Emmanuel Brochet 'Le Mont Benoit' |Extra Brut |NV

Name: Emmanuel Brochet 'Le Mont Benoit'
Brand: Emmanuel Brochet
SKU: E_BROCHET_BENOIT
Price: 152.95 AUD
Availability: InStock

Emmanuel Brochet 'Le Mont Benoit'

Extra Brut NV

$152.95

- Completely natural approach to the vines and winemaking

- A rich, earthy style, celebrating this tiny pocket of champagne

- Pair with spiced quail, kumquat and celeriac puree. Some Korean Fried Chicken too.

"A blend of 30 percent pinot noir, 40 percent meunier and 30 percent chardonnay, this contains 20 percent of reserve wine from 2014. It’s ripe and energetic in flavour, feeling multi-layered and complex, and it’s enlivened by a vibrant spine of savory minerality. This is a superb edition of this cuvée, exuberant in demeanor and sophisticated in its expression." Peter Liem

The main cuvée of the estate is Le Mont Benoit, named for the parcel in which it is grown. It’s a blend of all three varieties, although the proportions can change considerably from one year to the next, depending on the conditions of the vintage.

A portion of the blend is kept as reserve wine, and each release is generally composed of two vintages, incorporating a small portion of the previous year’s blend. While most of the wines for Le Mont Benoit go through malolactic, some of the non-malo wines that aren’t used for the vintage blends are also included in this cuvée.

Club Price $145.30 (?) ?

Villers-aux-Noeuds lies in a rather isolated area just south of the city of Reims, on the other side of the N51 from the heart of the Montagne de Reims yet not quite as far west as the main slopes of the Petite Montagne. Despite its premier cru status (90 percent on the échelle des crus), it’s likely that this village would be consigned to obscurity if it weren’t for Brochet. While his family has owned vines for generations, they rented them out rather than tending the vineyards themselves, and Brochet only began working a portion of his family’s holdings in 1997, bottling his first wine in 2002. Peter Liem

Today he farms 2.5 hectares of vines, all located in a single parcel within the lieu-dit of Le Mont Benoit, which lies on Cretaceous-era chalk under about 40 centimeters of chalky-clay topsoil. The parcel is planted with all three major varieties (in the proportion of 37 percent meunier, 30 percent chardonnay and 23 percent pinot noir), and the oldest vines date from 1962, although about half the parcel was re-planted in 1986, following the devastating frosts of the year before, and some portions were planted in 2003 and 2006. Brochet is committed to working his vines organically: he stopped using herbicides and insecticides in 2002, and by 2005 he stopped using all synthetic treatments. In 2008 he began the process of organic conversion, certified by Ecocert.

Brochet’s champagnes are sleek and finely-poised, showing a vinosity and ripeness derived from viticulture while maintaining a delicate freshness and balanced weight. They are marked by a distinctive minerality, one influenced by chalk yet somehow broader and earthier, more akin to the minerality found in the wines of Jérôme Prévost or Aubry to the west, or even Chartogne-Taillet to the north, rather than the overtly incisive chalkiness of the eastern Montagne de Reims.