruit definition is one of the finest skills of Champagne’s winemakers, and nowhere is this more challenging than in the tightrope balance of long-aged rosé. In the sublime 2002 season, Billecart has achieved the seemingly impossible and conjured a rosé both larger and lighter than life. True […]
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A stunning Dom Pérignon has recently been unleashed to wow the world. After the powerful 2002 and the abrasive 2003, 2004 is a backward and honed Dom Pérignon of understated intensity, charged with dramatic tension of high-voltage electricity. At almost a decade of age, it seems to transcend the very passage of time itself, projecting […]
readBlanc des Millénaires was the oldest currently available champagne in the last edition of this Guide, and — remarkably — it’s still available. More incredibly, it’s transcended to another plane of silken magnificence at a full 18 years of glorious age. The greatest soils of the Côte des Blancs rumble in precise, finely chalky mineral […]
readEven toward the end of its release, this wine is staggeringly youthful, somehow mustering even more pristine freshness than it revealed when it first landed. It sings with the zest of lemon and lemongrass, the crunch of pear, the spice of quince and the tang of granny smith apple. The bottle I tasted at the […]
readGrand Cuvée is more tense and fresh in its current late 2011 disgorgements than I have ever seen it. In spite of its profound maturity and inimitable complexity, it sings with a youthful definition that Krug has progressively refined in recent years. A zesty, crunchy amalgam of apple, pear and every form of citrus you […]
readThe 2004 Comtes brings back all the innocence of a joyful childhood, of scaling lemon and lime trees to plunder their tangy fruits, of a free-as-air dash through fields of daisies in endless blue daylight, of freshly roasted cashew nuts mounded in market baskets, and of a breathless plunge into an icy mountain rock pool. […]
readVeuve Clicquot has the resourcefulness to set aside a respectable allocation of every vintage release for its late-disgorged Cave Privée. A bold venture, not least because vintages that don’t age well will never surface. Twenty-three years post-vintage and five years post-disgorgement, 1990 is a grand testimony to the enduring power of a vintage that has […]
readThere’s a gentle and calm demeanour to Krug 2000 that belies its tumultuous season. In spite of its glowing generosity it’s somehow transfixed in time, held in suspended animation and astonishingly unchanged from its release two years ago, yet somehow even more expressive than I have ever seen it. The sheer endurance of even a […]
readVeuve Clicquot’s Vintage Rosé’s ideal is for the grapes to speak, and La Grande Dame Rosé’s ideal is for the soil to speak. And speak it does, with an avalanche of tumbling fury of chalk minerality from the five loftiest grand crus of the Montagne de Reims and Côte des Blancs. Clos Colin delivers a […]
readGrande Cuvée is no more, but one of the great champagnes of recent times has not gone quietly into the night. Its final vintage just keeps getting better, returning for yet another rousing encore this year. At a full 15 years of age, Grande Cuvée has grown into an iridescent gleam of yellow straw. Its […]
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