Blending as Tradition

There's no sign on the door. No website, no tasting room, no Instagram. If you found your way to Madame Fallet's cellar in Avize, it would be because somebody whispered it to you. Cross the threshold and you step into Champagne as it was decades ago: old foudres aging in cool natural chalk cellars, and tens of thousands of bottles resting quietly in the dark.

Madame Fallet and her late husband started bottling their own Champagne in 1957. The "grower Champagne revolution" we love to talk about was still half a century away. In 1957, nearly everyone in Avize sold their grapes to the big houses and called it a living. But not the Fallets. They just quietly did it all themselves, and kept doing it, building a following of private clients who drove to the cellar door. They were making Grower Champagne before anyone thought it would become a movement..

But this pioneering, fiercely independent little estate has always made a blended wine. Every bottling combines two consecutive vintages, roughly two-thirds from the newer harvest and one-third reserve. Old vines (50 to 80 years) on Grand Cru Avize chalk, picked late and ripe, fermented in large, old, neutral Alsatian oak casks, then aged at least seven years on the lees before disgorgement. (That's more than four times what the rules require; for a refresher on what all that time on the lees does to a Champagne, see our March booklet.)

Why blend, when your terroir is this good? Because for Madame Fallet, the blend expresses  the truth of the terroir. Any single year is weather; two years woven together gets you something closer to the nature of Avize. The reserve wine brings depth and a quiet autumnal richness, the younger wine brings lift. Blending is not a commercial compromise. It's how she paints her portrait of the place.

Building a moment

The Prelat family has grown grapes in Celles-sur-Ource for four generations, but Julien is the first to vinify and bottle his own wine.

It wasn’t an easy transition. When Julien embarked on his journey there was no family winery. There was no cellar. There was no equipment. He sold his first vintages as still wine to a négociant  while he saved for equipment. His first Champagne released under his own name came in 2010, and it was tiny: just 6,000 bottles. Today he makes about 30,000, which is still a rounding error by grande marque standards.

There were challenges, but Julien also had advantages. He had the great terroir. And he also had very special friends. If Celles-sur-Ource rings a bell, it's probably because it’s the home village of Cedric Bouchard, Julien's neighbor, ami, and mentor. Cedric is famous, of course, for his super-collectible Roses de Jeanne Champagnes, which made "one grape, one vineyard, one vintage" into a leading Champagne philosophy.

Julien took Bouchard's lessons to heart, but applied them in his own way. Like Bouchard, he makes single-vineyard, single-varietal wines. He and his wife, Karine, farm their 7 hectares organically and by hand. But where Bouchard sought to push the envelope , Prélat seeks harmony and offers us a sense of elegant classicism. 

For instance, dosage is not a dirty word with the Prelats, even as Bouchard makes all his wines as Brut Nature. The Prelats believe that balance and harmony are everything, and that getting the dosage right makes the wine pop. So they taste each release blind at varying levels of dosage until they find the one that lets the wine truly sing. If a wine ends up showing best with no dosage or 1 g/L, that’s fine. If it is at its most expressive with 4g/L well, that’s fine too. And in the case of the base '22 Les Vignes Basses, that number was [4] g/L.

Les Vignes Basses might be the purest test of Prelat’s approach, because the grape is Meunier. Meunier has spent most of Champagne's history as the workhorse blending grape. It’s an early-ripening, frost-hardy variety the big houses use to round out their assemblages but never put in the spotlight.

Julien does the opposite with Les Vignes Basses, releasing it as a 100% Meunier cuvee from a single parcel in Celles-sur-Ource's marl and limestone. He ferments in stainless steel and blocks malolactic conversion, so the wine keeps every bit of its natural racy cut. 

2022 in the Côte des Bar is a top vintage giving wines with the ideal balance of ripeness, acidity and mineral cut. Thanks to meticulous farming and the magic of this vintage, Julien captured everything blenders prize in Meunier. But instead of weaving it into the background, he puts all that decadent complexity center stage and in sharp focus. There is apple blossom, ripe orchard fruit, a creamy texture, all framed by beautifully fresh acidity and a chalky-saline Côte des Bar finish from those famous Kimmeridgian soils.