The exclusive taste of vintage

Vintage exudes luxury. There is something special about it. Something you treat with care, store carefully and, when it comes to champagne, drink on very special occasions.
Text: Magda van der Rijst

The exclusive taste of vintage

'Vintage' as a designation of quality is most familiar from champagne and port. These are considered the top of the range and cost the most. For both, vintage refers to wines made from grapes from one excellent vintage, which have the potential to age excellently. Wines for which you want to be patient. We'll leave it at that as far as port and the similarities between port and champagne are concerned. Here we talk about vintage champagne and other sparkling wines with a year on the label. 

Blended wine

Most champagnes are made up of wines from different vintages. This is allowed. Every year a vin clair (base wine) made with the grapes of the new harvest and that is blended with so-called reserve wines from other years. Reserve wines are specially held back to be used later for a particular house's style and flavour. Only in very good years, when the vin clair is of such exceptional quality that it is a waste to 'blend away' its unique flavour, is a vintage or, French-style, millésimé made of it. Both vintage and millésimé mean vintage.

Long ripening

Blending is absolutely forbidden with a vintage champagne and it must compulsorily age for longer. A non-vintage, the 'ordinary' champagne without a vintage, matures for at least 12 months on the lie (yeast residue), for a vintage it is 36 months. So three years, but most champagne houses leave their vintages much longer because it develops endless aromas during its stay in the cool cellar, eventually creating a very complex wine with a subtle mousse. Logically, the base wine must be of exceptional class, with lots of concentration and sufficient acidity. By no means every year produces such grapes.  

Autolysis

The secret of all champagnes (and other sparkling wines, but more on that later) lies in that bottle aging. The vin clair, the still base wine that ferments in stainless steel tanks, oak barrels or amphorae, is aged with a mixture of sugar, wine and yeast (tirage liqueur) bottled. Cork it and in the closed bottle the wine starts fermenting again, producing carbon dioxide that cannot leave the bottle. When the yeasts are finished they die, fall apart and in this breakdown, autolysis, new substances such as mannoproteins, polysaccharides and flavourings are created. These provide a different, rounder texture and richer flavour. Typical autolysetones include toast, brioche, croissant, nuts, honey, dried fruits, mocha and sometimes even coffee. That second fermentation in the bottle and the accompanying autolysis is the essence of sparkling wine made by the traditional method, such as champagne. The longer the wine stays in contact with those 'decomposers', the more time there is for aromas to develop. As a result, vintage wines have a lot of flavour, in which you can taste the class of the vintage.

Further reading? You will find more information in WINELIFE Magazine, issue 86. You can order this one here. 

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