Printemps 1 | Bulles Bio

Crashing into a wave of Organic and Biodynamic champagnes

Welcome, bubbleheads. It begins : my thoughts on what I've tasted at Printemps. It's impossible to do everything, so I tried to focus on the unknown. I'm not sure I could count the wines…but my estimate is that I'll be highlighting the most interesting 2-5% of what I tasted.

Bulles Bio

This was a huge tasting of organic and biodynamic champagnes in the city market. Unusually for a trade event everybody has to pay, too (a modest fifteen Euros, unlike the fifty charged by one of the other salons). I planned to spend about an hour and half here, but in the end it took about three to get round.

Organics have exploded in popularity in champagne over the last few years. There are 598 domaines producing organic champagne, and 2751 hectares registered organic or in organic conversion. With estimated 2022 conversions this equates to 8.7% of the vineyard area. The average in France is 14%. Champagne is catching up, in other words.

The standard? There were some vivid, bright wines but also some fairly rustic and off-kilter bottles (something a few other visitors remarked upon later, too). A number of producers here were in conversion, meaning that they only had very young champagnes, still Coteaux or indeed vins clairs. Youthfulness (and perhaps only one fermentation) suits many organic producers; in some instances I felt that the still Coteaux were the best wines in the portfolio. Seeing as many were single-vintage wines, they presented an opportunity to get a raw, zero-makeup take on recent harvests.

2020 is good, but continues to feel a little raw as a vintage at the moment. I do wonder, too, whether some of the extremities of the year posed a few challenges to winemakers when it came to things such as nutrition and fermentation dynamics (something a number spoke to me about in reference to drought conditions).

When it is settled, it’s a ripe, heady and rather intense vintage, with a little of the punchy grippiness of 2015 (but better than 2015, less aggressive). 2019 is finer, no doubt the best of the recent vintages, with 2018 somewhere in the middle with its combination of heat and generosity but moderate tension and acidity.

There were some names that are either more familiar or that I’ve written about before: Leclerc-Briant, David Leclapart, Olivier Horiot, André Heucq, Fleury, Bourgeois-Diaz, Fleury, Waris-Larmandier. I focused, though, on thirty domaines that I didn’t know so well.

Here’s what I found of interest: