It seems there's not much respect for old age these days - unless it's in a bottle. Recent auctions in Hong Kong have highlighted a reverence for old wines with mature bordeaux, champagne and burgundy selling for record prices.
Only in recent years has aged champagne started to gain an appreciative audience. Champagne's weather conditions vary drastically from year to year, so the regional tradition is to blend several years together to smooth out the wine and provide a consistent house style, thus most champagne is labelled as 'non-vintage'. Only in special years - a few times per decade - do the champagne houses put a vintage year on a bottle. It is these vintage wines that collectors are beginning to covet.
Most bubblies are non-vintage and promoted as ready-to-drink, so few people are familiar with the character of aged champagne.
During his recent visit to Hong Kong, Bruno Paillard, of Maison Bruno Paillard, said the term 'non-vintage' should be changed to 'multivintage', as the former is an unflattering moniker.
In Champagne production, the wine is left in the caves for many years while the yeast cells, or lees, in the bottle do their magic. When it is ready, producers freeze a part of the bottle's neck and remove the yeast sediment in a procedure called disgorgement. By law, all non-vintage champagne must rest sur latte, or with the yeast cells decaying in the bottle, for at least 15 months, while vintage champagne rests for three years, although in reality many cellars leave the wine on its lees for much longer. This led to a trend of indicating the date when vintage wines had been disgorged, most notably Bollinger's treasured RD label, which indicates 'recently disgorged'.
The decision when to disgorge is a tightrope walk balancing the expense of allowing the wine to gain more complexity versus the cost of holding thousands of bottles in a cellar as work-in-progress inventory items.
