2015 Louis Roederer / Vinotheque Offer
Since my visit to Champagne Louis Roederer last December, I can’t seem to get the haunting flavors of the 2015 Cristal out of my mind. I was so thoroughly moved by this cuvee, which is why I’m extremely honored to offer you 2015 Louis Roederer Cristal today, at some of the best pricing you will see!!
Also today, I want to bring your attention to some extremely rare bottlings of the 2002 Cristal Vinotheque, which you’ll see below. This is the first time I have been able to ever offer these incredibly rare bottles - Supply is extremely limited.
There is so much to be said about Louis Roederer and Chef de Cave Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon. While I’ve mentioned a few key points in our STORY below, if you care to read more about this fascinating Champagne House, we have reproduced an excellent article by William Kelley which was published in The Wine Advocate in 2020. It’s a wonderful read and the information is very relevant.
Chef de Cave, Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon has completely revamped the philosophy and the vision for Roederer - he is operating this large Champagne house with the same mentality and attention to detail as Domaines a fraction of its size.
With his arrival in 1989, and taking full control in 1999, he laid out a plan, “Plan 2012” to bring the Domaine back to its roots, that is back to working the soil free of the use of herbicides and synthetic fertilizers that had become the way of life for the Champagne producers in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. He tried and failed in his first attempt at converting to organic farming but decided to stay the course. Today 122 hectares of the Domaines vineyards are certified organic and it is their goal to have all vintage dated wines made with certified organic grapes. Anyone will tell you it's extremely labor intensive to farm organically in Champagne. However, Lecaillon’s vision some 20 years ago has resulted in healthier plants with deeper root systems that are much more adapted to the warmer climate we are dealing with today. It's this forward thinking philosophy that now 20 years later we are all seeing the results, as the House is producing some of the most compelling wines in its 250 year history!
2015 Cristal was produced from 100% organically grown fruit - 2012 was the first vintage this practice was employed for the Cristal. It is also 1 of only 2 Cristals (the other being 2002) that all 45 plots that are selected for Cristal were used. Although yields have fallen 30% since conversion to organics the results speak volumes about the quality of the Cristal wines being produced today. As good as the Cristal wines have been over the decades, it's really the wines under Lecaillon’s watch that have raised the bar for this legendary cuvee.
Is Louis Roederer today the greatest of Champagne’s Grandes Marques? Certainly, the quality of wines that chef des caves Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon and his team are releasing, as well as the house’s unparalleled commitment to organic and biodynamic farming, give Roederer a strong claim to status as the region’s leader. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Roederer is two decades ahead of many of their rivals. At the time of writing, many of Champagne’s most celebrated prestige cuvées are still produced from vineyards that are systematically treated with herbicides, but early this year, Roederer released the first vintage of Cristal produced entirely from organically farmed fruit—a contrast that could hardly be starker. And although this is in itself admirable, Lecaillon stresses that the high-profile viticultural revolution over which he has presided has been carried out in the name of producing better wines—what he likes to call “the pursuit of taste.” While all of Roederer’s wines are worthy of attention, none better-exemplify everything that makes this Champagne house so exciting than its emblematic bottlings, Cristal and Cristal Rosé, and it is these cuvées that are the focus of this article.
This historic marque was founded by Pierre Joseph Dubois as Dubois Père et Fils in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. In 1818, Dubois’s son sold the house to his Alsatian distributor, Nicolas Henri Shreider, and Schreider’s nephew Louis Roederer began working here aged 16. In 1832, Roederer inherited the business, renaming it Champagne Louis Roederer the following year, and the firm has remained family owned ever since. That fact no doubt explains why Roederer is able to take such decisive actions and decisions today; in the three years following the abandonment of herbicides and their return to tilling the soils, Roederer’s yields fell by around 30%—a loss that few corporate-run Champagne houses would be able to countenance.
Louis Roederer was succeeded by his son Louis Roederer II in 1870, and it was he who presided over the inaugural 1876 vintage of Cristal, a cuvée produced at the request of the Court of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. This was Champagne’s first “prestige cuvée,” and while its crystal glass bottle remains the same, the wine inside was a very different beast from the Cristal today, likely containing over 100 grams per liter dosage, adapted to the taste of its clientele in that era. Louis Roederer II’s tenure as the head of the marque was brief, however, as he died at the age of 35 in 1880; he was succeeded first by his sister Louise Henriette Léonie Roederer and then—in 1903—by her son, Léon Olry Roederer. The Roederer family had begun purchasing vineyards of their own in 1841, when Louis Roederer himself acquired 15 hectares in Verzenay, and by 1880 their holdings had grown to around 140 hectares.
That didn’t change under Léon Olry Roederer, or under his young widow, Camille, who ran the house after his death in 1932 and until her own in 1975. Camille Olry Roederer was in turn succeeded by her daughter Marcelle and grandson Jean-Claude Rouzaud, the latter becoming the first head of Champagne Louis Roederer to receive a technical training. Under Jean-Claude Rouzaud and his son Frédéric Rouzaud (who took the helm in 2006), expansion has continued, and today, Maison Louis Roederer owns fully 240 hectares of vineyards, supplying some 70% of its needs. Indeed, with the exception of the Roederer Brut Premier, all the house’s Champagnes are produced from its own grapes, meaning that this Grande Marque might also justly be described as Champagne’s largest grower.
Roederer’s enviable vineyard holdings amount to some 240 hectares, including 130 hectares in grand cru villages and 73 hectares in premier cru villages. This includes 84 hectares located in the Côte de Blancs, 69 hectares in the Montagne de Reims and 68 hectares in the Vallée de la Marne. Most of these holdings are characterized by chalky soils, and they are almost exclusively planted to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with Pinot Meunier occupying only 6% of Roederer’s vineyard area. Average vine age is comparatively high, with systematic replanting only when vines attain 60 years of age.
So far, so good, but the real revolution began in the year 2000, when Roederer launched their so-called “Plan 2012,” a program devised by newly appointed chef des caves Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, who had joined the house in 1989 and took the helm in 1999. The second person in history to graduate first in class in both the viticulture and oenology programs at Montpellier University, Lecaillon demanded, and was granted, control in the vineyards as well as the cellar. “Plan 2012” aimed to take Roederer “back to the roots,” weaning the vineyards off herbicides and synthetic fertilizers and returning to cultivating the soils. Tilling the soils for the first time cut the vines’ superficial root systems, forcing them deeper into the soil, and Roederer’s yields fell—as we have seen—by around 30%.
*Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon (Photo by Luc Manago)
In the year 2000, Lecaillon also initiated an organic trial in the village of Bouleuse in the Vallée de la Marne. Bouleuse is a cool and humid spot, and in the challenging conditions of the 2001 growing season, that trial failed. Learning their lessons, the Roederer team visited other organic and biodynamic growers and took advice from the well-known Burgundian consultant Pierre Masson. And in 2004, they tried again, this time in prime holdings in Avize, Aÿ and Verzenay.
By 2012, Roederer had achieved their target of zero herbicide use, and today, 122 hectares are certified organic. What’s more, Roederer’s farming practices incorporate biodynamic methods, though only 10 hectares of their vineyards are certified biodynamic.
The house’s first entirely biodynamically farmed cuvée was the 2006 Brut Nature, a collaboration with designer Philippe Starck produced from the Roederer holdings in Cumières. Cristal Rosé followed suit with the 2007 vintage, and Cristal itself with the 2012 vintage. Lecaillon says that farming this way results in deeper root systems and more resilience in warm, dry weather. Vines farmed this way, he adds, also produce ripe fruit with lower sugar levels—an obvious advantage in an era of warmer vintages.
Needless to say, in a region dominated by chemical farming since the 1960s, the significance of Roederer’s commitment to organic farming is considerable. So, too, are the challenges to farming this way on such a scale. Champagne is a region of paradoxes as, on the one hand, the most intensely farmed appellation d’origine controlée (AOC) in France, with the highest average yields, and on the other, the AOC with the largest area under organic conversion. Roederer’s decision to embrace sustainable farming points to the way that paradox must ultimately be resolved. And if confirmation were needed, Moët Hennessy—Champagne’s largest landowner—announced in early 2020 that their vineyards will be farmed entirely without herbicides by the end of the year.
Roederer’s commitment to organics, however, was only part of the house’s “Plan 2012.” Just as interesting is Lecaillon’s emphasis on sélection massale. As I have written in these pages before, in 1985, the average Champenois grape cluster weighed 85 grams, a number that nearly doubled in just 15 years due to the planting of productive, early-ripening clones; and these fat-berried, high-yielding clones are a recipe for quantity at the expense of quality.
In the village of Bouleuse, where Roederer attempted their first organic farming trial, the house also has its own nursery, producing its own rootstocks and grafting them with its own selections of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Lecaillon believes that exploiting the genetic diversity of these grape varieties is key to adapting to climate change, observing that the slowest-ripening selections of Pinot Noir in Roederer’s massale program take three weeks longer to attain the same sugar level as the fastest-ripening selections. At the same time, Lecaillon has also initiated a review of all vineyard practices, with special reference to pruning—something that’s critical to vine longevity.
With the completion of “Plan 2012”, Lecaillon and Rouzaud followed up with “Plan 2025,” which aims to transform Louis Roederer into what a “Maison Vigneronne”—in other words, a house with the mentality of a small grower rather than that of a large négociant. The year 2013 witnessed the Roederer’s first vintage Blanc de Blancs produced from organically and biodynamically farmed vineyards, and the new plan is for all of the vintage wines to be farmed organically by 2025. This year, Roederer will attain organic certification for all of its Cristal, Cristal Rosé and Blanc de Blancs plots. And a new purchase contract incentivizes Roederer’s grape suppliers to convert to more sustainable farming as well. At the same time, Roederer has invested in its team.
Until and including the 1970 vintage, Cristal was vinified in entirely barrels. From 1970 to 1982, Roederer vinified an increasing percentage of Cristal in stainless steel tanks and wooden foudres, to the extent that barrels had been abandoned by the mid-1980s and only some 10% to 15% of Cristal was raised in wooden foudres. Between 1994 and 1996, before he became chef des caves, Lecaillon orchestrated a series of trials that convinced him that a larger percentage of Cristal needed to be vinified in wood, to bring more “flesh and density” from maturation on the lees in a non-reductive environment. He duly commissioned 28 tronconic 95-hectoliter oak casks, and since 1999, between 20% and 40% of Cristal has been vinified in wood.
*Roederer’s Cellar
If this is the most notable evolution in the winery, there have been other changes, too. Increasingly, ambient yeasts are allowed to start the fermentation in the winery, and Chardonnay sees little sulfur dioxide at the press. During élevage, Lecaillon is also open to resuspending the lees to build texture and structure into the vins clairs. And though, with the exception of the 1988 vintage, malolactic fermentation was invariably blocked for the vins clairs destined for Cristal, Lecaillon describes himself as an agnostic with regards to this practice; accordingly, a small percentage of the vins clairs that compose the 2008 Cristal did see some malolactic.
The Vineyards that Produce Cristal
The blend of Cristal itself is derived from 45 candidate parcels, which are included or excluded each year on the basis of extensive tasting. These parcels are defined by soils with a high concentration of active calcium carbonate, and all boast vines that are a minimum of 35 years old. Most of the Pinot Noir in Cristal comes from northeasterly exposed Verzenay, Beaumont-sur-Vesle and Verzy, which produce wines with serious acid structure, as well as holdings in Aÿ and Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, which bring a bit more textural plenitude and fruit to the blend. The cuvée’s Chardonnay component—which typically represents 40% of the blend—derives from prime parcels in Avize, Mesnil-sur-Oger, Cramant and Oger.
Cristal Rosé, first produced in 1974, typically contains a touch more Pinot Noir, and some of that Pinot Noir sees a week-long cold infusion before pressing, which imparts its decidedly pale hue; Pinot Noir and Chardonnay then ferment together. That cold maceration imparts some delicate phenolic structure that seems to contribute an additional dimension to Cristal Rosé. But it may be that the wine’s origins are just as important, since Cristal Rosé derives from only four of the finest parcels among the 45 that are candidates for inclusion in Cristal.
*Cristal on the rocks
For many years, Cristal Rosé was based on two plots of old Pinot Noir vines in Aÿ, in lieux-dits Bonotte Pierre Robert and Gargeotte. However, in 2010, Gargeotte was pulled up for replanting, and Bonotte Pierre Robert followed in 2017. So, since 2018, the Pinot Noir for Cristal Rosé has been sourced from Roderer’s holdings in lieu-dit La Villers in Aÿ, a parcel that was planted in 1998 with massale selections from Gargeotte and Bonotte Pierre Robert. Meanwhile, Gargeotte and a nearby lieu-dit named Milnon Vauzelles have been replanted with the same selections, and Lecaillon anticipates that from 2030 on they will be interesting candidates for inclusion in the blend. In any case, this base of Pinot Noir is complemented by Chardonnay from a Mesnil-sur-Oger lieux-dits Montmartin and Migraines, and Avize lieu-dit Pierre Vaudon.
For many years, each vintage of Cristal was disgorged in a single disgorgement, after five or six years on the lees. Today, disgorgement is later. The 2008 Cristal set a new record with almost eight and a half years on the lees, though Lecaillon cautions that extended lees contact is less desirable in riper vintages and observes that some of Champagne’s most celebrated vintages, such as 1945, only saw very brief aging sur lattes. Each year, the house now holds back a percentage of the original disgorgement for later release after additional aging on cork.
Beginning with the 1993 vintage, Roederer also began to experiment with a late disgorgement “vinothèque” program, and this debuted commercially with the 1995 Cristal and Cristal Rosé. Noting that the 1995 was evolving more rapidly in bottle than the 1993, Lecaillon took the decision to riddle the bottles sur lattes and continue their aging sur pointes (i.e. vertically, neck-down) which prevents any oxygen ingress and reduces the surface area of lees in contact with the wine.
The protocol is adapted to each vintage: thus, the 1995 Cristal Vinothèque saw eight years sur lattes followed by six sur pointes; whereas the 1996 Cristal Vinothèque saw 10 years sur lattes and four sur pointes. What’s more, vinothèque releases also see lower dosage and are finished with a different liqueur d’expedition. The 1995 Cristal, for example, was disgorged with 12 grams per liter dosage and a liqueur that had aged in oak, whereas the 1995 Cristal Vinothèque saw only seven grams per liter dosage and was finished with a liqueur d’expedition made with bottles of the 1995 Cristal itself. Such attention to detail is typical of this primus inter pares of Grandes Marques.
