It’s hard to find a purer expression of Pinot Noir than Autour de la Creusette. Most Champagne is blended, and Pinot Noir is included for body, structure, deep fruit, and ageability. Classic blends add Chardonnay for lift and focus, and Meunier for more accessible fruit. Together, they make a complete wine.

But grown in the right terroir and handled by an attentive grower, Pinot Noir on its own makes a wine that isn’t just complete, but one that also tells a beautiful story. Bertrand-Delespierre is one such grower. 

Didier Bertrand and Chantal Delespierre established the domaine in 1980, on the Petite Montagne de Reims. The soils here are varied with clay, sand, and marl layered over a deeper subsoil of chalky limestone. Pinot Noir here develops striking depth, as well as a vibrant chalky minerality – especially if the vines have had time to dig through all those layers, deep into the limestone subsoil.

Autour de la Creusette is made from Pinot Noir growing in clay-and-silt soils on vines planted in 1973 and 1980. This is old vine Pinot from the heart of the Petite Montagne and the vines have dug deep into those soils. Didier and Chantal’s children, Adrien and Clémence, make the wines today. They’ve continued their parents’ work, farming without herbicides and working with enormous precision in the cellar. 

They vinify just over a third of this cuvee in demi-muids (600L barrels) with the remainder in stainless-steel tank. Using two vessels (one that breathes through pores in the oak, the other completely sealed) allows the wine to develop different textures and components. They block malo, and add only a tiny 1 g/L of dosage, keeping the acidity bright and letting the richness of the Pinot Noir fruit speak for itself. 

This is a tiny production wine: fewer than 200 cases in this vintage. The family has to work on that scale to produce a portrait of a single site with such specificity. But it pays off for us. The wine is delicious and amazing food (Eating Karaage? Try this!), a brilliant expression of the terroir, and (key to our project this month) also a quintessential example of what makes Pinot Noir great in Champagne. 

Pinot baseline set with our Pinot Noir, we move on to the Pinot Blanc. 

The Demets family is based in southern Côte des Bar. This is the part of Champagne furthest from Reims and Epernay and closest to Chablis. And the soils are more like Chablis (lots of the classic Kimmeridgian and Portlandian clay-limestone marl) than like Champagne’s more famous chalk-dominant terroir. 

Pierre Demets, grandson of the founder, joined the domaine in 2008 and took over six years later. Today, he and his wife, Mathilde, farm their ten hectares organically and have focused intently on their terroir and their biodiversity. Their tiny plot of Pinot Blanc, planted in 1992, had always been used as a small component of their blended Champagnes. But as Pierre and Mathilde focused more and more on biodiversity and their micro terroirs, they started to see the Pinot Blanc differently. 

It’s planted in a single parcel, Frion, with southwest exposure and the Côte des Bar typical clay-limestone soils. The exposure means afternoon sunshine for the vines, encouraging ripening. The clay in the soils gives the wine depth and (since the clay can hold water) helps with even ripening. The limestone does its usual magic, helping the fruit to find a vibrant structure and minerality. 

But here, we get a unique expression of that classic Côte des Bar terroir in the very specific voice of Pinot Blanc. The wine has subtle aromatics of white flowers and orchard fruit. And in the mouth it has classic Champagne freshness, but also a gentle, yellow-fruited timbre followed here by a mineral, saline finish.

It’s a blanc de blancs, but it’s nothing like a 100% Chardonnay wine from the region. It has a depth that makes us think of Pinot Noir a little more, but it has a charm that is very much its own. Pierre and Mathilde gave it the merest half gram of dosage, and yet it has a feeling of juiciness and generosity. Combined with the salty finish, it makes us want another sip, and then another. It’s easygoing enough to savor on its own as an aperitif (especially if you’re geeking out over the Pinot Blanc’s tells). But there’s power on the finish that really makes it shine with roasted pork chops served with softened onion.