Aged Champagne?

Good champagne ages well. Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame is usually about

Dimitri

Champaign is pretty much ready when shipped. Brits seem have a tradition of aging Champaign. I think it mauderizes.

One can tell how ;long the wine has been in the bottle by the hardness of the cork. No expansion is about two years old.

The only really old champaign I know of is Bolly's RD. Recently disgourged. Of the older vintages, they advise drinking within 6 months to one year. Takes close to 6 months to arrive after disgourgement. REally old is 20 years. They have some 30 year old.

About three years ago at a tasting at the Hollywood Wine Club annual function we taste a 1914 and 1921 Pol Roger. The wines for the tasting came directly from the cellars of Pol Roger. They were both delightful wines. They both had a pleasing oxidized taste accented hints of fresh bead and berry fruit and showed a surprising degree of effervesce.

If you are going to age Champagne, you need very cool storage condtions. If you try to age it anywhere near normal modern household temperatures, I doubt if any Champagne will change for the better. The safest way to drink old Champagne is to buy an older LD one that is kept in the cellars of the Champagne maker as stored to age, and then separated from the lees, etc. shortly before shipment. The long contact wth the lees can give a special character that many like, and the Champagne may become more rounded. The main disadvantage is that most of the better RD Champagnes are quite expensive.

With very cool storage conditions, some have reported that some less expensive NV Champagnes will soften and round a bit with a year or so time in the cellar, but others may not.

There was, and may still be, a following for long aged Champagne in the UK. You probably need to start with a high quality vintage Champagne which must be stored under ideal, very cool conditions. I have tasted

If you are going to long-age Champagne, you first need to taste some. RD will not do, as it has a different character from what you get by aging normal Champagne that has been prepared for sale. I have no idea where you can buy old Champagne, other than RD, that has been aged properly. It would be a pity to long-age Champagne only to find that you do not like the style. Although the RD is expensive, it is far safer than aging Champagne yourself.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

I beg to differ. I would bet my last dime that normally disgorged champagne, kept cool, would age much more gracefully than anything recently disgorged (as common wisdom would have it), and I am not the only one to think so. (Krug thinka the same: They keep their "Collection" bottles disgorged.)

Veuve Clicquot has done blinds tastings (in the US, as oenologue Cyril Brun told me), where they poured blind the same older vintage in two versions, one disgorged at the usual shipment time (6 to 8 years after harvest), one recently disgorged. In every tasting, the first version was preferred over the second. This holds true with my personal experience. From the big champagne tasting I have done a few weeks ago, Bollinger Grande Année 1996 was incredibly youthful, a perfect champagne to lay down, while RD

But I do agree that cool storage temperature is vitally essential.

M.

I have not had experience with comparing an RD and a normal Champagne of the same age from the same producer, so I could not have an opinion on this. I guess it depends on how old the old champagne is. From my limited experience and what I have read, little sparkle often is left after very long storage. If the champagne has been kept in the maker's cellar with a very good crown cap, it may retain considerably more sparkle at very old age. The 69 Krug I had recently had been stored properly. It was much smoother and had developed a hint of nuts. Some like this, and some do not. Now if this same Champagne had been kept by Krug on the lees until now, I have no doubt that it would have extracted a somewhat diferent taste from the lees, but probably would have retained more sparkle.

In much of northern Europe it is not difficult to find very cool cellars. In many parts of the US the soil temperature is too warm, even if you have a deep cellar. The wine must be cooed by refrigeration if you want 55 F or better even lower for Champagne. Also much Champagne here stays at near room temperature for a considerable time before it is sold. Buying an older Champagne at auction can be very risky in the US. You even have to special order some RDs here now, because the Champagne maker was concerned that some of the RD Champagne was being heat damaged in the distribution system.

For my taste, I have seldom seen a Champagne over about 20 years old, either regular or RD, that I thought had been improved by the long aging. But this, of course, is a mater of personal taste. I have seen several Champagnes aged for 10-15 years that seemed to have rounded out a bit without loss of much sparkle and without too much nut character. Of course I have read accounts , mainly from the UK, of Champagnes from the 1920s that still were considered very good in an old Champagne sort of way. I assume most of these were regular Champagne kept in the UK rather than RDs recently shipped from France. It would indeed be interesting to taste one of these ancient bottles, but from the tasting notes I have read, I think I probably would prefer a Champagne of considerably less age. I have a very few bottles of Champagne going back to 1952 , but these are just to see what happens. I only would risk a single bottle of each wine for such an extended storage.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Od course. But what I was advocating was storing a vintage brut that is released after 6 to 8 years after the year of harvest, simply to add the same (or maximum twice the same) time span.

I think I have a bottle each of Bollinger's 1985 Grande Année and RD. That will make an interesting comparison for New Years Eve!

M.