House-Aged Champagne

Alison Napjus

Everyone knows a sandwich tastes better when someone else makes it for you. And if you want a perfectly aged bottle of vintage Champagne, you let the experts do it. That’s the concept behind Champagne library releases, allocated bottlings of top vintages from a handful of producers. Unlike most wines, Champagne undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle to create its bubbles. The final production step is disgorgement in which sediment in the neck is removed (for a top vintage-dated cuvée that moment typically comes four to seven years after harvest). Standard Champagne aging—something anyone with a good wine cooler could do—is a post-disgorgement cellaring process. But real aging expertise comes before disgorgement. The chef de cave (head winemaker) extends maturation and contact with the enriching sediment, carefully monitoring select…

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Cigar Aficionado (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2018

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