"We have already shared with you the complete production of champagne, let's take a closer look at the blending stage. Nuances, tastes and aromas... Everything is created at this precise moment! Focus on this decisive phase in the production of a quality champagne.
A crucial step in the production of champagne
After being harvested by hand as required by the Champagne tradition, the grapes are then pressed, then put into fermentation where the yeasts consume the sugar naturally present in the fruit in order to transform it into alcohol. We obtain still wines (i.e. not sparkling, for the moment) which evolve and are stored, most often, in temperature-controlled stainless steel vats.
Then comes the assembly stage: as its name suggests, the goal is to combine several still wines (from a few to several dozen) like the different ingredients in a recipe. Each combination will give birth to the identity of a future champagne.
In Ludes, all this is orchestrated under the watchful and attentive eye of our Cellar Master, Laurent Fédou, and his team. They carefully and delicately select the wines to create harmonious vintages. Here, according to him, is the unique expression he seeks when developing each of the House's champagnes:
“The Canard-Duchêne style par excellence: freshness and balance.”
Because in fact, the personality of the Cellar Master also sets the pace for developing the oenological identity of a House. He is the master of the common thread that will be found in each of the vintages, in addition to their specific aromatic profiles.
The assembly: infinite nuances
In the vat room, the juices were separated according to numerous criteria:
- By cru : a cru corresponding to a village, there are 319 in the appellation including 44 Premiers Crus and 17 Grands Crus which are recognized for the exceptional quality of their grapes. We can sometimes even push the separation of the harvest by plot.
- By faction : the first juices extracted during pressing are called “cuvée” and are of higher quality than the last liters called “taille”.
- By grape variety : Pinot Noir, Meunier or Chardonnay
- Per year
In fact, each harvest is unique both in terms of quantity and the particularities of the wine:
- Was the weather favorable? Regular rain and good sunshine are ideal.
- Is the vineyard healthy? The vines are in full health and are flowering in the natural rhythm of the seasons.
- Are the harvests generous? The grapes are sufficient and delicately picked by hand by passionate women and men.
The result of 70 million years of evolution, the natural richness of the Champagne lands offers us a delicious and complex palette of aromas and tastes to create exceptional vintages.
Concerning the 2022 harvest, because you need beautiful grapes to make good wines, they keep their promise: we find the freshness in our Chardonnay, the structure and elegance for our Pinot Noirs and the fruitiness of our Meunier! All the ingredients are combined to allow our Cellar Master to imagine the most beautiful blends, work of reflection and creativity. So, we ask you for a little more patience before tasting these beautiful vintages which will still have to flourish in the coolness of our cellars. Plan on a rest of 15 months to 3 years on average, and see much more for certain vintages.
The art of blending wines
Trying, analyzing, discovering… It’s an art and that’s the whole point of blending champagne.
Experience, patience, knowledge, but also instinct make all the difference here to capture the unique richness of the hillsides of the Montagne de Reims . The Cellar Master must have a perfect knowledge and memory of his terroir to create the perfect wine pairing .
This is what Laurent Fédou and his oenological committee do on a daily basis. They achieve it with great delicacy, a subtle balance.
They carry out numerous tastings and necessary adjustments to make the desired champagne. Because the recipe is not written in advance, from one year to another, we will not use the same still wines to find the same result, the same vintage.
The whole difficulty lies in preserving the markers of identity from previous years and creating unique champagnes .
Surprise, harmony, elegance, freshness, power, delicacy, finesse, depth, balance…
So many adjectives to describe the different vintages of champagne from Maison Canard-Duchêne.
Discover the collection of our essential champagnes.
Reserve wine, a Champagne specialty
The use of reserve wines is a technique specific to Champagne. It consists of setting aside, each year, a part of the harvest which will therefore not be bottled immediately.
The decision once again falls to our panel of tasters who judge the suitability of a wine to be kept in reserve or not. The selected tanks will not move again until incorporation into a future blend.
These still wines, as if suspended in time, are the guarantors of the constancy of a style, of a vintage. They allow, from one year to the next, to compensate for the variations of the harvests. Because even if we can tame nature, we can never control it, it alone can decide what it gives us.
Maison Canard-Duchêne goes even further by drawing inspiration from the solera technique (also called perpetual reserve) for its Léonie cuvée.
The principle is to mix in the same vat wine from several years, the best of the best. And each year, new wine is added to complement the older wines used. This method is said to allow old wines to educate the younger ones.
So, when there is no year indicated on the label of a champagne, this means that it is composed of a blend of wines from several harvests.
And conversely, we speak of vintage champagne when the wines used all come from a single harvest. The goal is then to create a unique cuvée, reflecting the best of the past year. Are you more of a 2010 or 2012 person?
To discover the entire champagne-making process and enjoy a bucolic stroll in our park of century-old trees, Maison Canard-Duchêne invites you to visit its cellars! Contact us for more information.
