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Armand de Brignac releases first vintage Champagne

17 October 2024 By Giles Fallowfield

Armand de Brignac has released its first ever vintage Champagne, a limited release Blanc de Noirs style cuvée from the warm and sunny 2015 harvest, which is priced at £2,650 per magnum.

The new Champagne joins the five multi-vintage styles in the brand’s range, but is released in very limited quantity with just 1,258 individually numbered magnums going on sale next month (November) in Harrods and other luxury retailers.

Alexandre Cattier, the head winemaker at Champagne Cattier, the Chigny-les-Roses based house that produces all the Armand de Brignac wines, explained why the brand had decided to break the mould of multi-vintage styles and produce a vintaged champagne at a tasting of the entire range to launch the new vintage.

“Why not?” he said, pointing out that the 2015 was a good starting point “because it was a very good vintage for us”.

“With good ripeness levels and no rain, it was very easy to get the best grapes. It’s a generous style reflecting the sunny summer that was easy to make. We ended up with a Blanc de Noirs because both Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier were good.”

The blend is a majority of Pinot Noir (70%) coming from a mix of grand and premier cru villages including Mally and Verzenay, while the remaining 30% of Pinot Meunier was sourced in the Cattier heartland crus of Chigny les Roses, Rilly la Montagne and Ludes.

“Some say that 2015 was a good, rather than great year, but it was particularly good for black grapes,” Cattier said. The wine was only disgorged in February 2024 with a low dosage of 6g/l, and is still on the austere and fresh side when tasted in July but will show more of the rich, generous fruit of the vintage by the time is goes on sale, he said.

The main export destinations for the brand – which is distributed by Moët Hennessy under a 50/50 partnership that started in 2021 – are the mature champagne markets of the US, UK, France, Italy, Hong Kong and Japan, along with South Korea and South Africa. “Between them they account for about 75% of the business,” Whitney Saffel, from the Armand de Brignac team in New York, who attended the London tasting, explained.

“The target market has a slightly younger demographic than some other luxury champagne brands – 30 – 50-year olds, the sort of people who are investing in art and other collectibles, but they buy it to drink [not put in their cellar]. That’s why it’s made in a super fresh and easy to drink style.”

In terms of production, Cattier which owns some 33 hectares of prime vineyard in and around Chigny les Roses in the Montagne de Reims, sells between 600 and 700,000 bottles a year, buying in the rest of the fruit it needs under long-term contract, as is the négociant norm in the appellation. While Saffel wouldn’t be drawn on how many bottles of Armand de Brignac are made each year, he did reveal that some 80% of sales are accounted for by the Brut Gold NV blend, with the other 20% coming from the other five cuvées.

More specifically he says rosé accounts for 12%, Demi-Sec 5%, Blanc de Blancs 2% and the two Blanc de Noirs styles – Blanc de Noirs Assemblage No 4, only 7,328 bottles of which were produced was launched last year (2023) – just 1% of the business. This last name 100% Pinot Noir cuvée, which showed particularly well in the tasting and benefitted from more age on the cork being disgorged in April 2023, also has a base of 2015, but has 15% reserve wine from each of the previous 2013 and 2014 harvests in the blend.

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