Clos du Mesnil

Clients tasting Ultimate Champagne 2009

The House of Bollinger

Ultimate Champagne

15 - 19 March 2010, 6 - 10 September 2010

We have been visiting the Champagne region with our champagne loving clients 15 times a year since 1987, so not only are we the un-rivalled leading experts to the region, we can truly claim to know much about Champagne and have a very genuine personal passion for the wines.

On this special luxury tour we stay at a small manor house hotel (with an indoor pool) belonging to one of the small Champagne producers that we have long been admirers of. We will take this over for our exclusive use as our own personal "club house" for this VIP tour and then from here we have a series of our dream, top-level Champagne visits and tastings. We have been arranging this tour for four years now and indeed surprised ourselves that we took 16 years to include this unique tour in our portfolio!

We travel to the region by first class Eurostar to Lille and on from here by road (the fastest connection to the region). Of course we'll have a brief introductory tasting en-route to make the journey go more pleasantly. After settling in, we begin the first of our dream champagne tastings. Your wine guide will host a comparative tasting of his own personal or Arblaster & Clarke family favourites and some of the greatest Cuvvees and vintage champagnes from Houses that we are not visiting during the week - this may include Veuve-Clicquot's Grande Dame, Salon, De la Motte, Cattier's Clos du Moulin and a few other great champagnes from leading small Houses. After this splendid start, we visit Philipponnat in the next village, whose single vineyard cuvée de prestige, Clos des Goisses is a truly superb wine; we start the trip in style as their guests for dinner prepared by a Michelin starred restaurant after a visit to the Clos, whose steep sides reach down into the Marne canal below.

Over the next couple of days we'll taste, in the company of our knowledgeable wine expert, a series of top cuvees from the most famous names in Champagne, over private invitations to lunch and dinner as guests of the Houses and at our own highly-acclaimed comparative tasting.

Some of the Houses to be visited are listed below.

The Champagne Houses

Philipponnat

The Champagne Philipponnat in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ is a relatively modern house, founded in 1912. Philipponnat is now owned by the Bruno Paillard group and is run by Charles Philipponnat. This has always been an underrated house offering good quality and excellent value. The house style is generally elegant and fresh, with plenty of easy-going fruit and a soft, smooth mousse. Philipponnat owns one of Champagne's greatest vineyards the Clos des Goisses and this is also the firm's 'Cuvee de Prestiege'. The Clos des Goisses is an intense, complex wine with strong, ripe fruit. It is capable of extremely long ageing. Our dinner here is hosted by Charles Philipponnat and is prepared for us by a Michelin Rosette restaurant.

Bollinger

Founded in 1829 by Admiral de Villermont, an important landowner, and his future son-in-law Jacques Bollinger, a native of Württemberg. This famous Champagne house in Aÿ has a very traditionalist image; it certainly continues to make muscular Pinot Noir-dominated wine of body, depth, vinous complexity and exceptional longevity. Since Ghislain de Montgolfier, who is direct descendant of the founder, took over the reins in 1995, the Bollinger style has changed very slightly, and for the better. The 'Special Cuvee' has lost the hard, serious edge it sometimes had, replaced by a richer, more expansive character that we recognise in the 'Grand Année'.

You will be warmly welcomed by this prestigious House for a special gourmet lunch and tasting.

Pol Roger

This Epernay house remains family owned and, until 1955, possessed no vineyards whatsoever. It currently owns 85 hectares. The non-vintage, White Foil, is an excellent example of the desired balance between the powerful Pinot Noir grape and the fresh character of the Chardonnay. Their rosé is exquisitely perfumed with strawberry, peach and raspberry, and is simply delicious. The vintages should be aged and then will show real class. Pol Roger's prestige cuvée is the Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill which shows both elegance and complexity. We have enjoyed a long association with this wonderful House dating back to 1988 and we are pleased to be invited for dinner hosted by a member of the family.

Krug

The great House of Krug in Reims is an extremely traditional producer, with all their wines being vinified in small oak casks. They claim not to make a NV Brut but rather a cuvée de Prestige - the Krug Grande Cuvée Brut, with a bottle age of 6 years minimum. Krug simply produces great wines of extra-ordinary complexity, which take time to mature. Given the fame of the brand it is surprising to discover that the production is only very limited - around half a million bottles a year. In addition to the Grande Cuvée, Krug produce a Rosé, a Vintage and a magnificent Blanc de Blancs from their walled vineyard in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger.

Moët & Chandon

Claude Moët, a wine trader descended from an old family resident in the Champagne region since the 14th century, founded his house in Epernay in 1743, and decided to perpetuate the Dom Perignon legacy. His grandson, Jean-Rémy Moët, is the one who, in the 19th century, really helped the house expand by opening it up to foreign markets. Jean-Rémy Moët handed the house over to his son and his son-in-law, Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles and it became known as Moët & Chandon. Moët is the largest Champagne house of all and owns a truly massive vineyard of exceptional quality. The ubiquitous non-vintage is actually a very good Champagne. (It is our impression that it has improved greatly in the past few years). Dom Perignon is quite excellent, a perfectly balanced supremely fine Champagne.

Our tasting of several vintages of Dom Perignon appropriately takes place in Hautvillers, where the eponymous monk lived and dedicated his work to creating the finest wines in the region. Much is made these days of how Dom Perignon did not invent Champagne. He was the first star winemaker, the first master blender and as Hugh Johnson says in his "The Story of Wine", the first wine scientist of the modern world. We can surely forgive him for the stories that the last Abbé of Hautvillers made up in the restoration after Napoleon.

Jacquesson

Jacquesson was established in 1798 and as evidence of what an important house this was, their cellars in Chalons stretched for ten kilometres of underground. Today they are based in Dizy in the Montagne de Reims and are owned by the Chiquet family. They are now a small house but working to the very highest quality. The Chiquet brothers have a quest to make the finest Champagnes that they can every year. In so doing they have abandoned the idea of making a consistent ‘non vintage’ with a 'house style' and now have abandoned the idea of making a house vintage or cuvée de prestige too.

Those of us who remember with affection their 'Perfection' NV and 'Signature. Vintage can now instead join them on an exciting journey to interpret each year individually and explore the terroirs of their single vineyard cuvées. The wines are entirely from the largely organic vineyards that they control, they are fermented in large oak vats, are unfiltered and are made with almost every step of the production being continually refined. Monsieur Chiquet, who has raised his Champagne to extraordinary heights, hopes to be present to show us around and explain his philosophy before giving us a fascinating tasting. This is another superb House whose fortunes Arblaster & Clarke has closely followed since the 1980s.

Billecart-Salmon

The Billecart family has lived in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ since the 16th century. This small house always produced high-quality Champagnes of great finesse. Billecart-Salmon is particularly renowned for the delicate style of its rosé - the essence of their style has always been its meticulous production, from the double "débourbage" to its long, slow, very cool fermentation. We have watched them rise to super-star status since we first started visiting them in the late 1980s.