NV Francois Seconde Brut Rose Champagne Grand Cru 750 ml

Legendary Location, Unique Producer

Champagne has its Grandes Marques—formidable brands that turn myriad growers’ grapes into the world’s best-known bubblies—and, until a tragedy on April 27th, it had men like François Secondé. Before his sudden passing, the one-of-a-kind Secondé had farmed in the village of Sillery since the age of 14. He proudly continued a tradition of local greatness that stretched back centuries, to a time when its still wines were deemed “so superior that only the king deserves them,” to the present, as Sillery is one of just 17 Grand Cru villages honored alongside sites like Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Aÿ, and Bouzy on Champagne’s Échelle des Crus. Secondé was the lone grower-producer in the village, and his François Secondé Brut Rosé Champagne Grand Cru is a 100% Pinot Noir homage to small-scale Champagne tradition. It is aged for 24 months, riddled by hand, and yields fewer than 400 cases. This is a bright, focused, and toasty rosé Champagne from a legendary location and a unique producer, the likes of whom we won’t see again. A toast to François, gone too soon; a treasure for Wine Access lovers of bubbly.

François Secondé was the kind of founder/grower/winemaker whose life and work inspired loyalty among generations of wine-lovers, a refreshing relief from the corporate vineyard takeovers, homogenized winemaking, and jet-setting consultants who dominate the trades. He left school at the callow age of 14 in order to apprentice in the vines. He purchased his first vineyard in 1972, and in 1976 increased his holdings to three hectares—still just eight acres. Over the next four decades, François’ terroir had grown to 14 acres, two-thirds of which were planted to Pinot Noir. Then, on April 27th, 2018, he died after a tragic fall.

The legacy Secondé left behind lives on in countless bottles of bubbly, extending a reputation the village of Sillery, just outside of the Champagne capital of Reims, had built over centuries. In the early 1600s, Henry IV’s chancellor, Nicolas Brûlart, owner of the Sillery Castle and vineyard, was able to get his wine in front of the king and his inner circle. The impact of this coup lasted for centuries, as Edme Béguillet, attorney to the parliament of Dijon and a notorious Champagne skeptic, admitted that Sillery wines were “so superior that only the king deserves them.”

The ancient endorsements of nobility makes for a good story, but have long since been supplanted in cachet to the Échelle des Crus, the “ladder of crus” that determines the quality and price of each village in Champagne. Sillery sits atop the ladder, commanding the same price as the villages whose names grace the most exclusive labels in the region. Pale pink, fresh, and toasty, this is a delicious 100% Pinot Noir Champagne of a variety that rarely makes it to the States: The product not only of a singular soil, but of the man who tended it for more than 40 years. Truly something special.