Finest Fizz – Champagne's Prestige Cuvées
Dom Pérignon or Cristal? Your answer will say quite a lot about you. If you say "Neither, I'll have Selosse, please," it will say even more.
If, given a choice of prestige cuvées of Champagne, you choose a grower's wine like Jacques Selosse, you obviously know a lot about wine, and care about it, too. Now, I would never suggest that connoisseurs don't admire Champagne's biggest brands; they do, and with good reason: they are superb wines. But, when it comes to prestige cuvées, image is as important as the taste of what's inside the bottle. Image and flavor are two of the three key reasons why people choose one rather than another – the third being investment potential. But that really only applies to a handful of wines.
To see how image and flavor interact, let's look at Veuve Clicquot's decision to change the blend of La Grande Dame, its prestige cuvée. This is a big move, because most prestige cuvées derive their style from the producer's non-vintage. The NV is a rigorous expression of house style; the vintage can go (relatively) wild and express the vintage, but with the prestige cuvée we are back to house style, but an apotheosis of house style. The prestige cuvées of the great houses are made from the very best grapes, blended with meticulous care and aged to perfection – and they're relatively safe. They won't challenge you in the way that growers' wines, or the most extreme wines from the houses, like Billecart-Salmon's Cuvée Sous Bois, might.
Grande Dame, from the 2008 vintage, is 92 percent Pinot Noir, up from about 60 percent. The original idea was to make it into a Blanc de Noirs, but the balance didn't quite work that way, and 8 percent of Chardonnay was necessary for verve and freshness in a complex, rich blend.
What drove the change? One factor – possibly the major factor – was the need to stand out in a crowded prestige-cuvée market. Veuve Clicquot wants to sell more Grande Dame and therefore wants more of a USP to attract our attention to it.
USP, you see. Image. Even having a clear glass bottle can be a point of difference, even though it's a dangerous one because light-strike can spoil a bottle within hours. It's why Cristal has that old-style Lucozade wrapping, and why you should be wary of any restaurant that removes the wrapping to display the bottle in all its naked and vulnerable beauty. Philipponat's Clos des Goisses is a single-vineyard wine; Salon le Mesnil a single cru. All these things help a wine to stand out from the rest of the super-expensive herd.
And yet, most of the time, people who want a prestige cuvée choose Dom Pérignon. Says Peter Valiunis of Armit Wines in London: "It's the ultimate safe go-to Champagne. It's ubiquitous; it's in every restaurant. If you're celebrating, you go for DP."
Cristal was the first of Champagne's prestige cuvées, created in 1876. The first vintage of DP was 1921 but it evolved only slowly into the wine it is today. As it did so, Bollinger reacted by launching RD – Récemment Dégorgé or Recently Disgorged – with the 1952 vintage. How useful it is when the same initials work in both French and English.
DP is by far the biggest in terms of volume, but its ubiquity has not spoilt its image. At one top private members' club in London, members will usually order DP, unless they want blanc de blancs, in which case they go for Dom Ruinart. Cristal? Too many associations with rappers, apparently – though as Valiunis points out, peak rapper for Cristal was around the turn of the century, about 20 years ago. "But it's difficult to shake off that image.
"People with a lot of wine knowledge might go for Krug," he adds. "In the Middle East, Cristal is the go-to brand. In Asia it's Belle Époque from Laurent-Perrier – it's the combination of the bottle and the wine. In nightclubs, it's Luminous from DP." And what might Luminous be? Simple: you press a button on the bottom of the bottle, and the label lights up. Just to make sure that everybody knows what you're drinking. "In Hong Kong," says Valiunis, "if the bottle you've ordered is good it's always put on the table, with the label facing the room." Why bother with stealth wealth when you can shout about it?
And what about Bollinger RD, and Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill? Both have associations with the British aristocracy, and both have a good following, and Valiunis suggests that they appeal to people who go to the South of France on holiday rather than Ibiza.
But there are people, believe it or not, who care more about the flavor. These people will have noted that Bollinger RD, although Bollinger has got fresher in recent years, is still at the richer, oxidative end of the spectrum. DP is at the tight, reductive extreme. Cristal is somewhere in the middle, both tight and rich (sounds like the late J Paul Getty). Few are as tight as DP on release, because most aim for more immediate drinkability. Henriot's prestige cuvée, previously known as Cuvée des Enchanteleurs, is called Hemera from the 2005 vintage, after the Greek goddess of daytime (no, I don't know why) and is also lighter and fresher, less opulent, than it was; there's more Chouilly in the blend, and less of a style gap now between it and the brut NV.
There are prestige cuvées based on Chardonnay elegance: Taittinger's creamy, crystalline, blanc de blancs Comtes de Champagne (first vintage 1952); complex, weighty, rich Salon, also 100-percent Chardonnay; Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle, roughly half Chardonnay, is multi-vintage except in very top years. Multi-vintage is, of course, the expensive way of saying non-vintage. You pay a lot more for multi-vintage than you do for non-vintage. Krug is multi-vintage too, rather than NV. And if you want white flowers, there's Perrier-Jouet's vigorous, rich Belle Époque, in the instantly recognisable enamelled bottle.
Gosset Celebris, more than half Chardonnay (there's also a blanc de blancs version) is powerful, energetic but restrained. It has no malolactic fermentation, a USP that is either risky or forward-looking, depending on your view of where climate change will take Champagne. But they don't shout about it. Chardonnay can be remarkably powerful: at Ruinart, a lot of the Chardonnay comes from the Montagne de Reims, and is richer, more muscular than the Chardonnays of the Côte des Blancs. Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs is thus a Chardonnay that feels something like a Pinot, elegant and generous.
But it's when we get to the Pinot Noir-driven brands that the weight goes up. Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill is powerfully Pinot in style. Billecart-Salmon has weighty, mineral, quite reductive Nicholas-François Billecart as its prestige cuvée. Pinot-based William Deutz from Deutz has a couple of spin-offs in the form of 100-percent Pinot Noir Parcelles d'Ay, one from south-facing La Côte Glacière (a warm site; named presumably by a local wag), and another from east-facing Meurtet, cooler and more saline. All Deutz wines are lovely, but discreet and restrained; they're vinous rather than opulent.
Deutz is not the only house to spin its prestige cuvée into more than one wine. If you're really high-end you launch a prestige, late-released version of your prestige cuvée: DP with P2 and P3, Cristal with Vinothèque, Krug with Collection. Even Moët has a late-released version of its vintage wine: Grand Vintage Collection. Then there are different formats, special bottlings – Bollinger sold a special edition of its 2002 vintage in a gun-silencer-shaped box with a combination lock. Yes, the combination was 007.
Some of these will fare well on the secondary market and can make a nice return for their buyers; but not all. The investment wines, really, are DP, Cristal and Krug vintage. Single-cru Salon Le Mesnil, too. Bollinger RD is on the cusp, as is Philipponat's Clos des Goisses.
According to one leading industry source, it was DP 2002 that really launched the investment market for Champagne prestige cuvées; a great year, a great wine. "It was the glory days of Bordeaux en primeur, and there was money flying about everywhere. Big City [of London] boys were putting down £100,000 or £200,000 here and there, and they thought, why not buy some DP as well? It was much cheaper, and they'd make it back when they sold their Bordeaux. Then the Bordeaux glory days passed, but people were into Champagne. Prestige cuvée Champagne is now number two after Bordeaux for most fine-wine merchants."
So perhaps the real question is not which prestige cuvée you will choose, but whether or not you will ever drink it.
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