Les Arpents NV
85% Pinot Meunier · 10% Chardonnay · 5% Pinot NoirSparkling1 g/L · Extra-Brut12%HVENatural
The house entry point: a Meunier-led blend of reserve wines from 2019, 2020 and 2021, all fermented and aged in oak. Twenty-four months in the cellar before disgorgement.
Fermented in oak with indigenous yeasts, aged on the lees with spontaneous malolactic fermentation. Disgorgement liqueur made from the house’s own barrel-aged wines and cane sugar. No filtration, fining, cold stabilisation or chaptalisation.
- Country
- France
- Region
- Champagne
- Sub-region
- Vallée de la Marne
- Villages
- Damery (autre cru) · Saint-Martin-d'Ablois (autre cru) · Vinay (autre cru)
- Soil
- Calcareous
- Viticulture
- Benjamin Choppin works every parcel himself, in the vines daily through the season, and harvests by hand, parcel by parcel, the way a Burgundian would. One rule governs the domaine: respect for the living. No herbicide or insecticide is used; the only composts are certified organic; and the plots are bordered by trees, meadows and flowering strips to keep the biodiversity around the vines. HVE-certified since 2018, farmed along organic lines without seeking certification.
- Vintage
- Non-vintage
- Base wines
- 2019 · 2020 · 2021
- Vessel
- Oak barrels
- On the lees
- 24 months
- Dosage
- 1 g/L · Extra-Brut
- Sulfur
- Minimal — a small addition for stability in transit
- Filtration
- Unfiltered, unfined, no cold stabilisation
- Vinification
- Each parcel is pressed and vinified separately. Fermentation is spontaneous, on indigenous yeasts, in oak casks of 225 to 600 litres from the Tonnellerie de Champagne, followed by a spontaneous malolactic and a long élevage on the lees. Nothing is fined, filtered, cold-stabilised or chaptalised. The disgorgement liqueur is the house's own barrel-aged wine and cane sugar; dosage runs from zero to one gram, and sulfur is kept to a small addition for stability in transit.
- Case
- 6
2019 in Champagne
A year of extremes: spring frost, then two heatwaves in June and July that scorched exposed bunches, and a dry, sunny run into harvest in early September. A smaller crop than 2018, ripe and concentrated, yet with acidity intact — a vintage growers rate highly for its balance of weight and freshness.
2020 in Champagne
Early from start to finish: a mild winter, a warm dry spring and a hot summer brought the harvest forward to the last days of August, among the earliest on record. Healthy fruit, generous yields (capped by the appellation in a difficult market year), ripe and supple wines with less tension than 2019 — sunny, round, open early.
2021 in Champagne
The hardest year in a generation: severe frost in early April, then a cool, wet summer with relentless mildew pressure and hail in places. The crop was the smallest in decades and some growers lost most of it. What survived was picked in mid-September at classic ripeness — wines of tension and line, closer to the Champagne of the 1990s than to the sunny years around it.
The NV Les Arpents
Notes to follow.
DomTheSomm note
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