Champagne Alexandre Filaine, the “Sensuum” of Champagne

Fabrice Gass is the artificer behind the small Champagne winery Alexandre Filaine that produces wine with a dry and precise style.

Production is small, only some 5,000 bottles a year, but has had the fortune of recently entering the orbit of Dominga, Marta and Enrico Cotarella who through the family estate Falesco are importing it to Italy. During the recent Vinitaly trade fair, I was able to taste the small yet impressive line of Champagne Alexandre Filaine production, wines that have an extremely Champenoise style and are an expression of the talent of a very Champenoise character, in regard to both his personal history and approach. Fabrice Gass is the creative force behind the wines from this small winery named after his partner Alexandre Filaine. The grapes used are from a 1.5-hectare vineyard in the village of Damery in the Vallée de la Marne that is subdivided into seven parcels to cultivate Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier.

Fabrice Gass earned his stripes in the very tough school of Maison Bollinger, where for years he was a dégorgeur and with whom he still has an excellent rapport, considering he sells some of his grapes to the Ay-based group. The craft nature of Champagne Alexandre Filaine production involves not only the vineyards, where a viticulture raisonnée is practiced that limits intervention as much as possible and avoids any use of chemicals, but also what takes place in the winery, with practices that are similar to those of vin de garage which in collective memory has recently had success thanks to an inevitable poetic charm.

In his home winery, Fabrice Gass has set up the best equipment he needs for production including a traditional, 2000kg press and a machine to precisely measure dosage as well as used barriques and tonneau barrels for fermentation. The wine then sits on the lees in bottles with bouchon liège real corks and dégorgement is done by hand. His style is dry and precise and all three wines in the Champagne Alexandre Filaine line mirror this conception of cleanliness, which in regard to flavor is also the result of not allowing malolactic fermentation and confirmed by adding an extra-brut dosage. The most surprising wine among the three was without a doubt the Cuvée Sensuum Vertigo 2008, a truly irreproachable and luminous interpretation of that already great harvest.

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