Champagne houses have known for a long time the fabulous aging potential of their best wines. But faced with the popular belief that champagne ages poorly, and sometimes also faced with the need for cash and therefore the financial immobilization that constitutes a stock of champagne during aging, few houses have embarked on the marketing of old champagnes, but we can count on the most popular of them : Bollinger and Dom Pérignon.
Bollinger : the specialist in old champagnes
The Bollinger champagne house is certainly the one that has best assumed its desire to age its vintage vintages, particularly through its famous R.D. cuvée for "recently disgorged". This refers to champagne kept for a long time on slats and disgorged shortly before being marketed. Usually, these are wines that have the same blend as the vintage from La Grande Annee (a benchmark of its kind for lovers of very great champagnes).
Grande Année or R.D. Bollinger ?
So while the 2004 vintage of La Grande Anne has been on the market for a few months, it is only the 1999 vintage of the R.D. vintage that comes out. Five more to ripen its aromas, to round off its character, to give the wine time to do its introspection, to develop its complexity. It is also very interesting to make the comparative tasting of a R.D. 1999 and a Great Year 1999 disgorged about 4 years ago. If the trunk is common, the aromatic tree is specific to each of the cuvées. Remarkable as well as astounding. The Bollinger house has a remarkable mastery of this aging, which it sometimes even performs in magnums under a cork stopper. The must !
The Oenothèque Dom Pérignon
At Dom Pérignon we also work on the aging of wines and the diversity of aromas that this creates and develops. For several years, the famous house has offered a range called Oenothèque. Comparable in a way to Bollinger's R.D., it brings together the best vintages of the house, disgorged and dosed shortly before marketing. In 2009, the house even took it upon itself to market a box offering two bottles of Vintage 1995, one disgorged in 2002, when this vintage was marketed, and the other disgorged in 2008, a few months before its release. on the market. A box with educational virtues!
Dom Pérignon 1993 transformed
At the moment we can also discover the 1993 Dom Pérignon Wine Store, a vintage which was an almost perfect example of purity and freshness when it was marketed, which comes back 15 years after much deeper and more complex. A sublimated version of this beautiful vintage, with deep and gourmet aromas on surprising notes of spices and praline.
