A Champagne lunch with Pascal Agrapart and his son Amboise is an exceptionally rare treat. So no surprise the guest list was a who's who of top New York City sommeliers and journalists. Why was I there? Somebody must have cancelled. It was a father-son presentation, but there was very much a third generation, a third voice, at the table, expressing itself through that -- a wine from a different culture, a different climate, a different time.
You know it's going to be a special tasting when the "Welcome Wines" are better than the top wines you'd taste at many events. We started with Agrapart's "entry level" blanc de blanc blend, Terroirs. But oh, what an entry level! Top sites in Avize, Oger, Cramant and Oiry -- there is no filler here. Agrapart is, of course, a Chardonnay specialist; but even so, this is an almost shockingly perfect expression of what blanc de blanc can be. Does it help that it's out of Magnum? More and more people are saying.
The second warm up wine was the exceptionally rare "Exp" bottling, a tiny and in their words "risky" cuvee they only make when two successive vintages create the ideal conditions. The goal: to produce a Champagne from only grapes no yeast, sugar, dosage. The method: add unfermented pressed juice here, vintage to the base wine in this case, to start a secondary fermentation without any of the technical inputs that go into managing most Champagne production.
Risky indeed! Could the wine end up flat? Could the bottles explode? I hope not! Could the fermentation go sideways and ruin the wine? Well, that's not what happened with the It was a baby, but already bright and beautiful, with a perfect, elegant mousse sometimes the bubbles are just The fruit was exquisite and the minerality a touch more subtle, for now.
The Agrapart family's deep connection to Avize's chalky soils showed brilliantly in the horizontal of their top s: Mineral, Avisoise and Venus. Avize's great terroirs, according to Pascal are dominated by a subsoil of chalky limestone. Each of these three wines expresses one of those terroirs:. This is reputed to be Agrapart's most mineral-driven, laser-like wine and the lived up to its reputation.
