Champagne

Wines labelled as Champagne can only come from a precisely delimited zone of northern France, and be made from the following grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, plus the lesser planted Pinots Blanc and Gris and the obscure Arbane and Petit Meslier.

There are lots of other rules too, governing planting, pruning, yields etc. but the other key regulations demand secondary fermentation in the bottle (that’s what gives the bubbles) and minimum periods of maturation on the lees of fifteen months for non-vintage Champagne and three years for vintage Champagne.

We offer a limited selection of Champagnes, mainly because we are not big enough to play the discounting game. Of the better known houses we tend to list the wines of Pol Roger (160 years of history, still family-owned, with a great reputation for producing elegant Champagne); and the small but refined production of Jacquesson. Instead we major on smaller production "Growers’ Champagnes" (i.e. made, at least largely, from grapes grown on family-owned land) from these three excellent domaines (see below). As you can see, each has wines based on different grape varieties: Pinot Noir for Serge Mathieu, Chardonnay for Perrot-Batteux and Pinot Meunier for Thomas-Hatté.

If you would like to buy a quantity of Champagne from us for a celebration do call us directly - we will give you a much friendlier discount than the website!

Champagne Thomas-Hatté

Frank Thomas makes Champagne from his family’s historic holdings of just 3 hectares of vines around Fleury la Rivière, about 10 kilometres north-west of Epernay. His wines are based on Pinot Meunier, and that unusually high proportion of the grape gives even his Brut a distinctive, early maturing charm, and some of the character of a well-aged vintage Champagne.