The accolade ‘La Grande Année’, or ‘The Great Year’, is a beautifully simple indication of the prestige of two new Champagne Bollinger cuvées – La Grande Année 2015 and La Grande Année Rosé 2015 – because only truly extraordinary years are awarded this vintage status at the house.
In order to understand why these cuvées are so special, we must talk about the weather – obviously a key factor for growing grapes and producing wine. The year 2015 was one of remarkable weather; a mild, wet, winter gave way to an April that saw the highest recorded levels of sunshine since 2007 and set the tone for a searingly hot, dry, summer (fortunately, the vines were able to cope with a lack of rain because the chalky vineyard soil had absorbed large amounts of water from the wet winter).
This chain of meteorological events resulted in a marvellous September grape harvest – it yielded compact bunches of small, concentrated, and extremely healthy berries with high levels of acidity. As a result, the 2015 cuvées display exquisite texture and an incredible power and generosity.
Of course, underlying the gratifyingly good 2015 harvest is Bollinger’s excellence in winemaking. This vintage showcases the house’s finesse, where technical precision is married with layers of hand craftsmanship, experience, and history. The unique heritage of the house is intertwined with its family forest, which stands above its vineyards in north-eastern France and provides Bollinger with the oak that makes the barrels in which its vintages mature.
Bollinger is the last remaining champagne house to have its own resident cooper, Gaël Chaunut, a highly skilled artisan, who is responsible for assembling and maintaining its magnificent oak barrels. This brings us to another crucial element in the Bollinger story, its savoir-faire in oak cask maturation.
Maturation in old oak casks (averaging 20 years of age) is the house’s most distinctive characteristic. This process allows the wine to breathe and facilitates micro-oxygenation, which creates magnificent flavour and complexity and gives the wine a wonderful capacity to age. It evolves in a very specific way, with the oak aromas melding with those of the grapes, and the structure, precision and sensory qualities of the wood imparted to the wine as it mellows and matures.
The champagne blending stage at Bollinger is an art form. Performed with meticulous precision under the expert eye of cellar master Denis Bunner, it involves tasting some 500 different wines to achieve a flawless balance of taste and texture.
Bollinger’s impressive range of vineyards are planted mostly with Pinot Noir – a black grape variety that defines the house style, which is complex and powerful. La Grande Année and La Grande Année Rosé are wonderfully opulent, with a luscious richness that is offset by an elegant note of bitterness. They are superb gastronomic wines that pair perfectly with fine cuisine, their creamy effervescence complementing delicate, sophisticated flavours and illustrating the exquisite harmony between great wine and food. (Similarly, Bollinger’s La Grande Année 2012 was launched at London restaurant St John with bespoke pairing menu.)
Bunner is thrilled by this release, and says: ‘2015 expresses more of the soul of a Bollinger millésimé than any other year. More opulent, more powerful, it exalts Pinot Noir. Uplifted by maturation in wooden casks, this champagne reveals the characteristics of an exceptional year.’
