Nicolas Maillart's story starts with three villages and two sides of one family.
Écueil and Villers-Allerand, both Premier Cru, sit on the northern side of the Montagne de Reims, while Bouzy Grand Cru lies much further south and east. Between its members, Maillart's family farms around 17 hectares, but what strikes me isn't the acreage, it's the inheritance behind it. Écueil comes down through Maillart's father's side; Villers-Allerand and Bouzy through his mother's. Each village carries its own history, its own soil story, its own reading of what Champagne can be.
The Bouzy vines once belonged to his maternal great-grandfather, a vigneron whose own children didn't carry the winemaking on. The family kept the land, though, leasing it out to growers while Maillart's mother took on its management. For years, the fruit went straight to the grandes marques. Now Maillart buys it himself.
"Instead of selling the grapes to big companies, I'm selling them to myself," he told me - and I loved the simplicity of that line, even though I suspect the reality behind it is anything but simple. Different family members still own different parcels; Maillart farms the land and makes the wine. He could, in theory, fold it all into one tidy company. The family has chosen not to.
"Families are complicated," he said, with the shrug of someone who made peace with that fact a long time ago. "If it works like that, I keep it like that. If they're happy, I'm happy."
It's a low-key answer to a question that's becoming hard to avoid in Champagne: what does ownership even mean when the person farming the vines, making the wine and putting his name on the label doesn't necessarily own the ground beneath them? And as land grows more valuable and families grow more spread out, how many of these estates will manage to stay whole for another generation?
Three villages, three different characters
Maillart's vineyards all speak very differently. In Bouzy, the vines sit almost directly on chalk. In Villers-Allerand, there's roughly a metre of clay before you reach it. Around Écueil, some parcels carry noticeably deeper clay, including sand.
Maillart uses those differences two ways - as a source of layered complexity in his blends, and, elsewhere, as a way of letting a single parcel or village speak entirely for itself.
"You can have Pinot Noir from here and Pinot Noir from there, and you can easily understand that they express themselves differently," he said, which sounds obvious while tasting them side by side.
In Villers-Allerand, the family has something increasingly rare, scale. A 1.5-hectare parcel has somehow escaped the endless subdivision that's whittled so many Champagne vineyards down to narrow ribbons of vines. Running down the slope, it lets Maillart plant according to what the soil actually wants; Meunier higher up, Pinot Noir through the middle, Chardonnay where the chalk pushes closer to the surface, then Meunier again where the clay thickens.
Bouzy flips the script entirely. Chardonnay in Bouzy is a genuinely interesting question right now. As seasons warm and ripeness comes easier, plenty of growers are wondering whether Pinot Noir should simply take over. Maillart isn't convinced.
"I like Chardonnay from Bouzy," he said, simply. Why pull something out before you've properly understood what it might still become? His Bouzy Chardonnay is broader, more vinous than anything from the Côte des Blancs. At a moment when Champagne is quietly rethinking the old certainties around variety, exposure and a changing climate, Maillart's vineyards feel like a useful place to ask the question.
From the vineyard to barrel
All the fruit travels to Écueil, where Maillart's cellars are located, for pressing. He is upfront about the trade-off; you're always transporting something, either grapes or must, and neither is free of compromise. His choice comes down to control.
"I prefer to have a view of the grapes," he told me. "Then I have a better vision of what I can do. I know everything; it's my process." New winery facilities, currently under construction, will give him more room to receive and cool fruit as harvests grow warmer, and more space for the barrels that have quietly become central to how he works.
The grapes are pressed, given a natural, overnight débourbage with no enzymes, then fermented in barrel and raised for around ten months to a year, staying in oak right through to after the next harvest, when bottling preparations begin. Nothing today goes anywhere near stainless steel. But that wasn't a founding principle, it was an evolution.
Maillart left the cooperative system to make his own wine in 2003, he started small with conventional tanks and just 20 barrels. His feeling for oak had been shaped by time in Burgundy during his studies, but also by the champagnes that had genuinely moved him.
"One of my biggest emotions in Champagne was Krug 1988 and Egly-Ouriet," he said, but what stayed with him wasn't oak flavour as such, but texture, complexity, the sense of a wine still capable of evolving. Early side-by-side trials between tank and barrel weren't perfectly controlled, he'll admit that freely, but they were convincing enough. "In barrel, I had more texture, oxidation was more preserved, and I was getting better complexity."
He built up his barrel count slowly, buying second-hand from Burgundy at first, partly for practical reasons of cost and cellar space, but partly because a producer can't simply flip a wine's style overnight without asking what that means for the people already drinking it. "You move your style slowly," he said. "I have my customers, and I want to keep their loyalty." His first vintage made entirely in oak was 2017.
When does oak actually become part of the wine?
There's a common assumption that barrel-fermented champagne must taste overtly woody. It doesn't have to, and in Maillart's wines it mostly doesn't. What you notice is shape rather than flavour: breadth through the middle palate, a certain energy to the texture, and at its best a saline firmness that has nothing to do with toast or sweetness. So how does a wine spend the best part of a year in barrel without the barrel becoming the loudest voice in the room?
For Maillart, the answer came through years of trial and error, and eventually through the relationship he built with a particular cooper. He tested different coopers, different origins, different toast levels, year after year, until around 2014 or 2015 he found a small cooperage whose barrels gave him exactly the delicacy he was after. New oak now sits at around ten per cent of the cellar, with a very light toast, and he prefers barrels shaped and toasted over fire rather than steam, believing it leaves a different imprint in the wood, though he's quick to say there's no formula you can simply lift from one cellar and drop into another.
"The cooperage and the winemaker are a combination," he said. "You have to experiment." It's a point worth sitting with, because oak so often gets talked about as if it were a fixed ingredient - new or old, big or small, heavily or lightly toasted - when really its whole character depends on the ripeness of the fruit, the composition of the juice, the conditions in the cellar, and what the winemaker is actually trying to say. A barrel that sings in one cellar might overwhelm another entirely.
"With my type of terroir and my profile of maturity, it goes very well with oak," he said. "I don't say it's the best. I just say that, with my vision, that's what I like."
Can oxygen actually be a form of protection?
Maybe the most interesting thread running through Maillart's work is his relationship with oxygen, not as something to fend off, but potentially something to work with.
It started with a particularly firm parcel of Pinot Noir - ripe enough, but with an acidity that could feel hard, almost closed. After talking with other growers, and tasting unsulfured wines from Burgundy's Claire Naudin, Nicolas wondered whether vinifying without sulfur might change the wine's whole shape. His first attempt, in tank, didn't work. After some élevage, the aromatics turned unstable and imprecise. He tried again the following year, this time letting the unsulfured wine ferment in barrel. This time, it worked.
That shifted how he thinks about oxygen altogether. In barrel, wine meets oxygen slowly and steadily, right through fermentation and élevage. Maillart believes that gradual exposure builds aromatic compounds that are, in effect, better prepared for whatever oxygen the wine encounters later in its life. He compares it to a kind of vaccination: controlled exposure now, resilience later. It's not a scientific claim so much as a working theory, but it's a useful way of thinking about his method. He raises his wines oxidatively so that, eventually, they resist oxidation better.
It also explains his light touch with sulfur, added mainly at pressing and again at disgorgement rather than throughout élevage. He doesn't actively push for malolactic fermentation, though it happens partially in some lots particularly the bigger volumes destined for his cuvée, Platine, an approach his father used before him. "I'm harvesting quite late compared with others, and I like to keep maximum freshness," he said.
Which raises a question worth asking more often: does freshness really demand defensive winemaking? Or can a wine's tolerance for oxygen be exactly what makes it last? Maillart says his opened bottles do lose pressure and some of that initial lift, as you'd expect, but they resist the unpleasant aromatic breakdown that oxidation usually brings. For him, that's the clearest argument for everything he does in barrel.
And yet none of it, he's careful to say, is new. "Until the 1950s, everything was made in oak in Champagne," he said. "I'm not inventing anything. I'm just rediscovering the technique."
Tradition moving forward
Platine remains, by far, the largest wine in the House. Nicolas is registered as a négociant-manipulant, but the fruit comes entirely from within the extended family's holdings rather than any wider network of growers - a distinction that matters less as a technicality than as a reminder of how imperfectly Champagne's official categories sometimes describe what's actually happening behind a label.
What keeps circling back through his wines is the idea of inheritance, tradition held lightly rather than nostalgically, and oxygen treated not as a threat but as something that might, handled the right way, offer real protection. Maillart never presents any of this as gospel. Oak isn't inherently better than steel. Late harvesting doesn't automatically make a better wine. Low sulfur isn't a philosophy he's selling. Each choice has simply emerged, slowly, from tasting, watching, and the everyday realities of his vineyards. It feels less like a return to the past than an honest question about why Champagne ever left some of these practices behind and whether, in today's climate, quite literally, a few of them deserve a second look.
The wines
We tasted through a run of cuvées that traced these ideas glass by glass.
Platine opened things up — very ripe, expressive red and black fruit, built entirely from grapes grown within the family's own vineyards, dosed at 1g/L.
Mont Martin 2020, from a 1.5-hectare parcel over a metre of clay and chalk in Villers-Allerand, is mostly Meunier - 65% Pinot Noir, 15% Meunier, all from Villers-Allerand, with 17% Chardonnay and 3% Petit Meslier drawn from across the domaine. It was fresh, precisely ripe, and a lovely reminder of how much difference a single August day of harvest timing can make - very harmonious, very together.
Montchelot 2020, same village but pure Pinot Noir off ten metres of sand over ten metres of chalk in Écueil, dosed at 1g/L, was a different animal entirely - riper, bolder, properly luscious, all juicy blood plum, held together by a great acid line and noticeably more structure than the Meunier.
Jolivettes 2020 came from Bouzy, from a parcel sitting at the same altitude as Pierre Paillard - brut nature, dry, saline, tart cherry fruit, terrific length and an energy that just carries the fruit along. Ten per cent new oak runs across every wine in the range.
Les Ronsures 2022, a Chardonnay, was all perfume - fresh and precise, but with a candied, marmalade edge and a pithy grip that kept it honest.
Les Courzy 2020, a Petit Meslier, was the wine I found myself thinking about longest. It comes from a metre of clay lower on an east-facing slope, from massale selection sourced from a nursery in the Jura, planted in 2003 and only first harvested in August. Maillart told me the planting decision came from genuinely sitting down and reading about climate change: with mostly Pinot Noir in the ground, what would he actually plant if he needed a new variety for a warmer future? Pinot Blanc and Gris didn't seem like the answer. Arbane and Meslier did. Meslier ripens close behind Chardonnay, though never quite catching it - and in a hot vintage, that lag becomes interesting; in 2023 or 2024 it simply doesn't carry the same power in the mouth. It's now going into both Platine and the rosé - 2% was added to the 2022 Platine purely for freshness, and 2020 is only the third vintage he's made of it. He's considering bringing in some bâtonnage to round the style further.
Coteaux Champenois 2022, Les Gillis, a Chardonnay from a south-facing mid-slope in Écueil, planted via massale selection in 1962, spent two years ageing - just 734 bottles made. Gilles, blended with Le Chalot, becomes the base for a longer-aged champagne; the massale fruit gave the wine a distinct muscat lift, and Maillart noted how much easier the mid-slope position in Écueil makes it to track ripeness as it happens.
In Australia, Nicolas Maillart's champagnes can be purchased from East End Cellars online.
