Champagne Styles

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Gary Westby from K and L Wine Merchants, and I'd like to talk to you about champagne styles. When talking about champagne styles the first thing I like to look for is whether the wine is a vintage like the Bon Viol, or a non-vintage, like this Gonet. Does it have a date on it? If it doesn't have a date on it that means that it's a blend of many years. That can be a very good thing, because champagne's very far north and to get a consistent flavor, it's great to blend year's together. The second thing I like to look for is what the level of dosage is in the wine, and that's always labeled whether the wine is, for example, a brute, like the Gonet, an extra dry, like this White Star, or a demi-sec, which means half dry, like this Lorent Perrier. This is in ascending order of sweetness. Demi-secs are some of the sweetest that are available, while you can even get even drier styles than this brute, an extra brute or brute zero. The third thing I look for is if there is a mention of the varieties that went in to it on the bottle. For example, on this '02 Bon-Viol, you can see that it says blanc de blanc, which means white from white. That means that it's made, in this case, of exclusively chardonnay. Or, like on this '02 Memoir de Vine from Michell Arnau, it says blanc de noir, meaning white from black, in this case all pinot noir. The third type of style that we can talk about are the rosettes. They're made primarily in two different ways; either as a sonet, where pinot noir or monair is masserated all at the same time, all in the same vat, all of the juice with all of the skins, to get a very, well relatively dark color like in this LaClarc Briant Rubiesse rosette; or a more delicate color, like with this Loius Roderier 2002 vintage rosette, which has about 12% red wine blended in to the white in order to get the rosette color."