Champagne Bollinger Blanc de Noirs PN AYC18 NV

Since 1829, six generations of the Bollinger family have crafted a dry, long-lived, and toasty style of Champagne that has come to define this great house. With nearly 400 acres of vineyards spread across Champagne – almost entirely in Grand Cru and Premier Cru villages – Bollinger is perhaps unique among Champagne’s larger maisons for growing over two-thirds of all the fruit needed to make their cuvees. Pinot noir is the favored grape to lead their blends, and this AYC 18 is their penultimate expression of their top plots of pinot noir.

Most of the fruit hails from their Grand Cru plots in Aÿ – one of the most famous villages in Champagne, in the Grande Vallée de la Marne, where pinot noir is revered for its production of powerful and sleek expressions of Champagne, all grown on the southern-facing slopes northeast of Epernay. The winemaking style of Bollinger is traditional, with a focus on barrel fermentations driving that voluptuously spiced Bollinger style. In fact, they are the last of the Grand Marques to employ a full-time cooper – a nod to the importance they place on barrel influence in their final wines. 

After over six years aging on the lees, this profound and opulent bubbly is finished with a precise six grams per liter dosage. A new disgorgement, completed in January of last year, just landed a couple weeks back in the USA, and I can’t stress this enough – this is a collectible and showstopping bottling for any Champagne aficionado to cherish. Opening aromas of plum blossoms and rose petals, followed by toasty and rich bread dough sensations pull you into the glass, followed by tautly wound flavors of cherries and raspberries, with hints of orange zest, black pepper, fresh pine needles, and delicate chantilly cream. This is heady, precise, and opulent stuff – a Bond-worthy bottling of Bollinger if ever there was one!