Laurent-Perrier Cuvée Rosé Ribbons Robe

Laurent-Perrier launched this in 1968, when rosé Champagne was thoroughly unfashionable and mostly made by blending a splash of red wine into white. They chose the harder route instead, and they still take it.

The fruit is 100% Pinot Noir from ten crus across the Montagne de Reims, destemmed and vatted so the juice sits on its own skins for somewhere between 48 and 72 hours depending on the harvest. That's maceration — the same technique you'd use for a still rosé — and it carries real risk. Get it wrong and you have a heavy, tannic pink Champagne with no lift. Get it right and you have this: a colour that shifts from raspberry towards salmon as it ages, and a depth of red fruit that no blended rosé quite reaches.

Five years in bottle before release. Raspberry, redcurrant and wild strawberry on the nose, black cherry sitting underneath. The attack is fresh and clean, then it fills out — supple, rounded, more substantial than the colour leads you to expect. It drinks like a wine rather than a novelty.

This bottling arrives in the house ribbon robe, the pleated presentation sleeve Laurent-Perrier wraps around it. Worth mentioning mainly because it means you can hand it over exactly as it is.

How to Serve

8–10°C. A tulip or a small white wine glass, never a flute. There's enough weight here to keep it on the table through a whole meal rather than losing it before the starter.

Where to Drink It

Scott's, at the counter, with something off the shellfish display. The Wolseley, for a long unhurried lunch. Brat in Shoreditch, where the smoke coming off the grill does something rather good to Pinot Noir.

Food Pairings

Parma ham and very little else is a genuinely brilliant start — cured pork against red-fruited Champagne is a salt-and-acid trick that never misses. It also copes with spice better than most Champagne, so a fragrant bowl of Vietnamese food is fair game.