Grand Vintage 2009 Moët & Chandon, Blanc and Rosé

2009 is the preferred vintage the Chef de Caves who celebrated this year for its completeness and a charisma produced by distinct maturity and propensity to age long.

It is no secret that Champagne lovers enthusiastically await precious cuvée de prestige, for rare vintages, better if disgorged late, and for the few unattainable lieux dits (single parcels) wines. The reality of the situation is that vintage Champagnes represent only 10% of overall Champagne production. This explains why every valid tasting, especially for the greatest Grand Maison de Champagne - Moët & Chandon – always begins with a non-vintage cuvée, absolutely the most important because it is the calling card of a Maison’s style.

A style guaranteed by the great secret behind Champagne production, the vins de reserve, wines from previous vintages that represent up to 50% of a blend based on the lastest harvest. These wines guarantee a consistency year after year and above all the recognizability of a non-vintage Champagne and the producer’s style. This is one of the reasons why some of the great Champagne brands opt to not produce a vintage cuvée every year, in order to better manage the production of their non-vintage bubby and maintain as best possible good wines to serve as vins de reserve over time for those Champagnes that are too often commonly referred to as their “base” or “stock” Champagnes – a term that does not render justice to the enormous work behind its creation.

Moët & Chandon, for example, did not turn out a vintage 2007 and nor will there be a 2010 or 2011. This because, as Chef des Cave Benoît Gouez – who has been supervisor at Moët for the past 12 years – has often underlined, the main objective in every harvest is to safeguard the grapes that will be used to make the vins de reserve, and by doing so perpetuate the Maison’s unmistakable style year after year. It is a commitment that, considering the extraordinary volume of production (over 20 million bottles for Brut Impérial) of the most consumed Champagne in the world. Moët’s brand manager Fanny Bonet-Monserrat loves to recall that “every second a bottle is opened somewhere in the world” and so the Maison’s savoir-faire becomes an enormous responsibility even towards the market.

This is why since 1842, the harvest that produced the first Moët & Chandon vintage Champagne, to 2009, the last vintage to come to the market, the Maison has produced only 73 vintage Champagnes. And it is for this reason that Moët & Chandon’s Grand Vintage Champagnes are created only in those years that have a distinct personality, with grapes that can bring to the glass the individual traits and uniqueness of a single, top-quality harvest. For Chef des Cave Benoît Gouez, creating a Grand Vintage offers him the utmost freedom of interpretation, a creative license that, while remaining true to Moët’s mature and fruity style, lets him bring out as best he can the singular nature of the year and exalt the complexity of the blend that only the best vintages of Champagne can give.

Vintage Champagne thus represents an exception for a Grand Maison and, as in the case of vintage 2009, this is perhaps even more true for Moët & Chandon. This because, as Benoît Gouez pointed out, Grand Vintage 2009 is the product of “an exceptional year”, a harvest he personally prefers to the much celebrated 2008, given the boldness that 2009 can express in a blend unusually dominated by Pinot Noir. The consistent reliability in a Brut Impérial is of secondary importance to a Grand Vintage. Thus after the 2008, renowned for the freshness, liveliness and pinpoint precision of the fruit, Benoît Gouez celebrated the completeness of the 2009 harvest, with a charisma produced by a distinct maturity, a very Moët trait in which the Chef des Caves saw a propensity to age long and a wonderful evolution. Now all we have to do is wait.

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