At Last, a Brut Reveals Its Age

Figure this one: a dated non-vintage wine.

Charles Heidsieck has just released such an odd duck, and the well-known Champagne house has a sound reason. It’s to help those who like to age their Champagnes--and those who’d simply like to find out what kind of wine they’re buying.

Now, every basic book on wine has a line that reads more or less like this: “Champagne and all other sparkling wine should be consumed as young as possible. When it is released, it is at its peak.” This may be true for inexpensive sparkling wines, but for many of best, including California’s methode champenoise bubblies and most Champagne, some aging in the bottle can be beneficial.

As wine lovers know, sparkling wines made by the methode champenoise are “bottled” twice: once with live yeast in the bottle to create the bubbles, when they’re first put in the winemaker’s cellars, and again several years later, after the yeast sediment is removed, a process known as disgorging. It is the second bottling that is sold.

The rule when buying sparkling wine is that older Champagnes are more complex and younger Champagnes are fruitier. With a vintage-dated Champagne, finding the age of the wine is no problem, of course. But most Champagnes are blends of vintages, and winemakers have never thought it worth putting the date of disgorging on their non-vintage Champagnes.

In a shop or restaurant with rapid turnover, you could expect an undated wine to be young and fresh, not very complex. In places where sales are slow, such wines can be mature and complex. But until now, no one has known how “old” a non-vintage Champagne is, except perhaps the wine master who bottled the wine. The wine master can sometimes (but not always) determine the age from certain numeric codes on the bottle, label or shipping box.

Charles Heidsieck’s idea was to create a special label for its non-vintage Brut Reserve indicating its age. For instance, a wine first put in Heidsieck’s cellar in 1993 now carries the phrase “Mis en Cave en 1993.” In addition, it carries the date the wine was disgorged on the rear label. (All Charles Heidsieck wines are aged three years on their yeast before the yeast sediment is removed. The wine then is aged two or more years “on the cork” before it is released.)

Charles Heidsieck hopes the new label will add context to a non-vintage bottle of bubbly. Francois Bannier, export director for Champagne Charles Heidsieck, said the idea to give consumers this bit of data came “from a problem we had with a distributor in France.”

The distributor had a few customers who had varying reactions to some of the various non-vintage Charles Heidsieck Brut Champagnes he was selling. He asked the Champagne house to explain what was going on.

“They came to Reims,” Bannier says, “and we tested 10 bottles with the same labels [but different releases]. The bottles were coded, so we knew which wine came from which release.” It was clear that there were 10 very different wines in bottles that looked identical to the untrained eye. “Some people would like the younger wine, some people would like the older wine,” says Bannier.

In Paris, the best sommeliers used to write the date when they bought a bottle on its back label. “This was their only way to determine how long the wine was in the bottle,” says Bannier. “But now, with the ‘Mis en Cave’ label, you can control the kind of aging you like best.”

Charles Heidsieck sells its non-vintage Reserve for about $35 a bottle. For a limited time, the winery has special three-packs of the Reserve wine, one bottle each of the Mis en Cave releases for 1993, 1994 and 1995, for $100.

I have sampled a slightly different range of Charles Heidsieck Reserves--’92, ’93 and ’95. The ’95 wine was young and not very complex. It was tasty, but it would have benefited from an extra bit of time in the bottle. The 1993 was creamy, soft and ripe, a great aperitif.

And the the 1992 was a classic, with a bit more complexity in the aroma. It was slightly leaner and went beautifully with food.

Bannier says the 1995 is clearly the baby of the three and would not normally be sold this young. It was included in the special wooden three-pack so consumers can see the awkwardness of the young wine in comparison to the mature and properly stored 1994 and 1993. But he says the 1995 will age nicely and grow to become as complex as the others in the pack over time.

Berger is a syndicated wine columnist living in Topanga and Sonoma County.