The Largely, As Yet, Unrealised Potential Of The Great 2002 Champagne Vintage
I couldn’t be bothered to take pictures of each one, so I just thought I’d film them all.
Right. So. What’s a humble, shy, introvert son-of-a-chef like me doing picking over this stratospheric line-up of Champagne. A very large proportion of the greatest and the good are here, I’m sure you’ll agree. Well I was invited to come and taste them by my pal and all-round marketing talent Giles Cooper who heads up the PR and Marketing for England’s most successful and vibrant fine wine company, Bordeaux Index. All I can say, Giles, is thank you. Thank you very much. This was a rare opportunity indeed. Up there with tasting 2010 White Burgundy, or 2005 Bordeaux.
It is simply impossible to get insight into the the true quality and potential of a vintage by reading someone else’s opinion. From my experience, every vintage of Champagne is starkly different from every other. I suppose what I am trying to say is that Champagne is more vintage sensitive than possibly any other wine on the planet. So, I will, using these smarty pants examples, try to achieve the unachievable and unlock the soul of what is arguably the best Champagne vintage of a lifetime for you the reader.
In order of the wines on the video clip, they are….
Pol Roger 2002 (60% Pinot Noir 40% Chardonnay)
I’m struggling not to use expletives and hyperbolae already. I remember clearly thinking that if all the other wines are as beautifully expressive as this one, I was about to have an unforgettable afternoon. This wine was, as I know now, looking beautifully expressive and open, far more than most here. It was pure set honeycomb and Crunchie bars on the nose, with a clarity and vivid focus that only the very finest vintage champagnes ever possess. I noticed how floral, and perfectly ripe the Pinot Noir component was. The Pinot has also contributed considerably more breadth than I am used to seeing in Pol Roger’s wines. OK. That’s the first clue to the character of 2002 Champagnes. As I look down the list below, this is a vintage where, if possible, the houses have appeared to favour an increase in Pinot in the blends. That’s not to say that the Chardonnay’s no good. Christ. Quite the opposite, but for earlier drinking cuvées, Pinot Noir seems the only way to achieve that. All the Pinot dominant wines were considerably more forward and balanced, and ‘affinée’ than the tightly locked time bombs that are the Blanc de Blancs. Speaking of which…
Pol Roger 2002 Blanc de Blancs (100% Chardonnay)
It’s tight. Really really tight. “Toit like a toiger.” (Please refer to first Goldmember scene in Goldmember Austin Powers 3) I don’t remember a vintage of this wine that I didn’t prefer to the blend above. What does that tell me? Well, it reminds me of the chardonnay in previous vintages, like 1973, 1988 but with heroic levels of extract. These wines are so minerally that, they exhibit a chalky, almost granular texture. If I didn’t know better, I would say there is a degree of rusticity in these wines. It is, in fact, the opposite case. These wines are incredibly slow evolving and will attenuate, smooth out and develop perfume over the sinewy youthful fruit that they current possess. This is wonderful wine, but I wouldn’t tackle it yet. Classic, fine, tight and long. It will be a classic Pol Roger Blanc de Chardonnay, like '88 but with more weight combined and the perfumed elegance of the '86.
Louis Roederer Cristal 2002 (55% Pinot Noir 45% Chardonnay)
This is Cristal. It is exactly that. What I am trying to say is that if you’ve had a great vintage of Cristal before, and this is definitely one of them, you can tell straight away that this is indeed what it says it is, as if it was showing you its passport. Everything about it screams Cristal, in a broad-strokes, Rolf Harris “Can you tell what it is yet?” way. Not many wines in the world are as distinctive as Krug and Cristal. I think it was Max Schubert, the legendary creator of Penfold Bin 95 Grange Hermitage (as it was known back then) that said that greatness is only half about the quality. He said that a wine could be perfect without being truly great. It was equally important for the wine to be different. Well, love it or loath, and it’s not my favourite, Cristal is both brilliantly screwed together, and utterly unique and non-derivative. So, for those of you who don’t know what it is about Cristal that sets it apart, I shall attempt to describe it. Baking bread. Sourdough in particular. It has the smell, when released, that always reminds me of sourdough minutes after being but in the oven. There’s a hint of molasses and orange rind too. In fact, to me, Cristal always remind me of Jamaican gingerbread. That broad orange citrus aroma, with a malty, mid-bake ginger loaf and digestives. Now, this wine is a decade old and still has all of these characters. It is clearly unready. At the Roederer Awards last year, I tasted a glass of the 2004 with the competition winners, and that loaf was fully formed and ready to come out. Rich, succulent and crusty. I was suprised how unusually forward and delicious it was, in fact. This wine, perhaps of all Champagnes, needs the longest time in bottle before it can be drunk with maximum enjoyment. The 2002 is a true vin-de-garde, and I imagine will repay cellaring for at least another 5 years. I know many wine-makers in Champagne will wholeheartedly disagree with me, but this is a wine that I only love with a minimum of 10 years on cork, and this one has 3 years to go. Like quite a few of these wines, I now see why Bordeaux Index might have invested heavily in this vintage. Watch the price on this wine rise over the next half decade.
Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 2002 (100% Chardonnay)
Ahh. My darling Comtes. This cuvée has been on truly sizzling form since the late eighties. It is, if I have to declare my hand, the wine above all wines that I would select to drink when or if I ever choose to remarry, if I lose a dear loved one or if my children have something to celebrate. It wouldn’t, however be suitable for celebrating a lottery win, no matter how much it was for. It is far far too classy for anything as vulgar as that. This is a very very long-lived wine with perfect balance, and if you catch it at it’s apogee, it has a truly intoxicating scent. I recently had it served to me blind at a wine dinner with Roger and Sue at The Harrow in Little Bedwyn. No one got the vintage right (It was 1998) but it was the first wine of the evening, and it was the best. Perfect even. There was warm sun. I had beautiful company, and I couldn’t have wanted for anything more delicate, poised and fine. After tasting over a hundred wines, it was that first mouthful of wine that I was still thinking of. I also drank the 2000 with a dear dear friend on her birthday last year. It was also utterly sublime, and so open and supple, in line with the vintage, that we drank it with relish through every course of our Skye Gyngall lunch at Petersham Nurseries. So? How does this vintage compare? Well way back at the beginning of the year, I had my first taste of it the Harper’s Champagne Symposium, and wrote it up in the third of three blog posts I did covering the event.
I said
“It smells of acacia, magnolia flowers, vanilla orchid and lime blossom. The wine arm-wrestles with your tongue at the moment, but is already showing incredible finesse. Can’t wait to taste it for a proper appraisal in a year or two. I think I would buy one to drink Christmas 2013"
I think that I got it about right, but having tasted it again here, I would extend that cellering time until the year after. 2014 is more sensible. This wine is very young, and has so much more to give. To think that most of it has already been consumed… It’s tantamount to infanticide. Yup, I would be buying wines like this all day long if I could afford to.
Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque 2002 (50% Pinot Noir 46% Chardonnay 4% Pinot Meunier)
I loved this on first taste a couple of years ago. On first impressions, it really appeared to struggle amongst this celestial competition, but it was rich, majestically structured, fruity, but maybe just a little simple. That doesn’t bother me too much, because flavours this clean and robust at ten years old suggest that it’s not going to run out of steam anytime soon, and it will naturally gain complexity in the bottle. Many people see the bottle and imagine this wine is for the feint of heart. It’s not. It is rounded, full, broad and very long.
Dom Ruinart 2002 (100% Chardonnay)
I drank my first glass of Dom Ruinart last year at an unbelievably high-brow art and antique exhibition at the Chelsea Old Hospital, called The Masterpiece, an event where one can buy a whole range of things that I personally couldn’t do without, such as a Edwardian rococo snooker table, a papal forgery or a Mark XIV Supermarine Spitfire. I mean how do people cope? I tasted the 1998, 1996 and the 1993 in magnum. My life changed. Dom Ruinart is the king to Taittinger Comtes’ queen. Equal in quality and precision, it appears to take a much more Matador-like stance. It has such poise and muscle tone. This wine was the first time I have ever drunk a Dom Ruinart that was so blantantly unready. Having said that, there is a monolithic majesty, a latent raw power, like a Lamborghini at idle. It doesn’t so much purr, rather growl like a young panther. It had such chalky energy that I was, well, frightened by it. It was doughy in a tighter way than the Cristal but equally unevolved, with chards of quartz and marble in it. Five years at the very least, before I would approach this again, I reckon. Crikey. I will take a long shot and say that this will be the best wine here in a decade or so. Bloody incredible. I felt humbled is if drinking liquid Kryptonite.
Dom Perignon 2002 (55% Pinot Noir 45% Chardonnay)
I have been moaning jealously to everyone I know this year, because it appeared that everyone I know had tried this wine apart form me. I tried the 2003 Dom and wasn’t blown away. It was maybe a good effort for the vintage, which isn’t something that you ever should have to say of a luxury item like Dom Perignon. However, this is truly delicious. I don’t remember Dom P ever having this much Pinot Noir in it (It is almost always Chardonnay dominant), which takes us back to the first paragraph of this post. Furthermore, considering the tightness of the 2002 vintage per se, and the elegance of the classic Dom Perignon style, this is a truly unusual release. Firstly, it is firing on almost all cylinders already. Whether that is to say that it’s peaking early or whether it will increase in excitement until it goes supernova, I can’t quite tell. I wouldn’t bet against the latter. All I can say is that this is the best relatively young Dom Perignon for drinking in decades. It’s already like a sky full of fireworks, but with all the finesse of a Darjeeling-filled bone china tea cup, with a slice of Amalfi lemon.
Philliponnat Clos des Goisses 2002 (65% Pinot Noir 35% Chardonnay)
This is a wine that I had on my honeymoon. It was the amazing 1988 vintage in a famous restaurant on the Champs-Elysées called the Ledoyen. It was the one truly memorable thing, apart from the astonishing period décor, that I could say about the lunch, apart from the price. This wine went down very well at the tasting, but I felt it was lacking a little of the finesse that most of the other wines showed, and was distinctly shorter on the palate. Mind you, most of the wines in this tasting had extraordinary length, so maybe it is just relative. It was massively proportioned, rounded, riper and showed a kernally quality that I didn’t go a bundle about. It’s either showing adolescence and needs more time, or it just wasn’t for me.
Bollinger Grande Année 2002 (60% Pinot Noir 40% Chardonnay)
When you compare the price of this wine and what it delivers to all the other wines in the tasting, this is not only clearly a work of art in its own right, but an unspeakable bargain. It’s like drinking Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It’s orchestral in size, 1920s mahogany in setting, and full of swooping, fruity clarinets and dueling Steinways. A mouthful of glorious richness and freshness at the same time. If you don’t know what the fuss is about with Bollinger, then drink this. If you still don’t, then bugger off and leave it for the ones that do. 2002 Grande Année? The best in my lifetime. It’s better than '85, '90, and '96 and it will outlive them all. This is a wine of genius at a price that, while not cheap, belies it’s true pedigree. Sheer class and a wine drinkers wine. A bit like drinking sparkling Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos of a similar age, I’d imagine. What a way to finish.
I’m exhausted now. I think I might have a lie down after that.