The 2025 vintage in champagne - hopes and questions
As wines go into bottle, how are winemakers feeling about 2025?
The best time to do a vintage report in champagne is…about ten years afterwards. The second-best time, though, is Spring. It’s bottling and blending time, the still wines having evolved over winter, decisions having been committed to and feelings over the vintage set more solidly.
How are winemakers feeling about yet another unprecedented year?
Some fabulous wines, sometimes comparable to, but more uneven than, 2019.
2025 was hot, fast and early. The balance in most of the Pinot base wines I’ve tried has been superb, though; it does seem as though the Northern Montagne fared especially well this year in Pinot Noir, with some gloriously glossy, focused, approachable yet far-from-loose base wines. Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon at Louis Roederer says of his Pinots that “the signature of 2025 is this silkiness, the juiciness…it’s easy to taste. The acidity is there, but it’s not too edgy. The structure is there, but it’s not showy. It’s flawless…it’s like 2019, but in 2019 we had more alcohol. The good news with 2025 is that it’s like 2019, but with less alcohol.”
Antoine Huré at Huré Frères in Ludes on the North face says that his 2025s are “riper than 2022” after they decided to wait until the back end of the harvest to pick. The risk of vegetal/underripe flavours caused by picking when aromatic maturity is behind sugar accumulation is so hard-wired into Champagne now that quality producers are certainly nervous about picking on the early side; luckily for Pinot growers the alcohol accumulation didn’t always push as hard as it might have done. “2019 was more 11.6, but 2025 is more 11.2” observed Lécaillon.
“It’s not a homogenous harvest, and it’s difficult to read the wines” says Alice Tetienne at Henriot, who was perhaps the most circumspect of all the Chef de Caves I have spoken to. “There are some very nice Pinots from the Montagne, from the North and from Avenay for us…but the Côte des Blancs is not the best, the acidity and structure is not really there, it seems a bit simple.”
Yield anomolies
Thomas Vilmart at Vilmart & Cie in Rilly-la-Montagne, also on the North face, is excited for the wines.
