Champagne Monmarthe Solera Meunier Blanc de Meunier NV

Every year, Champagne Monmarthe blends the current harvest with wines from their perpetual reserve, kept in the estate's oldest concrete tank. This method lets young and mature wines share their characteristics and enhance one another over time – think of it as a library of every vintage since 2015 coalescing in every bottle. The family frames it as a wine of transmission, like a thread connecting each generation of the estate, which is a lovely way to describe what is, mechanically, one of the most flavor-building techniques in all of Champagne.

The winemaking is exacting in the best way. The current-vintage component is vinified in 600-liter barrels for eight months, the reserve wines age on in that old concrete tank, and the finished cuvée rests on its lees for 24 months in the cellars. Then – and this is the part I love – it's bottled as a zero-dosage Brut Nature and released just three to six months after disgorgement. No sugar to hide behind, so what you taste is pure fruit, terroir, and time, which takes real confidence in the raw material. Production sits at just 4,188 bottles, so this is genuinely small-scale Grower Champagne.

Even with no added dosage, a decadent nose of toasted French bread, marzipan, cherry blossom, and apple butter leads into a palate that's every bit as generous. You’ll get green apples sautéed in butter with cinnamon and brown sugar, then a turn toward savory with fennel, chalk, and pecans, before it lands on something uncannily like a creamy iced vanilla latte on the finish. It's extremely powerful and generous, with amplified acidity keeping the whole thing lifted and a finish that goes on and on. That chalky Ludes soil shows up exactly where you'd hope – a mineral, saline zip on the close that keeps every sip primed for the next. This is the richer, rounder, more decadent side of Meunier, and it's a beautiful argument for why the grape has climbed so fast. It’s a bottling I wish I could share with every Champagne lover I know – and at our price, maybe I will!