The Quest for Great Rosé Champagne Continues…
5/11/13 -
Many glowing things have been written about Raphaël Bérèche: “rising star”; “one of the best young Champagne growers”, etc… and many superlatives used to describe his wines. Our own Champagne selection tells of a great affection for this Domaine’s wines. Bérèche gives us tasty Brut Reserve, and Bérèche’s Extra Brut Reserve, which receives an extra year of aging sur lie, is an absolute favorite at Chambers Street Wines. Since Raphaël took over the Domaine in the early 2000s, Bérèche has also begun to produce highly chiseled, low dosage and Brut Nature Champagnes that reveal both excellent organic work in the vines and almost obsessive attention to detail in the cellar. The Domaine gives us a miniscule quantity of top notch, single-vintage, single-terroir wine.
The house style at Bérèche is marked by barrel aging for the base wines and aging under cork during the second fermentation (“tirer à liege”). These are processes that allow more exposure to oxygen during élèvage (a French word that in this context means to “bring up” or “raise” the wine as though it were a child); exposure to oxygen creates deeper, more complex and finely textured Champagnes. While barrel aging is relatively common in Champagne, tirer à liege is less so… and it’s not for the faint hearted since it’s a risky business that exposes the wine to greater danger of cork taint. Bérèche insists that cork aging in the cellar is vital to creating creamy and fine mousse in the resultant wine, and it’s worth the risk of a few off-bottles (that being said, we have yet to taste an off-bottle from Bérèche..)
2012 brought us our first round of Bérèche single vineyards (we’ll look forward to having those again later this year). 2013 has brought us still more new wines from Raphaël Bérèche: Reflet D’Antan and Rosé Campania Remensis. “Reflet D’Antan” means “reflection of yesteryear” and, in keeping with a current mini-trend amongst Champagne growers, there are older vintages in the bottle imparting a stately, burnished, and timeless character to the wine. Bérèche uses a perpetual cuvée for Reflet’s base wine à la Selosse, and now quite a few others who have adopted this technique. It’s reasonable to think that “Reflet” will age similarly to Selosse’s “Substance”, but we don’t have hard evidence as this is the first release of the wine.
As a category, Rosé Champagne, often highly priced and with ample dosage, innocuous, and generally uninteresting, poses a challenge for us. Campania Rememsis is an extremely distinct Rosé “d’assemblage” (Rosé Champagne made by “assembling” or blending a small quantity of red wine into a white Champagne), entirely comprising fruit from the village of Ormes, just west of Reims. When we encounter a Rosé Champagne we like, we snap it up and shower it with praise. Bérèche’s Rosé Champagne Campania Remensis is the most exciting Rosé Champagne we’ve tasted in a long time and we urge you to buy one or two (or three or four…) for special meals, or for the cellar. It won’t hurt to have a decanter on hand as this is Champagne that benefits from air to show all it’s got. More details below… Salut! -Sophie
