Collection 242 : The evolution of Brut Premier

Some weeks ago in Paris, he showed up not just simple champagne but a new concept of it, a revolution. The blending of how we know and how we knew about the best seller Maison product, Brut Premier, doesn’t exist anymore. Collection is a new idiomatic form of blending, based on a need for change. A challenge for Louis Roederer who wants to benefit from the climate change and enhance the peculiarity offers by the different Champagne soils studied by the Maison teams in the last twenty years because of the decision to approach biodynamic farm practices.

Today Roederer is the most important farmer in champagne with 140 hectares biodynamic off 243. The huge effort has been awarded: louis Roederer is one of the 22 farmers in the world insert in ”The Robert Parker Green Emblem”.

Back to collection, the idea is to select the best parcels from the Montagne de Reims, côte des Blancs and vallée de la Marne, to vinified them separately and collect them in order to create the base of a single vintage. Then, another percentage is given by those wines composing by the one called as ”reserve perpetuelle” and last but not the least, there is a percentage (from 6 to 10%) of reserve wines aged in wood. This multi-vintage gives at the palate complexity and freshness at the same time but even deep and intensity pointing out the louis Roederer style.

There is a sense of freedom given by the choice and the possibility to reach the best every vintage and gather all the best grapes tracked during the year, from flowering to harvest. Each collection will be numbered, the firsts present on the market are 241 (just in Magnum, base vintage 2016) and the 242 (base vintage 2017) each with a personal identity which will be unveiled with ageing, named and maybe catalogue like a book, with the numbers of harvests done by the Maison, born in 1776. I surnamed collection as a ”baby cristal” because in 2017 the iconic cuvée will not be bottle so all the best grapes picked on different 45 parcels, have been included in the collection blending. Eventually collection 242 is so chalky, crispy, fresh, with a lovely roundness in the middle palate. A successful and visionary champagne, the beginning of a new era. A champagne in the pursuit of taste, the purity, mirror of the soils.

by Erika Montovan