NV Champagne Henri Giraud Blanc de Craie 750 ml

This is what insider Champagne is all about: A hard-to-find bottle from what Robert Parker praised as “the finest Champagne house virtually no one has ever heard of.” 

Only about 200 cases of Champagne Henri Giraud Blanc de Craie make it into the US each year, and we’ve got a tiny fraction of that. It’s just enough for the Wine Access members who want to share in a Champagne made in the painstaking fashion that marks some of the region’s greatest bottles. Grown in chalk soils in the Grand Cru village of Aÿ, the Blanc de Craie is fully vinified in wood—a method used by icons Krug and Bollinger. 

Decanter named this Champagne one their top multi-vintage bottles, and they’re not the only ones to have fallen in love with it. Despite being a relatively new bottling that’s only been released a few times, Blanc de Craie has consistently earned glowing scores from Parker, Wine Spectator, and Vinous, which praised this release for its “terrific aromatic intensity” and “tons of nuance.”

This wine held us rapt from the moment we first took it in. Extraordinarily rich, yet crisp as an October dawn, it’s got small bubbles with expansive notions and a perfect varietal character with both lemon-confit sweetness and a distinctive oyster-shell salinity. 

The French word craie translates as "chalk," a reference to the remarkable composition of the ground in Aÿ—seven inches of loose topsoil on 700 feet of pure Cretaceous chalk. You feel that terroir in each sip, as the wine develops from approach to finish. The fine mousse breaks over the firm mineral backbone to reveal honeysuckle-tinted fruit. It's gorgeous.

To achieve this feat, the Girauds call on nearly 400 years of history (the Giraud house was founded in 1625), invoking traditions from Champagne's deep past to create a wine that is both modern and edgy. As a 12th-generation winemaker, Claude Giraud went searching for a novel expression of his famous Aÿ terroir in the late 1980s. With the help of his longtime cooper, Camille Gauthier, he began sourcing barrel wood from the Argonne forest, an old and nearly forgotten Champagne tradition.

Because the Argonne soils are poor, the oaks grow slowly and the wood develops an extremely dense grain. This enables Claude to raise the wine in a vessel that breathes ever so slightly—one that, according to Giraud, results in even more freshness than its stainless steel counterparts. 

The wine is then aged for several years on its fine lees, protecting it from over-oxidation. The final effect is one of beautiful contradictions: Chardonnay from Pinot sites, fermented and fined in oak barrels—for freshness!—offset by an elegant leesy richness. It's one of Champagne’s best-kept secrets.