A blend of the 2012, 2008 and 2007 vintages, the NV Brut Grand Siècle #26 is just coming onto the market. Wafting from the glass with notes of nectarine, peach and ripe citrus fruits mingled with notions of freshly baked bread, buttered toast, nougat, white flowers and clear honey, it's medium to full-bodied, fleshy and enveloping, with a deep and rather broad-shouldered core of fruit that's girdled by racy acids and animated by a classy pinpoint mousse. This suave, complex three-vintage blend is the Grande Marque prestige cuvée par excellence. This bottle was disgorged in February 2023 with seven grams per liter dosage.
My tasting with Chef de Cave Michel Fauconnet was especially interesting, as a number of exciting innovations are in the works at Laurent-Perrier. The first is the release of a new cuvée in a genre well-adapted to the house's gently reductive, Chardonnay-based style: it's a non-dosage blanc de blancs, and it will be released later this year. The second important development is that Laurent-Perrier will henceforth enumerate each new edition of their tête de cuvée Grande Siècle. As readers will know, Grande Siècle is a blend of three complementary vintages—put simply, one to provide structure, another freshness and a third, flesh. The maison's decision to be more transparent about exactly which vintages are in the bottle is to be welcomed, as this is a cuvée that can age formidably—as several tasting notes in this report testify—and, armed with this information, consumers will henceforth be better able to make informed decisions about when to drink their bottles. It will also serve to emphasize that magnums of Grand Siècle are systematically released later than bottles. For example, the current US release of the Grand Siècle in 750-milliliter bottles is #23, a blend of the 2006, 2004 and 2002 vintages; but the latest US release in 1.5-liter bottles is the Grand Siècle #22, a blend of the 2004, 2002 and 1999 vintages. The significance of this will not be lost on readers who appreciate Champagne with additional bottle age. In addition to these two innovations, Fauconnet also took pains to emphasize that the house has been making considerable efforts to improve their grape sourcing—improvements that seemed to be reflected in a more-than-creditable non-vintage Brut, a cuvée that is, needless to say, produced in some quantity. In summation, this rather discrete maison is quietly producing very fine wines, and all these recent, forthcoming and past releases come warmly recommended in their respective categories.
- William Kelley (04/2019)
