The trouble with champagne is that it is most often revered but rarely drank. Well, now take that prestige factor and double it. The team behind the world famous champagne, Dom Perignonm, did use this to their advantage. They huddled together a select few and anointed us with a “humbler” Dom Perignon 2009 while we waited in anticipation for a sip of that famed and rare Plénitude from the 2000 vintage.
Most champagnes are made as blends which means that it is not a crop of just one year that is to be found in the bottle. They use older reserve wines in a mix to impart that characteristic taste, on which remains consistent in matter the uncertainty of the climate every year. In a simple bottle of Moët & Chandon, for example, almost 25-40 percent of the wine is from older vintages this is what makes a big champagne house sustainable.
Back to Dom, this wine is only made in years when the weather is deemed perfect, when the winemaker doesn’t mix the wine with older stuff and bottles it as is. The average bottle of Dom sees a minimum of eight years of ageing before it is ready to be released. The champagne industry standard requires only three years.
Imagine when the cellar master opens nearly a decade-old bottle to disgorge and re-dose, and make ready for commercial shipping and feels that wine could have easily aged for much longer? Well, one would most likely wish to hold back some of the stock for an indefinite period of time to rest for longer in contact with its lees (the dead yeast and other matter present inside the wine from its secondary bottle fermentation) which can bring much more depth and character to the wine. These wines can be disgorged at a later date when the cellar-master feels ‘ready’.
This is what they did with Dom, first in 1998 and then again in 2000. Mind you, it can’t be done with every vintage because sometimes the wine may be good but not resilient enough to handle an extra eight years. This process has thus been consecrated as the Plénitude, the bottle is christened the ‘P2’ and launched after nearly 18 years of it first having been put down to rest.
That’s how rare a bottle of Plénitude really is. Dom Perignon is not made every year only in select vintages. Then, even with those vintages, not all will find a second lease of life. So it takes two very strict sorting and selections and a mandatory 16 years on lees before a bottle can see the light of day. This is more than just a taste of the stars, this is a sensory delivery of galactic proportions!
I have always marvelled at how fresh a bottle of Dom always tastes. Even a decade-old Dom, to me, in a blind tasting, barely seems more than a few years old. At the private dining room when I held the glass of the 2000 vintage in my hand and at no point could I have considered that this wine was a day over five years. It was as fresh as the day the grapes had been harvested. For those who believe champagnes don’t age, this is quite a reckoner. Not only does it show that good champagnes age, they also pair with a variety of flavours and foods that can span across a meal and cuisines.This one requires you to focus; it doesn’t warrant a tasting note, but meditative introspection, the kind that is done with eyes closed, glass in hand and a sip on the tongue. The writer is a sommelier. mail@magandeepsingh.com