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Champagne Palmer & Co celebrates reserve wines in brand update

06 June 2024 By db staff writer

Champagne Palmer & Co has renamed its brut NV ‘La Réserve’ and introduced a Bottle ID that summarises each edition’s intricate winemaking.

What makes the character of a great Champagne? Good terroir certainly plays a role in ensuring that the fruit is of optimal quality, and the careful blending of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier makes a huge stylistic difference. But it is all too easy to overlook another key decision that a Champagne cellar master must make – how to use the house’s reserve wines.

This is why Champagne Palmer & Co has decided to utilise the name La Réserve for its flagship brut. It is built on a notion of perpetuity – the reserve wines are composed of previous blends of La Réserve, and future reserve wines will contain part of the current blend. By carrying the same threads of Champagne DNA over from wine to wine, there is a stylistic consistency, but also scope for huge complexity at the same time.

It can sometimes be difficult to strike the right balance between power, freshness and elegance, but the steadying hand of a gifted cellar master can achieve that. “In this way, La Réserve is a wine that is truly, perpetually Palmer & Co,” explains the house’s cellar master, Xavier Berdin.

Blending reserve wines is rather like food pairing: it is about bringing different components together to create a single, harmonious thing that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Berdin outlines the efforts that go into creating an unmistakable wine. “A timeless Palmer & Co signature, La Réserve is a Champagne of great precision,” he explains. “It offers a powerful, expressive and complex palate, balanced by a remarkable, dynamic freshness conferred by our emblematic terroirs of the Montagne de Reims. By leaving the wine on its lees for over three years, we have achieved exceptional length, underpinned by a silky texture tinged with fine bubbles, just the way we like them.”

Transparency for every bottle

Since 2021, Champagne Palmer has included Bottle ID on its back label, offering information on what exactly is within. This has now been updated to reveal the blend, the base year, the percentage of reserve wines, the years of the reserve wines and the precise dosage.

For the house’s managing director Rémi Vervier, this is another way of educating the consumer about what they are drinking. “Our ambition has always been to create great Champagnes that are both unique and recognisable, and to make this a hallmark of our identity over time,” he explains.

“La Réserve showcases our house’s expertise in blending and managing reserve wines, which we are happy to share in complete transparency.”

In the case of the current release, it is a blend of 51% Chardonnay, 30% Pinot Noir and 19% Meunier. The base harvest was 2018, with the blend also including 22% of reserve wines from the 2017, 2016 and 2015 vintages. The dosage was 6.5 grams per litre.

To discover more about Champagne Palmer, visit: www.champagnepalmer.fr

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