Bubble Trouble

Last weekend, Flight Club held its second event, co-hosted with a Third Placer. It was a double-blind tasting of 9 non-vintage (NV) Champagnes and 1 sneaky non-Champagne sparkling wine, just to mix things up. I would describe it less as a “tasting” per se and more like “boujee boozing”. What can I say? We had a good time!

If you want to assemble your own Cru and co-host something, let me know! We have another few ideas lining up. As always, check the events page and follow @thirdplacewine, where I announce when registration opens.

Today, I’ll talk about what “non-vintage” means, do my best to sort through the results of the tasting and offer some takeaways.

Vintage v. Non-vintage

For starters, what even is “non-vintage”?

You’ve probably noticed that most still wine labels have a year—or vintage—on them. Basically, this means that the wine in the bottle was made entirely from grapes from that year’s harvest.

Notably, a lot of Champagne bottles DON’T have a year listed on the label, but some do. Why?

Champagne bottles with a year on the label or, “vintage” Champagnes, are made from grapes from a single year’s harvest, when that year’s grapes are declared exceptional by the Champagne house. Seems pretty straight forward.

“Non-vintage” (NV) Champagnes, by contrast, are made from a blend of harvests from different years. We’ll get to why that is later. You typically won’t see the letters “NV” on the label though, you just won’t see a year listed.

NV Champagnes are the entry level offerings of a house, and the most accessible in terms of price and availability as they compose the greatest volume of Champagne production. Usually, you will drink them young and not hold onto them.

Vintage champagnes are the next level up and there are two points worth mentioning here. The first is that a house’s prestige cuvée—or its top-of-the-range offering—is almost always a vintage, BUT not all vintage Champagnes are prestige cuvées. So just be mindful that when a year appears on the label, it could be a regular vintage or a prestige Champagne.

Take for example, Moët & Chandon. They have a regular vintage offering and a prestige cuvée, Dom Perignon, which is always a vintage.

The second point is that Krug is a big exception to this since they only make prestige Champagnes. Yes, its entry level Grand Cuvée is a non-vintage (well, technically it’s “multi-vintage”, but that’s a whole other can of worms) but as a prestige Champagne it is not even comparable to a standard non-vintage. And yes, they do also make vintage Champagnes.

Confused yet?

There are other important differences, too, like aging requirements—15 months minimum for NV vs. 3 years for vintage; much longer for prestige—but that’s beyond the scope of this. Just think in order of complexity, availability and cost:

• Non-vintage: entry level, made with grapes harvested across many years, a house’s calling card.

• Vintage: made exclusively with grapes from an exceptional year.

• Prestige: the best and fullest expression of a house, usually made from a single vintage.

Why is NV even a thing?

Champagne is generally (not always!) made from a blend of wines from different grapes from different vineyards across different years. This is a rather unique feature of Champagne compared to other wine regions, and it stems from practicality.

Champagne is historically a cool region and sometimes grapes don’t ripen consistently (this is changing but that is the topic for another post). Having the option to blend wines made from previous harvests (reserve wines), different grapes and across plots ensures there is always something to sell. It’s a hedge against vintage variation.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, NV Champagnes have come to represent a house’s calling card. Blending wines over time not only smooths over rough vintages, but also naturally develops a sort of stylistic consistency, which is then intentionally maintained. This way, people come to know what to expect when they buy, say, a NV Veuve Clicquot and that it’s not going to vary wildly from one bottle to the next.

Now, on to the tasting

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We went with NV Champagne as a theme because most people are familiar with them already, so it’s approachable and not intimidating to taste blind as many people have already been exposed to a number of the Champagnes we tasted.

We went for a double-blind tasting to enable people to compare, discover, and challenge (or confirm) their personal preferences among the house styles in the most unbiased way possible. To ensure the tasting was truly blind, we decanted the Ruinart into another standard, empty Champagne bottle to ensure no one could be biased by its distinct bottle shape.

We covered nine NV Champagnes and threw in one non-Champagne sparkling wine, just to see if people could guess which one was the odd one out. Here are the results:

Note: Louis Roederer #243 is a “multi-vintage” (but not prestige like Krug’s Grand Cuvée, it’s more similar to Jacquesson). The multi-vintage replaces their previous NV offering, Brut Premier.

Observations and lessons learned

Looking at the individual raw scores, there are some things we could take away and improve for the next time around.

• Palate fatigue is real. Working through ten wines is a lot, even if they are small tasting pours, and especially if you don’t spit.

• Scoring became more generous as people progressed through the Champagnes as observed from the unexpected overly-critical scores for Perrier-Jouët (wine #1) and the equally unexpected over-performance of Piper-Heidsieck (wine #9), to many tasters’ admitted surprise.

• This hyper-alertness at the beginning is likely the reason why 73% of people guessed that the first wine (Perrier-Jouët) was the non-Champagne. The remaining 27% correctly guessed that Alice Hartmann was the odd one out. (Alice Hartmann is a well-loved Luxembourgish crémant from the Moselle made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Riesling.) No other wines were suspected to be the non-Champagne.

• We should blind face-off Perrier-Jouët and Piper-Heidsieck to confirm the scoring.

• People don’t really care to use a spittoon, impacting the first three points above. Do a first round with a spittoon, then go back and drink as much as you want.

• One set of scores can really throw things off. One of the tasters gave exceptionally conservative scores across the board (mean = 3.5) save the Alice Hartmann, which was given an exceedingly generous score (9) even by this person’s standard. This set of data threw off the global scoring. If omitted, the results would have changed accordingly:

  • Alice Hartmann would drop from 5th to 7th place;

  • Piper-Hiedsieck and Taittinger would swap for 1st/2nd place;

  • Bollinger would bump up from 7th to 6th place.

Do try this at home

If you are curious to explore Champagne, getting to know a house’s style will help orient you in the wider world of Champagne. If you don’t know where to start, you can begin with what you’ve already tried and like, and then taste and compare other Champagnes from there. Is it more delicate or fuller-bodied? Fruity/floral or more biscuity/toasty? Tasting side-by-side will help reveal these differences. Just… don’t forget to spit.

If you want to see how to set up a double-blind tasting, check out this post Better Spät than Never and the reel below:

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That’s a wrap!