THE Crémant de Bourgogne producer to know
- 95 pts Decanter World Wine Awards95 pts DWWA
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NV Henri Champliau Cremant de Bourgogne Rose Burgundy France 750 ml
| $25 | per bottle | |
- Curated by unrivaled experts
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- Temperature controlled shipping options
- Get credited back if a wine fails to impress
Made Like Champagne—Just South of Champagne
“In general, I don’t think we (including me) drink enough bubbles.”
Those are the words of Elizabeth Schneider of Wine for Normal People, and we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we selected the Henri Champliau Crémant de Bourgogne Rosé in our Wine for Normal People club. It is, in Elizabeth’s words, “a versatile wine that will be a great welcome wine for a Thanksgiving dinner, or a nice sipper on a warmer Saturday afternoon, sitting outside and watching the leaves fall.”
From a family-owned producer in Burgundy’s Côte Chalonnaise, Henri Champliau is named for founder Alexandre Graffard’s grandfather. Graffard started his label in 2016 after discovering that the vineyards his grandfather had purchased around Mercurey produced grapes with acid levels closer to Champagne than to their still-wine cousins in Burgundy. He decided to make traditional-method sparkling wine and has been turning heads since.
Graffard is obsessive about quality: Even though all the estate’s grapes are hand-harvested in order to ensure that the quality of his Brut always far exceeds its price, he still rejects two-thirds of them.
For his Crémant de Bourgogne, he oversees the meticulous vinification of multiple lots of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Gamay, all of which are gently pressed, fermented in bottle, and undergo 15 months of aging sur lie—painstaking processes nearly identical to those undertaken in Champagne. Pinot Noir was his grandfather’s favorite grape, so there is always an especially high percentage (75%) of it in his Brut Rosé, paying homage to the original Henri Champliau.
This is a wine of dazzling purity, perfect for what Elizabeth sees as one of bubbly’s greatest virtues: “It can make a memory out of a regular fall day.”