BFC 8: A New, Improved Definition of Small

This was never really a fair fight. A tiny, family-owned vineyard's base wine versus a slightly larger, but still small, family-owned vineyard's reserve cuvée.

Ployez-Jacquemart produces 6000 cases a year. Gaston Chiquet is comparably huge with 16,700. Compare this to Moët & Chandon's 2,000,000 or Veuve Clicquot's more than a million cases produced annually. This was a TRUE battle of Little Guys.

And both wines impressed. One a classic expression of Champagne. The other, an intriguing old-school, throw-back. The clear winner... was the crowd.

Ployez-Jacquemart Brut, NV. As they like to say in Champagnese, "This one is 50% Pinot Noir, 50% Chardonnay and the rest Pinot Meunier." They grow red grapes organically on a couple of small parcels near the village of Ludes, and source Chardonnay from grand cru villages elsewhere. Their wines never see malolactic fermentation and are always at the low end dosage-wise. This had a lightly yeasty nose of white wafer and honeyed lemon. It is elegant Champagne, linear, well-balanced and chalky. Fresh lemony apple fruit with layers of strawberry and red currant. And a zippy, stainless-steel and mineral finish.

Gaston Chiquet's Cuvée de Réserve. This is old-school Champagne. Intentionally crafted in an antique, oxidized style. This was disgorged April 2004 and is one-third each Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. It's half 1995, half 1996 (1996 was a biggie, and 1995 didn't suck). The Réserve spends 7 years on its lees. The nose was baked apple, ripe fig, saffron and toffee. This was a big, sensual wine, achey with lees and finished with a brilliant, saline minerality.

Jack Purcells versus satin toe shoes. How do you score a contest like that? Good thing it was only an exhibition.

It Takes a Village

Our mad quest for mud resumes.

If you're a newcomer to our work at the Lab, you can brush up on our Dirt Search Mission Statment here.

Today, we'll be searching for that elusive terroir in the Champagne village of Aÿ. With a tiny population of just over 4000, Aÿ is located at the base of the southern slope of the Montagne de Reims just Northeast of Epernay.

Aÿ is renowned for Pinot Noir. Its red wines were said to be the favorite of the French King, Henri IV. So why then, you may soon be wondering, are we drinking a Chardonnay from Aÿ in the Lab today, a Blanc de Blanc from Gaston Chiquet?

Because Peter Liem, in his truly outstanding Champagne blog, recently wrote that he, "found that this Chardonnay helps me to understand Aÿ’s Pinots better, through a commonality of character and personality." He cites fabled importer Terry Thiese as noting, Chiquet's Blanc de Blanc, "isn’t so much a variant on Chardonnay as it is another dialect of Aÿ.”

So we thought it might be illuminating to drink Chiquet's Blanc de Blanc d'Aÿ, NV, alongside a Pinot Noir from the same village. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find still red wine from Champagne in the U.S. But not impossible. There is an odd (some might argue "novelty") wine from Bollinger, La Côte aux Enfants, Coteaux Champenois (1999), that occasionally appears on local shelves. La Côte aux Enfants is produced from a single vineyard in Aÿ, planted exclusively with Pinot. The wine is only produced in what some Frenchie deems an "exceptional year."

This Chiquet is one of my favorite non-vintage Champagnes. This bottle has a yeasty, slightly sourdough, nose mixed with almond butter and lemon verbena. Beautifully complex and linear. A nervy, citric acid highlights the attack, then cherry-apple fruit swirls around a serious mineral core. This finish is beautiful, crisp and chalky. (Disgorged 5/1/07).

As I'm actually one of those who would argue the Bollinger is a novelty wine, I was surprised by how good it was. A nose of plum and cherries and a beguiling earthy quality. On the palate, the fruit was forward, but not over-powering. Plum, black cherry and mineral water. With peppery tannins and a gentle, chalky mineralité. Although the overall impression was that of feminine delicacy, the various elements seemed bound together by an energetic, almost forceful, tension.

Did we find our Grail in these two wines from Aÿ?

Tough to say with any precision. It was hard to avoid discovering some commonality in the mineral aspects of the two wines. Both had an almost sensual, cherry chalkiness to them. Both seemed to possess that alchemical suggestion of a specific place and time.

But were those neighboring places really there?

Or mere projections...