2014 | Louis Roederer | Brut Vintage

A crisp and well-cut Champagne, delivering a strong mineral presence. There's a chalky underpinning to the tightly-meshed flavors of crunchy pear, raspberry, pickled ginger and pink grapefruit zest. Fine and lightly creamy in texture, with a mouthwatering finish that echoes the minerality.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: Roederer's 2014 Brut Vintage is beautiful, offering up aromas of pear, mirabelle plum, red berries, warm biscuits and smoke. Full-bodied, layered and elegantly muscular, it's seamless and complete, with terrific mid-palate depth and amplitude. Framed by bright acids and enlivened by a pinpoint mousse, it concludes with a penetrating finish. The blend is 70% Pinot Noir, emphasizing Verzy, and pressure is a touch higher than in its more ethereal Blanc de Blancs counterpart. As I wrote of its 2013 predecessor, this is a wine that puts many prestige cuvées to shame.

• John Gilman: The 2014 Louis Roederer Brut Millésime is composed of entirely grand cru fruit, with the cépages this year being seventy-one percent pinot noir (all from the village of Verzy on the Montagne de Reims) and twenty-nine percent chardonnay (from the village of Chouilly in the heart of the Côte des Blancs). Twenty-five percent of the vins clairs were barrel-fermented and aged in cask, and only twenty percent of the blend went through malolactic fermentation this year. The finishing dosage is eight grams per liter. The wine is very refined on the nose, offering up a youthful blend of apple, white peach, chalky minerality (with a touch of Verzy’s steeliness also in evidence), warm bread, just a touch of hazelnut, gentle smokiness and a topnote of dried flowers. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, focused and complex, with bright acids, excellent mid-palate depth and mineral drive, refined mousse and a very long, pure and beautifully balanced finish. Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon and his team at Louis Roederer are at the absolute top of their game right now and this is a stunning wine in the making. It is certainly very drinkable today, but I would be inclined to give it a handful of years in the cellar and let its acids relax a bit more and allow the wine really to blossom!

Producer Information

Louis Roederer is a well-regarded Champagne house based in the city of Reims and best-known for its flagship wine: Cristal. The house, established in the late 18th Century, is still family-owned, and produces a house style with equal amounts of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, around one-fifth Pinot Meunier. Although founded in 1776, the house in its current guise began in 1833, when Louis Roederer took the reins from his uncle and renamed the business for himself. Roederer set out to capture foreign markets, and most famously that of Russia; Roederer became the wine of choice for the Russian royal family. Cristal – now one of the region's top prestige cuvées along with the likes of Dom Pérignon (Moët), Belle Époque (Perrier-Jouet), Comtes de Champagne (Taittinger) or Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill (Pol Roger) – was created for the notoriously paranoid Tsar Alexander II of Russia, who requested the bottle be clear and flat-bottomed to prevent hidden explosives. Louis Roederer acquired several grand cru vineyards in Champagne in 1845 to add to his portfolio. This was unusual for the time as the majority of houses were buying grapes from growers rather than cultivating their own. Today, the Roederer vineyards encompass around 240 hectares (600 acres) of land in the Montagne de Reims, Vallée de la Marne and the Côte des Blancs. By 2012, around 25 percent of the vineyards were managed biodynamically (the 2012 Cristal is made from biodynamically farmed grapes). Cristal is produced in standard and rosé formats (although the latter is rarer). The standard vintage Cristal wine is produced from some of the house's best vineyard plots and is composed of around 60 percent Pinot Noir and 40 percent Chardonnay. Portions of the blend can also see some time in barrel. Cristal rosé is produced from similar proportions of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay although the Pinot Noir is left on skins for an extended period prior to pressing. Around 20 percent of the wine is also aged in large format oak, giving the resulting wine a light rosé color combined with hints of onion skin. Cristal wines are also released under the Vinothèque label – a combination of late disgorging/extended lees aging and further time in the Louis Roederer cellars in bottle. The Roederer portfolio also includes non-vintage and vintage brut, rosé and blanc de blancs wines. More recently, there has been collaboration between the house and French designer Phillippe Starck to create a Champagne Brut Nature. The house signature tends to be based around the Pinot grapes (Noir and Meunier). Roederer also produces the red and white still wines under the Hommage à Camille labels (often simply referred to as "Camille"), made under the Coteaux Champenois appellation. The red is a Pinot Noir from the Charmont vineyard in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ while the white – a Chardonnay – is made from grapes grown in the Volibarts vineyard in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger.

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