Excitement builds in Champagne

Excitement over the 2015 vintage is building in Champagne as the harvest comes to an end, with one producer confident of an “outstanding” vintage.

After a summer that saw “unprecedented” high temperatures from May to August followed by some “welcome rainfall” in late August that brought the grapes to full ripeness and in perfect conditions, producers are hailing what they believe will be an “exceptional” vintage.

The harvest began for most producers at the beginning of September with the yields set at 10,000kg per hectare.

Julien Duval-Leroy, of Champagne Duval-Leroy, told Vitabella: “We are experiencing an exceptional 2015 harvest. It is already well underway as practically all the grapes are now in our presses and the harvest will be finished in just a few days.

“The quality of the grapes is exceptional for all three varieties and the musts, which are superbly balanced, are already showing impressive concentration. It augurs a very great wine indeed!

“Everything points to an outstanding 2015 vintage. We’re most impatient to taste the finished wines in the firm hope they will live up to all our qualitative expectations.”

Meanwhile, Claude Giraud, at Champagne Henri Giraud, gave a view from the presses themselves saying that, “the first tastings at the press confirm all our expectations: there’s a lot of flavour. This confirms the tremendous aromatic concentration that we detected in the first samples taken in the vines mid-August.”

He added that the concentration would require toasting the house’s new barrels in an “unusual” new way.

He explained: “Our barrel makers stopped toasting just before the moment of maturity. There are very few people in the world who have the ability to stop this charring process by nose using the clearly defined olfactory stages of development which vary from forest to forest. This year we selected wood from two excellent forests in the north of the Argonne: Valmy and Lachalade.”