Champagne Christian Briard
This week we will head up to discover the Champagnes Christian Briard.
The birth of Champagne Christian Briard is a consequence of a family heritage, that was forgotten for a while, and the desire to reconnect with the family roots.
Christian Briard is an independent consultant who developed a freelance technical expertise in smart card for over 15 years, it was in 2002 when the idea of making a total life change was born. He left Paris, his love life and local work to return to the lands of his grandfather, a viticulturist and winemaker. It thus takes a generation after the family torch gets back to life.
This dynamic entrepreneur ended the sharecropping land of his grandfather, puts winemakers on the soils that deemed interesting, and got allied with great Champagne house for winemaking. He also surrounded himself with three winemakers, a sommelier and a chef in order to propose pairings with wine, for bringing out the best from his champagne.
His leitmotif?
“Not A champagne but more than one champagne” The champagne as other wine regions has a mosaic of little areas that each house must value. The goal of Christian is a double one. First “A reasonable farming for reasonable wines” but also finding the best possible quality.
What is he looking for by creating its champagnes?
“The distinctive wines, differentiated, with character,” wholesale “wines like me.” Wines in which the sense of the beauty of pinot meunier (a grape fruity, fresh and generous) is shown.
Side story:
This week I would like to share with you not only one, but two. The first regarding the Champagne Christian Briard, the second one to the very birth of Champagne.
By observing the bottle you should notice that it has no conventional label as we are use to see.
Indeed, the bottle is then laser engraved. Gold is casted into the burning process (that requires more than 15 minutes of work per bottle). On the back of the bottle there is a small text that presents the champagne as a quatrain … a quite rare feature.
Champagne Legend: Pierre Pérignon better known as Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk of the early 18th century is the cause of the discovery of the “champenoise” method (that is to say the way to control the effervescence of bottled wine).
There was no winemaker (the grapes mandatorily came from tithes, that was a part of the harvest), or alchemist but a simple “controller vineyards and wine presses” of the abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvilliers.
One day he had the idea of sinking of beeswax to seal the bottle necks of “still wine” with the objective to make them airtight to conserve the gas naturally present inside.
After a few weeks, most of the bottles exploded … Indeed, the sugar found in beeswax had fallen into the wine causing a second fermentation, leading to an effervescence …
Bon appetite and have a nice weekend!
Thanks to Christian Briard for their time.
Jonathan Choukroun Chicheportiche
Champagne Christian Briard
21 Rue du Plessier
02850 Jaulgonne
+33 (0)3 60 90 07 02
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