Anselme Selosse’s Champagne career has been influenced by a lot of daring experimentation, as well as by chance. And Spain.
Selosse’s grandfather was a Paris roofer who was wounded as an infantryman in World War I, married his army nurse, and moved to her hometown of Avize in Champagne’s Côte des Blancs.
Selosse’s father, Jacques, had hoped to pursue a career as baker, but turned out to have an allergy to wheat flour. He decided to take up viticulture instead, renting vineyards and selling grapes after World War II.
In 1964, Selosse’s parents began making their own Champagnes, and Anselme joined the domaine a decade later, after studying biology and enology at the university in Beaune.
Selosse found little inspiration in early 1970s Burgundy, which was a far cry from its exalted status today.
“It was a bad period,” Selosse recalls one afternoon as he looks over wine barrels, casks and peripatetic experiments left to age for years in the cool vaults of his 200-year-old underground cellar, lined with beneficial molds typical of northern France. “The way people survived was to produce a lot of quantity. Wineries were abandoning barrels because they were too expensive.”
Instead, Selosse’s found inspiration on an extended trip to Spain, where at Rioja’s R. López de Heredia he saw “cathedrals of barrels” for extended aging of its wines. “The coherence of López de Heredia influenced me a lot. … In wine, there is a past and there is a future, and in that winery, it was all integrated,” he says, lacing the fingers of his hands together.
In far southern Spain’s Andalusia region, in Jerez, Selosse was also bowled over by the traditional solera system of fractional aging used to blend vintages and age wines for Sherry.
Creating Champagnes of Substance
Back home with his parents, Selosse produced about 600 cases annually of brut and zero dosage Champagnes from the family’s 10 acres of grand cru vineyards in Avize, Cramant and Oger. The wines sold for “three times nothing.”
Selosse, who took over the family business in 1980, dreamed of making long-aged wines that would highlight his vineyards. “In Champagne, the prestige cuvées were about vintage, and the terroirs were secondary,” Selosse remembers. “I wanted to put the ‘where’ of the wine in front.”
Selosse divided his grand cru Avize vineyards. Three successive vintages of his lower slopes went into his brut, which he eventually called “Initial.” Three successive vintages of his higher slopes went into the extra brut “Version Originale.”
Though Champagne producers have traditionally kept reserve wines and blended vintages, Selosse wanted to take aging to the extreme by using a version of the solera system. For six years, he says, he fought the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne governing committee to be allowed to use the practice. Finally, he was able to start his solera-style system in 1986. Since then, he has systematically added wine from every vintage. He now withdraws 22 percent of the wine for bottling every year and replaces it with the new vintage from the same two parcels.
The first solera blend, from vintages 1986 to 1990, was released in 1996 as “Origine.” Soon after, Selosse changed the name to “Substance.”
“What arrives in the bottle has very little new wine,” he says of “Substance,” which still contains wines from all the vintages back to 1986.
For Selosse, aging brings out saline, savory flavors and the Côte des Blancs’ minerally texture, locally called crayeuse (“chalkiness”). “Something I have learned is that with wine from a terroir, after 15 to 20 years, the different vintages arrive at the same place,” he says.
Introducing a Different Style of Champagne
With his emphasis on picking grapes at peak ripeness, Selosse is opposed to the Champagne school that emphasizes acidic crispness. “Champagne should be beautiful, sensual, spiritual and delicate without having to rely on acidity,” he says.
Like all of Selosse’s wines, “Substance” has fans who see it as the ultimate in complexity along with critics of the dominance of oxidative and yeasty flavors.
The style has now become fairly common in Champagne, but it took years for it and Selosse to become famous.
Selosse’s breakthrough came in 1999 when Milan-based importer and distributor Antonio Trimboli brought the Champagnes to Italy to be discovered by jet setters and fashion industry moguls like Giorgio Armani and Diego Della Valle of Tod’s. Now, among Italian wine lovers, Selosse is practically regarded as a second Pope.
Selosse used his profits to double his estate vineyards and increase the size of his cellar aging capacity. In 2009, Selosse moved to his current cellar after he and wife, Corinne, purchased a defunct Champagne house at the edge of Avize and converted its old neoclassical mansion into a boutique hotel and restaurant. Though Domaine Jacques Selosse is not open to the public, hotel guests are invited to tour the cellars and taste with Selosse twice a week.
Today the domaine releases less than 6,000 cases a year, producing up to 14 wines, almost all from grand cru Chardonnay vineyards, with small amounts of Pinot Noir crus from outside the Côte des Blancs.
The wines include six miniscule-production, single-vineyard bottlings, each made with a base wine from a single vintage blended with a its own long-aged, “perpetual reserve” from that same vineyard. (Different from the solera system, the perpetual reserve is not as systematic; rather it is composed of varied percentages of older vintages, based on vintage—the size of the crop from that vineyard for a given year—and feel.)
The Selosses also make a brut rosé blend with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, an extra dry “Exquise” from a vineyard in nearby Oger and, in good vintages, a brut “Millesimé”—the domaine’s only vintage-dated bottling—from two parcels in Avize.
Continuing to Evolve
Selosse doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. He detests the typical winery technical sheets that would somehow define his wines.
Take, for example, the dosage (or liqueur d’expedition)—typically a mix of wine and sugar added to Champagne after disgorgement that determines its sweetness level. Selosse has no formula. Sometimes that means a little liqueur and sometimes none. “What we are trying to do is reveal the personality of the wine,” Selosse says. “The only way to do that is to taste.”
Selosse is still developing new wines. Though he has managed the drudgery of administration since handing the reins to Guillaume, after that work is done, he tinkers and serves as a kind of vintner emeritus. “If Guillaume doesn’t ask,” he says, “I don’t intervene.”
In 2026, he and Guillaume plan to release a Coteaux Champenois still white wine called “Finage Avize,” made from Chardonnay from vintages 2018 to 2020. The pair have also experimented with the forbidden-in-Champagne ancestral method—creating bubbles by bottling still-fermenting wine (resulting in a pét-nat)—rather than the traditional Champagne method of adding sugars and yeast to a bottled wine to launch a second fermentation.
“I tried it twice,” Selosse says. “The results were very, very elegant. But it’s not allowed.”
As he moves into his seventies, his goal is to continue evolving, or as he puts it, “to know what I think I know that prevents me from searching.”
“I will never,” he adds with a boyish grin lighting his face, “pass under a banner that says ‘Finish Line.’”
Read Part 1 of the story of Anselme Selosse in the Robert Camuto Meets column from Oct. 1.
