Pierre Gimonnet 1er Cru Rosé de Blancs

"Gimonnet’s cracking and cleverly named rosé is just 8% red wine (not least because it costs him almost €15 a litre to buy) blended with his vintage Gastronome cuvée – his blanc de blancs with the most body.

Charged with 50% grand cru chardonnay, the result upholds its mantra of sustaining the mouthfeel, persistence and surging bath-salts chalk minerality of the Côte des Blancs with great accomplishment, touched with the palest salmon pink hue and the lightest reflections of white cherries and strawberry hull.

Delightfully restrained and refreshingly tense, it’s more about crystalline precision than flavour. One of the most refreshing apéritif rosés this year, serve it like a delicate blanc de blancs, not like a rosé."

Tyson Stelzer - The Champagne Guide

The difference between a good wine and an exceptional wine is only a question of very, very small details, but we must focus on every detail all of the time,’ declares Didier Gimonnet, who oversees his family’s glorious estate with his brother, Olivier. The champagnes of Pierre Gimonnet & Fils are intricately assembled by masterful hands exclusively from enviably positioned and painstakingly tended old vines. Every cuvée sings its aspiration of ‘precision, purity and minerality’, each speaking articulately of its place in the northern Côte des Blancs through expressive, chalky minerality, without one molecule of detail out of place. With high-strung tension, crystalline structure and rapier-sharp precision, these are blanc de blancs champagnes charged with an energy that will sustain them long indeed. They represent some of the best-value apéritif champagnes of all.

92% chardonnay – 25.5% Chouilly for fruit and elegance, 16.5% Cramant for plumpness, 10% Oger for masculine structure and spicy minerality, 9% Vertus for exotic flavours, 32% Cuis for vivacity and freshness; 8% 2014 and 2013 pinot noir red wine from Bouzy; aged on lees 18–24 months; 6.5g/L dosage; 13,363 bottles; DIAM closure