Champagne.  It’s a conundrum. It is perhaps the most iconic wine of all and its very name is linked to celebration and stardom.  It can be great quality and there are a host of styles to enjoy, but it is also bound up with luxury lifestyle nonsense; super-yachts, Russians and overpriced clothing brands.  Not to mention the way supermarkets use the cheapest champagne they can lay their hands on as a Christmas loss leader.  This is a wine having a full blown identity crisis; is it the coolest thing ever or is it embarrassingly naff? Fortunately there is a solution; growers champagne.  What is growers champagne, you may well ask?

To understand growers champagne you first need to understand how the big brands make their wines.  The key point is that each champagne house has a style that they seek to consistently reproduce.  They do this by a process of blending.  The blend will be from vineyards all over the region and from wines held back from older vintages specifically for this purpose.

A master blender then mixes these wines together to create the house style.  It is a difficult, and highly skilled job.  Sadly for the blenders, they often need replacement teeth after a few years, since the acidity in champagne is so high it eventually rots away their incisors.

A growers champagne however is made in a simpler and, arguably, truer way.  It is a wine made by a single wine grower, usually from a single vintage.  In every other style of wine we seek out wines that express where they were grown, what the weather was like during the vintage and that say something about the terroir they come from.

Many of us feel that the best wines are those truest to their place, season and producer, but seasonal variation and site specific character is precisely what the big houses lose in their blending process.  Why then do we accord them such status?  We would not do the same for the huge blends used to create commercial still wine.

If you are interested in exploring some growers champagne we are, of course, happy to help.  Click here for a mini collection of three fascinating growers wines.  They are all delicious, different styles and offer a fascinating insight into what true, unblended champagne can taste like.

Enjoy your champagne!