2002 Vilmart "Grand Cellier Rubis Rosé"

60% Pinot Noir

40% Chardonnay

Production: 2.000 >> 2.500 bottles

Disgorged: Oct-2007

The simplest thing you can do, when you are writing a tasting note, is to tell your audience if you liked the wine or not. Let’s say that you weren’t too happy about the wine, but you had a hard time pinpointing what note was the main problem. You might even complain over the lack of terroir. Let’s take it one step further and say it’s a Champagne – and in order to do start messing with terroir, you have to the ability to pick out the character of each town, villages and vineyard in Champagne. Or?? Is there another way of defining such saying – let’s say you just missed the presence of a soil-expression or minerals.

This brings me to my Friday night Champagne, which had me thinking.

I definitely missed something here.

This Champagne is indeed healthy on many counts. The fruit is voluptuous and singing with a high profiled red Burgundy resemblance. There are also lots of strawberries and apricot perfumes and underneath brushings of: vanilla, smoke, sweet biscuits (feels too high dosed to me), burned butter and spices transforms. The taste is smooth, giving and powerful, but also rather dull. You end up chewing way too much on these sweet/dosage oaky notes and it doesn’t have the weapon of cleansing the palate with refreshing acidity– nor minerals and in all essence; terroir. To some extend it reminds me a bit of Selosse’s Rosé – just worse. It’s a Champagne, which seems more about a style of winemaking than soil in the bottle. I'm on thin ice with such a statement as I don’t have a terroir palate (but I am working on it ;-) ). Even so, that’s the best way I can explain how I felt about it. On top of that, I am already not too happy about a Champagne which is red Burgundy with bubbles – and this is indeed such a Champagne.

However it should be noted, that cellaring could be the trick here, as the 1999 of this cuvée has already adapted a lot more dried fruit elements which can take away some of this tutti frutti red fruit style and hopefully provide elegance and overall balance. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, as the 2002 has lot’s of fruit – so cellar –I will….maybe 4 years. But right now…..sooooo disappointing.

Glasses: Juhlin, Spiegelau Adina and Zalto. This small test will be included in the material for “The ultimate glass test”