The oldest Champagne house, founded in 1584, has added a blanc de blancs Champagne to its prestige Celebris range.
Champagne Gosset’s prestige cuvée is called Celebris – it was first created in the 1988 vintage which was released in 1995. Since then there have been just eight releases – plus four releases of Celebris Rosé. Now the house has debuted a vintage blanc de blancs to add to this range.
When cellar master Odilon de Varine arrived at the house in 2006, he says, he “was ashamed that there was no blanc de blancs.” He thus started crafting a 100% Chardonnay Champagne, based on the 2007 harvest, which was first released in 2011 as the house’s non-vintage Gosset Grand Blanc de Blancs. This is a wine that stands for sleekness, steeliness and the freshness the house is so well known for.
“Chardonnay is what Champagne should be, salty and refreshing,” says de Varine, but when it came to creating a 100% Chardonnay for the Celebris range, he was also clear that he did not want to make a wine in the same style as the existing Gosset Grand Blanc de Blancs. “When we made this blanc de blancs, we wanted to have the roundness and the softness of the chalk. Chalk comes from the sea, I wanted this salty length, I did not want the bubbles to hide the wine, so we worked on tiny bubbles for the wine. We worked a lot with the lees,” and, as he noted, also a slightly lower pressure: just below five rather than the usual six bars, which also adds to the creaminess and gentleness. “Having a blanc de blancs meant having another wine, something different, another expression of Chardonnay. We were working on the gentle side of Chardonnay.” As regards the lower pressure, he says: “The idea was to make a wine first, to preserve it from oxidation and to have fizz at the beginning and for the wine to express itself without bubbles towards the end.”
De Varine also pointed out that the base wines were not just from the Côte des Blancs and its key villages Avize, Vertus, Cramant and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, but also from the Montagne de Reims from the villages of Ambonnay, Cumières, Trépail and Villers-Marmery along with Passy-sur-Marne in the Marne Valley – “a place for expressive, salty Chardonnay.” The “dynamic” 2012 vintage – combining freshness and ripeness in equal measure – was then chosen to be the inaugural vintage of the Celebris Blanc de Blancs. It spent nine years on lees and was disgorged in December 2021 with a dosage of 7g/l.
