NV Champagne Larmandier-Bernier Longitude Premier Cru Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs 750 ml

No bubbly punches above its weight more than Champagne Larmandier-Bernier. The Longitude Premier Cru Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs has all the class of a vintage Salon for the price of a pair of Levi's. Feel free to dress it up or down. 

Champagne purists are going to want to snap this up by the case. While it's labeled Premier Cru, the Longitude is made primarily from Grand Cru fruit grown on Larmandier estate vineyards in the Côtes des Blancs. The nose is radiant with high notes of alpine flower and candied citrus. The expansive palate hints at apple and pear pastry but never spills over into decadence. Instead it finishes with Zen-like restraint on a whisper of chalk smoke.

Made by hand and plowed by horse, it's hard to find a more carefully crafted example of grower Champagne. Wine Advocate called it "elegantly textural and concentrated" with "a pinpoint mousse." Vinous founder Antonio Galloni said "Longitude pulses with energy and tension.” Decanter raised the ante to 95 points, summing it up as "a winner for those who like it honed."

We just think it's a damn good bottle of wine that's going to bring a lot of people a lot of joy in the next few years. Perfect now if you like your Champagne racy, with chiseled abs and a square jaw. Celestial after a couple years of aging, when it'll be just as lively and mineral but with more ample orchard fruits softening the edges of the frame. 

Six-packs are available at 33% off the suggested price, making Longitude a wine that feels right on a red carpet but really shines by the side of the pool. 

We happened on it at a tasting, where we'd been swishing big tannic wines for hours before walking up to the Champagne Larmandier-Bernier table. When they poured liquid daylight in our glasses, it nearly brought us to our knees. Lemon curd and honeycomb and brioche all poised in a perfect balance. An hour later we were back at HQ polishing off the bottle, having scooped the entire allocation.

Longitude is a tour-de-force from start to finish, made entirely of Chardonnay from the thin strip of the Champagne region that stretches from Chouilly south to the lowest reaches of the Marne, where the ancient seabed rises close to the soils’ surface. 

The fruit in Longitude comes from four locations, in Cramant, Avize, Oger, and Vertus,  which line up neatly along the 4th meridian, lending the wine its name. The name also references the wine's length and purity, the frank terroir-driven style. Just over half of the blend in this bottling comes from the 2015 vintage, with the remainder consisting of reserve wines from previous vintages. 

Every house approaches the reserve concept for multi-vintage wines a little differently. Larmandier-Bernier keeps a perpetual blend going, somewhat like a solera, containing a fractional amount of vintages dating back to 2004. This method gives the wine great consistency from one bottling to the next, so that if members fall as hard for the Longitude as we did, they know future bottlings will be every bit as awesome as this one.