LE BRUN SERVENAY

Champagne

“Only in wine does the ungrateful chalk pour out its golden tears.” —Colette

The bedrock of northern Champagne is chalk, a form of limestone. It is at its most ungrateful, with the least clay topsoil, in the Côte des Blancs. With little to no clay, this is where champagne tastes the most consistently chalky, cutting, racy, and suspenseful. To a certain kind of wine lover, Champagne is not champagne, the Côte des Blancs is champagne.

There is a new wave of ultra-talented growers in Champagne today. They favor riper harvests, wood, and oxidative techniques. Their wines can be stunning, but they are different. In some respects, the new winemaking is more minimal, but in others it adds elements that soften chalk’s ungrateful edge. A certain kind of wine lover sometimes feels nostalgic.

This is why Patrick Le Brun’s champagnes are precious. His holdings are superb, especially his extremely old vines in Avize and Cramant, two of the most assertively chalky terroirs in the Côte des Blancs. That is all that matters to him. He is a thoughtful man; he is aware of the current fashion. But he has chosen, as if were his duty, to be the guardian of a classic, non-malo, non-wooded, non-oxidative, Côte des Blancs esthetic. At this, he is one of the best.

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