A house style built through time

Hervieux-Dumez’s Tradition is meant to taste less like one particular harvest than like Hervieux-Dumez.

The estate is based in Sacy, southwest of Reims, and makes this wine from four premier-cru villages: Sacy, Chamery, Écueil and Villedommange. This part of the Montagne de Reims is clay-limestone country, planted to all three major Champagne varieties but particularly well suited to Pinot Noir, which leads the blend at 50%, joined by Meunier and Chardonnay in equal parts. 

They farm beautifully and, in fact, are not just sustainable but certified bee-friendly. The image of the bee on the label is not just decorative – it’s a mark of their commitment to the land. The result is fruit that has the breadth of the Montagne with the freshness of the limestone soils. 

The choices in the cellar are all classic. The wine ferments in steel, undergoes malolactic fermentation, and rests for about three years on its lees in the family’s seventeenth-century vaulted cellars. That time in contact with the spent yeast contributes to the wine’s gentle biscuity character without obscuring its freshness.

But the family’s most important choices are in the realm of blending. At least 30% of the release is reserve wines, wines the family has saved from earlier harvests specifically for this blending purpose. Reserve wines, famously, can moderate the peculiarities of any given vintage, allowing the family to produce a consistent style (they save their more radical expressions for their vintage-labelled wines). It’s this moderating function that makes them so essential to the Grandes Marques. But they are very important to many small growers too, as they can bring not just complexity, but also the maturity and depth of a longer-aged wine.

The result is a poised – almost seamless – classical Champagne: citrus and white flowers up front, followed by orchard fruit, brioche and a cool mineral finish. It is the brighter and more immediately refreshing of the two wines. Drink it as an apéritif, or with gougères, oysters, fried seafood, roast chicken, a mushroom tart or a salty, nutty cheese.

If Hervieux-Dumez blends until the seams disappear, Le Guédard practically draws arrows at its seams.

The clue is the strange “AS/100 BLAGE” on the front label. It’s not a secret code, but a visual play on the French word for blending, assemblage. (If you really want to get into it here’s the breakdown: “as”; “100” = cent which is pronounced close to “sem”, followed by “blage.” French puns really are odd.)

Silly as the rebus may be, Sanchez-Le Guédard really is assembling. Their five-hectare estate is based in Cumières, a premier-cru village in the Marne Valley, but also includes holdings in Damery (Marne again), Sermiers (on the Montagne de Reims), and grand-cru Oger in the Côte des Blancs. These are powerful and distinct voices, and SLG isn’t afraid to let each one sing. 

The confidence is grounded in the great terroir and farming (the estate is certified organic). The work in the cellar is super-old school (the bottles are still riddled by hand on traditional wooden racks). They do blend vintages, though the reserve wine (2019) is only one vintage behind the base wine and only constitutes 20% of the final wine. 

But the blending continues along almost every conceivable dimension. There are multiple villages and fruit from all three major subregions. They use all three grape varieties and even multiple vessels: the Pinot Noir (60%) and Meunier (20%) were raised in steel while the Chardonnay was raised in old Burgundy barrels. 

The wine comes together beautifully, but without trying to erase all these differences. It is a wine of harmony, rather than unison. The Pinot Noir provides the wine’s broad frame; Meunier adds supple fruit; Chardonnay brings freshness. The Côte des Blancs line we all love shines through beautifully, and there’s power from the Montagne as well as succulent complexity from the Marne villages. The barrel-aging contributes breadth without masking the precision.  

It is a wine of complexity but still, fundamentally, of elegance: fine bubbles carry flavors of ripe apple, pear and citrus into notes of dried fruit, brioche, chalk and a lightly saline finish. It is more vinous and food-oriented than the Hervieux-Dumez. You can open it before dinner, of course, but it will show at its best with scallops, salmon, roast cod, chicken with mushrooms, creamy vegetable dishes or a wedge of mature Comté.