In nearly half a century of drinking wine, and nearly half that time thinking about wine, I’ve had an off-and-on relationship with Champagne.
At times, I did not love it. The prices and access to the great stuff could be obstacles. The strange ways it was consumed were a turnoff: sipped from uptight flutes or spray-blasted over celebratory crowds. Where was the wine in that?
I’ve loved Champagne again for the last dozen years, due to a mix of changes in Champagne (the region), Champagne (the wine) and my own recent Champagne/Champagne experiences.
The shift began in 2013 when I spent a week “Touring Champagne” for Wine Spectator and found the dining and hospitality in Champagne country developing along with the scene of small grower-producers and somms serving Champagne like real wine.
Another personal milestone occurred when I moved to Italy a few years later. Italian wine people—from producers to everyday wine drinkers—really, really love Champagne. And it’s contagious. In Verona, where I live, the place for wine lovers to dine is Wine Spectator Grand Award–winning Antica Bottega del Vino, owned by a group of Amarone-producing families. The wine list covers Italy and the globe with rare depth. But the top-selling category? Champagne.
Five years ago, in a restaurant in the hills outside Verona, I drank my first bottles of Larmandier-Bernier.
I am not a wine reviewer who scores wines in blind tastings. Nor do I have special expertise in sparkling wines. But I love complex and elegant liquids, and those first sips of Larmandier-Bernier’s Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs Champagne Latitude were stunning.
The wine lit up my palate like the stations of a pinball machine. It was creamy and mouth-filling with a deep yeastiness and a chalky, mineral texture, but at the same time, it flashed energetic freshness as it rolled along the tongue.
After “Latitude” I tasted the Larmandier-Bernier cuvée “Longitude.” It was just as compelling, though less rich, with more long-in-the-mouth precision and austere chalkiness.
This summer, on a trip to Champagne, my first stop was at the 1970s winery built by Pierre Larmandier’s parents at the southern end of the Côtes des Blancs in the picturesque town of Vertus (pop. 2,000).
Though the two sides of Pierre’s family trace their history in viticulture back to the French Revolution, Larmandier-Bernier was created by his parents, who fused their last names along with their families’ vineyards.
In 1982, Pierre had just finished high school and was preparing to study business at university, when his father died suddenly at 44. Pierre’s widowed mother ran the estate while he completed his studies, though he returned home to help with harvests and blending.
“My parents made wine that was fine and elegant, but it was just fine and elegant, without depth,” he recalls. “With their enologist, they were always trying to make something with less taste. And I said, ‘That’s too bad.’”
In 1988, Pierre returned home and took over the estate with his wife, Sophie, joining a new generation of young grower-producers who also were questioning Champagne’s status quo. “We were asking a lot of questions,” Pierre recalls. “One of them was how to express terroir.”
Anselme Selosse was a precursor to this movement, and Pierre befriended Selosse’s assistant, Jérôme Prévost, who went on to create the cult micro-estate La Closerie.
Pierre and Sophie began fermenting their wines with indigenous yeasts in oak casks, cut vineyard yields and began picking riper fruit to improve balance in their base wines. “Before you make bubbles, you have to make good wine,” says Pierre, now 60. “Previously, the base wines were so acidic they hurt to drink.”
From their first harvest, they also isolated a couple of hectares of old-vine grand cru Chardonnay in Cramant for its own vintage cuvée.
“The idea was to make a distinctive wine that didn’t resemble the others,” Pierre says. “Our enologist at the time said the wine was too strong, and that no one would buy it. My mother told him, ‘Let Pierre do what he wants.’”
After aging the wine in bottle on its lees for nine years, the Larmandiers released it as Vielle Vigne de Cramant (later renamed Vielle Vigne de Levant), a rich and spicy extra brut marked by oxidative (or Sherry-like) notes that fit into a new wave of high-end, savory Champagnes.
In the 1990s, the couple abandoned herbicides and moved to organic viticulture, settling on biodynamics in 2000 after a trip to Burgundy’s Domaine Leflaive. “It was really there that we realized you could do something serious with biodynamics,” Pierre says. “That it was more than just people who wanted to talk about the sky and all that.”
The Next Stage of Larmandier-Bernier
He drives us northwest of town to a steep hillside vineyard that curves in the form of an amphitheater; the site has a hot southern exposure and relatively deep clay topsoils of 30 inches. There, his burly, bearded son Arthur, 32, is leading a crew trellising vines.
“The heat and the clay give richness to the wine,” explains Pierre.
While “Latitude” is sourced from this and other vineyards around the southern half of Vertus, “Longitude” comes from the chalkier part of the Côte des Blancs in the north, running along a vertical line extending through Oger, Avize and Cramant.
In the last 36 years, Pierre and Sophie have doubled the estate vineyards to 47 acres, with production reaching about 13,000 cases annually.
They’ve also added depth to their offerings. Beginning in 2004, they created “perpetual reserves” for their Latitude and Longitude base wines. Traditionally, Champagne producers have kept reserves of single-vintage base wines to use for blending in non-vintage bottlings. Perpetual reserves— pioneered by Selosse and inspired by the Spanish solera system of fractional aging for Sherry—age vintage after vintage together in one cask to create a reserve wine with added aged notes and complexity. In every vintage, the Larmandiers add the newest wine to the perpetual reserve while using the reserve for up to 40 percent of the blends they make that year.
Other Larmandier-Bernier Champagnes include their Extra Brut Rosé de Saignée made from Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, along with a pair of site-specific, vintage-dated bottlings: the zero-dosage cuvée Terre de Vertus and the grand cru, extra brut Les Chemins D’Avize.
In recent years, the couple have been joined by their sons, Arthur, who had worked in marketing for Chanel, and Georges, 30, an aeronautical engineer. The pair are fueling Larmandier-Bernier’s next wave of evolution: Currently they and Pierre are experimenting with fermenting some base wines in stoneware amphorae and they are also pushing Pierre to move their reserve wines from stainless steel tanks to wood casks for aging.
“I told them ‘Do what you want in life,’ but I showed them the trade,” Pierre says. “I said, ‘The life of a vigneron is short. You have maybe 30 vintages in your prime, and 30 years go fast.’”
