The Case for Great Champagne: A Billecart-Salmon Deep Dive
The vineyards overlooking the Billecart-Salmon house in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ
How often do you buy a great bottle of Champagne for yourself?
For the annual New Year’s Eve party? For an important birthday? To celebrate a raise or a promotion?
The ultra-fine bubbles and delicate flavors of France’s top Champagnes have long been linked to special occasions and commemorations, marked for distinct moments in our lives. Yet, while the association is an important one, it’s also an image that a number of top Champagne producers would like to transcend.
We don’t have an issue opening a bottle of great Bordeaux for Friday night’s steak dinner, nor do we hesitate to pour a glass of Scotch on a Tuesday evening after work. Yet, imagine if you only opened a bottle of outstanding Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir a few times year. Imagine only drinking Bourbon to celebrate your child’s graduation. That would be torture!
But that’s exactly how a large number of wine consumers continue to think about Champagne, despite the fact it’s one of the most diverse, unique, interesting, complicated, and food-friendly wines on the planet. Granted, they can be a bit pricy, but when you actually break down the age of the region’s top wines, the amount of blending and maturation that went into making them, and the care with which individual parcels are vinified in order to preserve their unique characters, you truly start to understand what you’re paying for.
Luckily, more and more consumers are starting to see the light, and a change is afoot. It’s not unlike the evolution we’ve seen with whiskey over the last decade.
Paying $100 for a bottle of Bourbon once seemed outlandish; a ridiculous price for something to sip! Yet, when whiskey drinkers started to compare the cost of a great bottle against the cost of a shot at their local bar, plus the fact they can nurse a bottle over the course of many years, that mindset began to change. A similar evolution in consumer thinking is happening right now with Champagne. It’s no longer just a wine for celebrating; it’s simply one of the world’s great wines, and the price of admission is more than justifiable once you understand what goes into its production.
I sat down with Clement Calleja from Billecart-Salmon this week to dig deeper into the details behind one of Champagne’s last family-owned houses. Having celebrated its bicentennial in 2018, Billecart-Salmon is the oldest, continually-owned house in the region, having never left the family’s ownership over those two centuries-plus. There have been ups and downs, family disagreements, near disasters, and a couple of world wars, but the house was never sold. It was even taken over by the Germans as a local headquarters during WWII, but it never went under.
Despite its long history, Billecart-Salmon hasn’t always been the critical darling it is today. “Even in the nineties, the house was not all that well-known,” Clement told me during our conversation; “We’re still a relatively small house. We still only produce two million bottles annually and we’re not not set up to do any more than that.” Simply put, there is limited Premier Cru and Grand Cru vineyard space, and there’s a limit to what those vines can produce. Given that the large majority of Billecart-Salmon’s fruit comes from those two classifications of vineyard, there’s a limited amount of wine available from the very start.
While every serious article about wine starts in the vineyards, digging into the terroir and what makes a producer’s fruit so special, I think the cellar is where the important details about Billecart-Salmon are hidden, so that’s where I’m going to start. I’m also going to focus on what I think is one of Billecart-Salmon’s most overlooked gems: the incredible Sous Bois expression, a wine that I think holds its own against behemoths of the genre like Krug and Dom Perignon.
Let’s start with the fact that a significant portion of the reserve wine in the Sous Bois comes from a ten year old solera. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how Champagne is made, older vintages are always held back as a safeguard against bad weather in a region that’s particularly cold for grape-growing. Hence, if a particular vintage isn’t memorable, it can be blended with older vintages to balance out the flavors. Think of it like blending a barrel of older whiskey with a younger whiskey to soften it up.
Most Champagnes start with a base vintage (say 2018) and bolster that wine with a blend of reserve vintages to create the cuvée. The Sous Bois starts with a base from 2012, so right off the bat you’re getting a nine year old wine as the foundation, which is incredible! 2012 also happens to be one of the best vintages of the last twenty years in Champagne, so add that little tidbit to the docket, and compare it against a $20 bottle of Prosecco that can boast none of these claims.
If you’re not a French speaker, Sous Bois translates to “under wood,” meaning the wine is barrel fermented. The label started as the baby brother to Billecart-Salmon’s Clos St. Hilaire—a single hectare of Pinot Noir that’s released as a single vineyard expression—which is also barrel fermented, with the remainder of the barrels being used for the Sous Bois. If you think the same wine is fermenting inside each barrel before blending, think again. Each vineyard parcel is barrel fermented separately into its own unique wine, giving Billecart-Salmon’s team an array of terroir-driven wines to blend with. The final cuvée is comprised of roughly equal parts Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier, with a third of the blend made up of barrel-aged reserve wines, some of them part of a ten year old solera (a blend of numerous vintages that is added to year after year).
So, yes, when you drink the Sous Bois, you’re drinking a barrel-fermented nine year old base wine from one of the best vintages in modern memory, blended with barrel-aged reserve wines, all of which were vinified parcel by parcel in single casks to preserve the uniqueness of each plot; and you’re getting all that for well-under $100, which is crazy given that this level of quality control and specificity doesn’t exist in a number of wines at twice the price point. But how does it taste? Utterly magnificent.
You might expect an overtly toasty and nutty Champagne with a name like Sous Bois, but that’s not at all the case. As Clement said during our conversation: “When using barrels, we don’t want to mark the wine. We want texture, spice, and creaminess. Finding the right vines and parcels to work well with the barrels is the key.” That’s exactly what you get with the Sous Bois: texture and creaminess. With six years of aging on the lees (the time spent in the bottle in contact with the yeast cells—see the above photo), you’re getting a richness that is remarkable without being decadent. For the price, it’s one of the most accessible high-end Champagne experiences on the market, if not the most.
Clement believes the current iteration is the best expression of Sous Bois that Billecart-Salmon has ever released. I’m willing to go a step further: I think it’s one of the best Champagnes they’ve ever released—period. The richness never once takes away from the pronounced acidity and minerality inherent in the wine. It’s still a refreshing and mouthwatering Champagne, despite all the barrel maturation and lees-aging, which is quite an accomplishment. It’s a symphony of complexity that dances around every single taste bud on your palate.
The Sous Bois isn’t the only affordable Billecart-Salmon Champagne using a reserve wine solera, either! For those of you don’t like added sugar in your alcohol, the Brut Nature expression uses zero dosage (the sugar added later to balance out a Champagne’s acidity), and the latest expression combines a 2015 vintage base wine with a ten year old solera of reserve wines—about a 40/60 split. Since the base wine is mostly Pinot Meunier, the solera is mostly older Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines, helping to balance out the character of the cuvée. Since there’s no dosage, the wine spends an extra year aging on the lees as an alternative, using the richness of the yeast cells to balance the acidity. It’s so freaking delicious, I almost can’t stand it. I had it over the weekend with a cheese board and some savory snacks, and it vanished way too quickly. Again, ripeness of fruit with racy acidity, both in perfect harmony.
Then there’s the unforgettable Blanc de Blancs that uses 100% Chardonnay from four of the best Grand Cru villages in the Côte des Blancs region: Avize, Chouilly, Cramant, Mesnil-sur-Oger. This wine is like a crisp, juicy green apple that effortlessly explodes over your palate before morphing into a round, creamy mousse that glides to a refreshing finish. The base here is the 2015 vintage, but 40% of the cuvée is made of reserve wines, most from the fantastic 2012 vintage. Here you’re paying for the quality of the Grand Cru fruit, rather than the barrel maturation or age, which means its time to talk about vineyards.
Billecart-Salmon controls the farming in roughly 200 hectares of Grand Cru and Premier Cru vineyards, with about half of them being estate-owned. The remaining fruit is purchased with strict guidelines from an additional 100 hectares of vineyards, the owners of which are longtime partners of the house. There are no pesticides or chemicals used in any of them, as Clement noted: “We are obsessed with the quality of our fruit.”
Billecart-Salmon sources that fruit from about 40 of the 320 crus in Champagne, and most are within a twelve mile radius of the house in and around Mareuil-sur-Aÿ in the Montagne de Reims region. They use only the first-pressings from each parcel and all the grapes are moved into a temperature-controlled climate before the pressing is done (usually with no more than 30 minutes of travel time from the vineyard). “We are also obsessed with temperature control,” Clement noted, “We want to press as soon as possible.”
Of course, Billecart-Salmon makes one of the most-coveted rosé Champagnes on the market, a fantastic Reserve, and a number of small-production, higher-end cuvées as well. I’ve chosen to focus on the three lesser-known expressions as a method of highlighting the incredible amount of work, detail, and time that goes into making some of the most under-appreciated wines in their portfolio—if not the world!
Working in a wine store, I watch customers drop $60 on a bottle of Napa Cabernet without blinking an eye—most of which are a decent quality, from a single vintage, and likely a step up from the $10-$20 options at the grocery store. Since speaking with Clement, however, I can’t stop thinking about the comparison against a bottle of Billecart-Salmon. For a few dollars more, I could drink a Champagne with a 2012 vintage base, bolstered by barrel-fermented reserve wines and a ten year old solera, and not only would I be getting more bang for my buck, it also probably tastes better!
Plus, I know the wine has been vetted meticulously by a panel of super-tasters at every turn. At Billecart-Salmon, there’s no blending recipe, and there are no tech sheets with easy-to-follow instructions. The recipe of each wine changes with each iteration, and each cuvée is mapped out by the tasting committee, consisting of four family members and four employees. Florent Nys, the cellar master for Billecart Salmon is part of the team, as is the previous cellar master Francois Domi, whom he apprenticed with. Even Jean-Roland Billecart, who is in his late nineties, is still on the tasting committee, adding his decades of experience to the group. The wines are always tasted blind, and every decision regarding every cuvée starts with this group.
I think about these things now every time I drink a bottle of Billecart-Salmon, which has been about twice a week as of late. Granted, I’m on a bit of a kick right now, but that’s because the more I uncover about the details of Champagne, the more I’m willing to spend. Does that make my consumption extravagant? Absolutely! Yet, unlike so many other wines and spirits on the market that are simply mediocre liquids backed by huge corporations with marketing budgets, this is one family-owned extravagance that I’m willing to indulge.
For celebrations, and for New Year’s Eve, of course. But pretty much any night of the week as well.
-David Driscoll