Blending In: Champagne's Reserve Wines

January 14, 2024|Kaaren Palmer.

Wine cellar with large wooden barrels in rows under arched ceiling, winery storage room

Blending, or assemblage, is an important factor in understanding champagne’s uniqueness and history as a wine of nature and human intervention.

Irrespective of a champagne’s ultimate blend, what is important is for those tasting to understand how blending components contribute to texture, structure and flavour, and thereby to balance, add complexity and length.

Most champagnes are a blend of some kind, which is necessary to achieve balance that may not otherwise exist, due largely to the region’s northerly climate irregularities. But the blending of ingredients is not exclusively related to combining three main grape varieties in a classic cuvée style. Blends may also constitute wines produced from contrasting complementary, or even single vineyards or villages, with or without malolactic fermentation, various forms of vinification, use of different yeasts, whether the lees will be stirred into the ferment to add flavour and texture (bâtonnage), whether the wines will be stored on fine lees or not (i.e. to what degree there will be fining or filtering), and inclusion of reserve wine.

Fermentation occurs prior to any decision to declare still wines (vins clairs) suitable as vintage wines, that is, the produce of a single year, as well as which wines will become non-vintage, and which will be stored - or reserved - for blending in future years.

The options, percentages and proportions, are a blending puzzle requiring annual solving by each champagne producer. The hope is that the result will be declared a vintage wine (reflecting the characteristics of the year and the harvest), or non-vintage, embodying perfect harmony and the stylistic aspirations of the house. Only after that puzzle has been solved can the resulting wines be bottled with more yeast and sugar to bring on secondary fermentation, thereby increasing alcohol by one or two percent, and therefore the bubbles from carbon dioxide.

Reserve wines are the more mysterious side of champagne’s non-vintage blends. Most champagne produced is of this type, a blend of wines from multiple years, so no date is displayed on the label. In most cases, the current vintage (known as the base wine) provides a large percentage of the nonvintage blend; the balance being made up of wines from earlier vintages – referred to as reserve wines - which are used to maintain House style, enhance the blend of a given year, compensate for a shortfall due to poor harvests, or to boost production in line with demand.

The Brut Réserve NV featured around 40 percent reserve wine with an average age of ten years. It is these gorgeous, older wines that shaped Charles Heidsieck’s cuvées, rather than the current vintage. Sadly, Daniel Thibault died in 2002 but his assistant, Régis Camus, continued the highly respected style as did Thierry Roset, the subsequent chef de caves, and then Cyril Brun who, without quite the largesse of prior owners, forges ahead in a similar style with his own recipe for complexity. The aim is to approach, at a more reasonable price, the complexity of Krug, also a masterful user of reserve wines, to define their most important cuvée.

Krug's winemakers can choose from a huge library of reserve wines, sourced from up to 13 vintages.

All these different vineyard parcels are fermented in wood and stored in stainless steel of many different sizes in Krug’s cellars. The older wines, being quite rich, might only contribute a very small portion, but they serve as ‘spice’ to the blend in much the same way that we might use salt and pepper.

Louis Roederer is another House that spends an immense amount of time and money on reserves, storing 10 or so choice vintages in a magnificent collection of huge oak barrels, each containing 4,000 to 7,000 litres.

Devaux, a co-operative of winegrowers in the south of Champagne (the area known as the Aube or the Côte des Bar), makes sure that all bases are covered; its reserves are stored in three different ways. Some are already blended in 4,500 litre (1,200 gallon) oak barrels, some are kept as individual wines, without filtration on their fine lees in stainless steel, and the remainder is in a solera system of reserves.

Champagne’s solera storage is similar to that used for sherry production in Spain. In this system, whatever is used from the oldest barrel is replaced by wine from the next barrel in the row. The current harvest’s wine is added to the newest barrel. No barrel is ever drained, so there is always some older wine in every barrel.

As the solera becomes older, the wines in the last barrel become more and more complex, and go back many years. Some champagne producers keep stainless steel soleras to avoid the oxidative influence of wood. Champagne's soleras are often as simple as using a percentage of the solera and topping it up with the same percentage of the new harvest. Strictly speaking, this is a réserve perpetuelle system rather than a solera.

The idea of using a solera (or perpetual reserve) has been adopted by a number of smaller champagne producers. Drappier, at Urville in the Côte des Bar, began the task of building reserves in this way in 2005. Laherte Frères NV Les Clos/Les 7 is a blend of all seven of the currently permitted Champagne varieties (chardonnay, pinot noir, meunier, arbanne, petit meslier, pinot blanc and fromenteau/pinot gris) and is fermented and aged in oak. The entire composition of this wine is from a perpetual solera, also begun in 2005, in which 60 percent of the blend is always from the latest harvest. At Champagne H. Billiot, the solera for its Cuvée de Prestige, Cuvée Laetitia, began in 1983, much earlier than the former two examples.

In 1987, cult grower Anselme Selosse, always a pioneer, began a solera system exclusively for his exceedingly multifaceted Substance champagne.

Bérèche & Fils began a solera for its Cuvée de Prestige Reflet d’Antan in 1990 and David Pehu in Verzenay began his solera for reserves in the late 1990s.

Francis Boulard created his prestige Cuvée Petraea (not 2012) as a perpetual reserve: each year, the wine from the current harvest (50 percent) is added to the blend and the remaining 50 percent of the cuvée consists of wine from prior years going back to 1997 in decreasing amounts. This grower restarted the solera in 2012 so that it's now fully organic. Champagne Dehours is another with a solera, going back to 1998. All these producers, however, are in the minority. In the case of smaller growers, who may not have facilities to store many years’ worth of wine, reserves from just a couple of years will enhance young champagne. Here lies one of the most significant differences between grower champagnes and those from large Houses. Most small producers blend perhaps two or three years of harvest, producing simpler but nonetheless delicious styles that are all about the particular vineyards from which the grapes spring.

As Marie-Noëlle Ledru says, 'The prior year’s wines are always more supple than the wine of the year, which is fresh and sharp.' For her, the older wine adds complexity, and the new wine refreshes the vivacity of the blend.

For most, small vignerons and large Houses alike, conservation of reserves is in stainless steel tanks, which ensures predictable quality for the stored wines. But small growers do not have magnificent storage facilities such as those of Pol Roger, which can draw down from row upon row of huge stainless steel tanks representing each of the three main grape types from 30 separate villages going back at least three years, and with more wines set aside from good years. The harvest of 2008, a great vintage, contributed to Pol Roger’s customarily excellent non-vintage Brut Réserve, but that champagne also contained reserves from four prior years. In this way, Pol Roger was able to release more 2008 wine for the declared vintage blend, while at the same time maintaining its House style.

But every year is different; Pol Roger Brut Réserve can contain as little as 10 percent reserve wine or as much as 30 percent, such as the one with the 2006 base wine.

For wines that have been fermented in oak, care must be taken to protect reserves from further oxidation, as the wines have already had a degree of exposure to oxygen via wood. The general rule here is to seal the wines in stainless steel tanks.

Bollinger is a rare exception, choosing to store individual years, individual villages (cru) and individual grape variety (cépage) in 800,000 magnums on cork under light pressure, to keep the reserve wines fresh. Up to seven reserve wines from its range are selected each year in order to maintain House style. In times past, Bollinger added only four to ten percent of reserve wines to each blend, its barrel fermented reserves being very rich.

These days, the non-vintage blend might extend to 60 percent reserve wine across 1–15 vintages, which include a proportion of the aforementioned magnums.

Champagne Pierre Gimonnet also favours glass storage under gentle pressure because of ‘the tendency of Cuis chardonnay to oxidise quickly’ (according to chef de cave Didier Gimonnet) when stored in stainless steel tanks. Its reserves are stored on fine lees in magnums, allowing them to mature and develop body without evolving too rapidly.

The fashion for wines without dosage sugar has seen reserve wines used as a vehicle to increase richness as a substitute for sweetness. Reserves make the finished wine more subtle, rounded and supple. That’s why Dumangin uses 60 percent reserve wines in its Extra Brut non-vintage, while Gosset’s Celebris Extra Brut contains 45 percent, and Laurent-Perrier finds 40 percent reserves from a hot, ripe year for its Ultra Brut. It’s all about drinkability.

Reserve wines increase complexity because, being from earlier vintages, they are more developed than current harvest wines, adding toasty, nutty and honeyed characters to a blend.

If the reserves have been kept at length on lees, they add vinosity – that is, more of the flavour, colour and texture of wine. Reserve wines may also contain more acetaldehydes (usually called aldehydes) that impart a faint sherry-like richness, adding further complexity and interest to champagne, and becoming more obvious as the wine opens in the glass.

Reserves usually make young champagnes – wines given a minimum of time on lees and which otherwise might show an imbalance of brash acidity – readier to enjoy. In mature, serious champagnes, reserves can help to add structure around which a great wine can develop. And bytasting reserve wines that have been selected for a blend, and then tasting the finished blend, it is possible to experience exactly how the reserve wines add to aromas and flavours.