Domaine Vincey Champagne Oger Grand Cru Interlude NV

More about Domaine Vincey

The Vincey family have been winemakers for 8 generations and for most of that time they sold their exceptional fruit to the local cooperative. Things started to change when Quentin Vincey joined the family business in 2010. He began the arduous work of converting the families 7 hectares in Oger, Mesnil and Chouilly to organic and biodynamic practice. Farming was already meticulous but the removal of synthetics and the application of biodynamic principles has only increased the quality of their fruit which is made clearly evident by the finished results

In 2014 under the leadership of Quentin and his partner Marine they bottled their first wines under the family domain. Quentin worked for none other than Anselme Selosse, perhaps the most influential champagne maker since WWII and his gentle touch and eschewing of modern technology has left a strong mark on the winemaking at Vincey. But Marine and Quentin very much do their own thing. They are after all lovers of great wine and taste blidn constantly with friends and colleagues. They are well connected to a group of champagne producers who we think are producing the best bubbles out there and have learned invaluable lessons from them.

Like Selosse they pick their fruit much later than is common in Champagne, allowing the grapes to become perfectly ripe. After a long gentle press most of the base wine ferments in small oak barrels on average around 8 years of age. The wine stays in the barrels on the lees for one year, until bottling, allowing for a long contact with the lees as to increase complexity. Oger has famously very high acid grapes and the old barrels help soften that up a bit without imparting any flavor.

The still wines, before the second fermentation, are known in Champagne to be quite sharp, like unripe apples. Because they actually allow their grapes to become fully ripe this is not the case at Champagne Vincey. Because of the higher natural sugar level the potential alcohol is 10.5-11.5% at harvest, which is perfect as the alcohol level will increase by just over one percent during the second fermentation. This means that they never chaptalise (adding sugar during fermentation to increase the alcohol) which is very common in Champagne and often leads to wines that lack balance and complexity.

The different vineyard plots are kept in separate barrels and the wine ferments with the natural (“wild”) yeast, a rarity in Champagne. Most producers in Champagne add cultured yeast. Between January and March, the year after the harvest, they blind taste all the barrels. The bottling is at the beginning of September, before the new harvest. After a year in barrels, they don’t need to do any filtration which again gives more complexity to the wine.

Another rather unusual practice is that they do not add any cultured yeast for the second fermentation. Instead they use frozen grapes from the same vintage allowing the sugar and naturally occurring yeast to do the bubble making work resulting in some of the finest and softest bubbles that I have come across. They release each wine a minimum of five years after boiling which is 2 more that required for vintage Champagne.

The resulting wine is nothing short of exquisite. It is the sort of wine that you smell and taste over and over again so as to try to figure out what is going on. The nose immediately speaks to its greatness. There's this wonderful fullness to the fruit with layers of complexity similar to the Selosse wines but without any of the oxidation. The fruit is rich but precise and with minerality that is deftly balanced with delicate savory and saltiness tones. This level of balance is always impressive but even more so from such young winemakers less than a decade into their career.