Champagne: The essential guide to the wines, producers, and terroirs of the iconic region by Peter Liem

Author:Peter Liem [Liem, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781607748427
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

MOUSSY AND THE MASTER OF MEUNIER

West of Pierry, the village of Moussy is the home of José Michel, one of Champagne’s great meunier specialists. Michel’s family has been growing vines in Moussy since 1847, and he began making wine here in 1955. The vineyards of Moussy continue along the same hillside as Pierry, and here there is a cleft in the hillside leading up into the forest above, which causes much of the vineyard area to face southeast. There are similar bands of Sparnacian marl and Cuisian clays on the slopes above the chalky bedrock, and nearly two-thirds of the village’s vineyard area is devoted to meunier. Meunier ripens readily here, but compared with the Vallée de la Marne, it’s more influenced by chalk and feels more structured, without as much overt body.

About half of Michel’s vineyard area is planted with meunier, with vines spread across seven different villages. Unfortunately, he rarely makes a pure Moussy champagne anymore. While he does make a pure meunier nonvintage champagne, he blends in fruit from the Aisne in the western part of the Vallée de la Marne as well as from Moussy, Pierry, and Chavot-Courcourt. Both his vintage cuvée and Spécial Club are equal parts meunier and chardonnay, as he likes the finesse that chardonnay contributes to the blend, and both of those wines are excellent. However, for the first twenty years of his career, his vintage wine was pure meunier from the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay. I’ve had the fortune to taste a number of these vintages with him—among the highlights have been a mature but complex 1953, a surprisingly fresh and vibrant 1959, and a spicy, trufflelike 1965, as well as a lively, complex, and unbelievably youthful 1946 made by his father. I wish he would make wines like these again, but he’s convinced that chardonnay brings something positive to the blend, and I can’t argue with that logic. All I know is that his old vintage wines prove that meunier can produce a complex and age-worthy wine if treated with care, and I hope that someone in the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay takes up the mantle and becomes the next champion of meunier.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.