Champagne Bollinger La Grand Année Brut 2014

Bollinger is rightly counted among the most distinguished houses in Champagne, but one chapter often gets overlooked. Lily Bollinger was one of the great "Champagne widows," the remarkable women who took the reins of their estates after their husbands' deaths – much like Madame Clicquot before her. A visionary, Lily championed late-disgorged, extended lees-aged wines, an approach now considered essential to crafting exceptional Champagne, and she gave the world a cuvée made from some of the region's last ungrafted vines. And that's only part of the story.

Founded in 1829, Bollinger is a Pinot Noir house with roughly 175 hectares (about 430 acres) across Champagne's finest Pinot villages, including Aÿ, Verzenay, Avenay, and Louvois. Uniquely, roughly two-thirds of the fruit for its cuvées comes from Bollinger's own Grand Cru and Premier Cru vineyards – among them the ungrafted plots of Clos Saint-Jacques and Chaudes Terres, which survived the phylloxera epidemic. The house still ferments in barrel and keeps a full-time cooper on staff (with a cellar of some 3,500 casks), lending its wines their signature richness, and it hand-riddles its most prestigious cuvées.

La Grande Année is one of Bollinger's tête de cuvées, made only in exceptional years and only from Premier and Grand Cru fruit. It's vinified entirely in oak barrels – a rarity in Champagne – then hand-riddled and aged a remarkable eight years on the lees, well beyond what the appellation requires. Finally, it's disgorged by hand, a practice you rarely see from larger houses. With a 61/39 split of Pinot Noir to Chardonnay, this Champagne tastes a little like heaven. Honeycrisp apple and spice – white pepper, cardamom – waft from the glass, giving way to pie crust, preserved lemon, yellow peach, crushed walnut, and a whisper of fino sherry, all brooding power and depth. Crisp and lingering on a salty-mineral finish, it's a marvelous way to kick off any celebration – and a bottle destined to impress!