Vintage Champagne: How to Choose and Store It Well

The vast majority of champagnes do not display a year on their label. So when a vintage appears — 2019, 2015, 2012 — it means the bottle tells a special story. Here's what this mention truly signifies, how to choose a vintage, and how to give it the best storage conditions.

Vintage vs. Non-Vintage: The Real Difference

Champagne is historically a blended wine: to guarantee a consistent style year after year, houses combine wines from several harvests. This is the "non-vintage" brut, the backbone of all ranges.

Vintage champagne takes the opposite approach: it is made exclusively from grapes of a single year. The winemaker only produces it when the harvest merits it — a year ripe, balanced, and expressive enough to stand on its own. Regulations also impose a minimum aging period of 3 years on lees (compared to 15 months for a non-vintage), and in practice, most vintages wait much longer in the cellar before being released for sale.

A vintage is therefore not "better" in principle: it is a champagne that captures a year, with its own personality, whereas non-vintage brut seeks consistency.

How to Read a Vintage

Each Champagne year has its own character. Cool years produce taut and acidic wines, built for very long aging; warm years — called "solar" — offer ripe, full, generous wines that are accessible earlier.

2019 belongs to this second family: a hot summer, beautifully ripe grapes, concentrated wines that nevertheless retain a true freshness. Our 2019 Vintage, 100% Chardonnay, illustrates this profile: beneath the freshness of the grape variety, notes of brioche, dried fruit, and honey already emerge — the famous "tertiary" notes that signal increasing complexity.

When to Open It?

That's the question everyone asks. Three simple guidelines:

• Upon purchase: a vintage is sold ready to drink. Opening it young means enjoying its fruit and tension.
• 5 to 10 years after harvest: most vintages reach their maturity plateau — an ideal balance between fruit freshness and evolving complexity (brioche, hazelnut, honey, sweet spices).
• Beyond that: great cool years can span decades. Solar years, however, benefit from being drunk within their first decade of life.

The best advice remains that of wine merchants: buy several bottles of the same vintage and open them a few years apart. You'll follow the wine's evolution like a saga.

The 5 Golden Rules for Storage

1. Lying down or standing up? For a few months, standing is fine. Beyond a year, lay the bottle down to keep the cork moist.
2. Stable temperature: 10 to 13 °C, without sudden variations. A cellar at a constant 15 °C is better than a garage that fluctuates between 5 and 25.
3. Total darkness: light is the number one enemy of champagne (the famous "light struck" taste). Leave the bottle in its box.
4. No vibrations: avoid the top of the refrigerator or washing machine.
5. Humidity: around 70% humidity to preserve the cork — a point that electric wine cellars manage very well.

At the Table

An aged vintage deserves more than an aperitif toast: serve it between 10 and 12 °C, in a large glass, with Bresse chicken in cream sauce, lobster, an aged Comté cheese, or truffle risotto. It is a gastronomic champagne.

Want to taste what 2019 offered in the Marne Valley? Discover our 2019 Vintage →

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