2014 Ayala Blanc de Blancs Brut Champagne 750 ml

Champagne’s 2014 season started like it was strapped to a 503-horsepower M3: A warm, dry spring set up a big, healthy crop, and growers were wearing grins—until a damp summer pumped the brakes. Only a gorgeous September could deliver on the season’s early promise.

September came, and with it four weeks of sunshine—exactly what the vines needed. The top houses were ebullient: Krug planned on bottling their $1000 Clos du Mesnil. Ditto Roederer, Philipponnat, and Taittinger with their têtes de cuvées. 

Bollinger also had designs on making their top bottling—but that wasn’t all they had cooking. 

At Champagne Ayala, the 150-year-old house Bollinger had acquired a decade earlier, star 39-year-old Cellar Master Caroline Latrive brought in pristine Côte des Blancs Chardonnay from the Grand Cru villages of Cramant, Chouilly, and Mesnil-sur-Oger, plus the Premier Cru villages of Cuis and Grauves. 

She knew she had the goods, but vintage Champagne is a long game. After fermenting the must in stainless steel, Latrive laid the wine down, letting the yeast cells go to work on the crisp Chardonnay, imbuing it with toasty complexity, roundness, and intensity. 

Finally, six-plus years later: Fireworks. Just 300 cases were routed to the US, and a bottle found its way to the folks at Wine Spectator. They gave it 94 points, making it tops among more than three dozen 2014s—including $150+ gems from Leclerc-Briant and big-time bottles from Pierre Peters, Philipponnat, and Gimonnet. 

Best-in-class Blanc de Blancs. It doesn’t get any better.