A new Corbon vintage Blanc de Blancs from Avize

Champagne Corbon Vintage 2006 is now on the market, a vintage with which the young Agnés took charge of her small family Maison’s development.

Avize is a village southeast of Epernay, on the D10 highway that runs through the Côte de Blancs. The town is 762 hectares in size with a population of around 1,800 inhabitants, known as avizois. Avize is home to the only “technical” school for winegrowing and making in the region of Champagne, if you exclude the Ecole de la vigne et du vin at the University of Reims, which was founded in 1927 (thanks to a donation from a négociant) with the name Lycée Viticole and today is known asViti Campus.

The vineyards in Avize surround the village and extend up the hill to the east to a forest the top which stands out over the Côte de Blancs. Avize has 267.9 hectares of vineyards cultivated exclusively with Chardonnay and there are also some parcels with micro-production made famous by celebrated producers. These include Champ Caïn, the lieux-dit of Jacquesson, which has a southern exposure and is almost flat. Les Chantereines produces the cuvée of the same name from Anselme Selosse, while Chemin de Flavigny is used together with Chemin de Plivot by Larmandier-Bernier for the cuvée Les Chemins d’Avize.

Avize was classified as a Grand Cu village due to its pedoclimatic characteristics where the chalky soil is covered by a thin layer of lime-clay that gives the Chardonnay a mineral salinity, ensuring a good acidity and a concentrated floral aroma that is greater than that of other Côte de Blancs villages where the wines tend to be more lithe and sharp, like in Cramant, or more intense and fruity as in Le Mesnil.

The interpretation of Chardonnay by the Corbon family stands out in the Grand Cru Avize, four generations of winemakers that began in 1920 with grandfather Charles, followed by sons Albert and then Claude, who decided to become a Récoltant Manipulant in 1972 but only presented his first Champagne to the market with his own label in 1981. The small winery looks out over the “vineyard garden” where today Claude’s daughter Agnés is in charge with an expanding organic approach in the vineyard, eliminating the use of herbicides and pesticides, a difficult one for small producers for whom the family’s economic wellbeing depends on the harvest. In the winery, on the other hand, Agnés has followed the vision of her father, who believes the great vintage Blanc de Bancs need to sit long on the lees in order to give the already prestigious Chardonnay additional finesse and elegance.

Cordon has come out today with Vintage 2006, a special year because it was when Agnés definitively took charge of developing the small family Maison, with particular attention to two (out of six) hectares of vineyards in Avize, the stylistic peak of production.

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