Waris-Larmandier, Lieu-dit 'Les Regards d’Avize' 2015 - 75cl

This one comes with a story worth knowing. Les Regards is a scrap of Chardonnay in Avize, all of forty-three ares of it, which Jean Waris farmed for years on behalf of a neighbour named Gilberte Oudart. She had no children, and when she died in 1995 she left the parcel to the family who had been tending it. Part of it is pre-phylloxera vine, never grafted. The rest was replanted in 1963 from the same old, low-yielding selection.

Marie-Hélène Larmandier and Vincent Waris work it the way they work everything — organic and biodynamic, picked by hand, pressed in an old 4,000kg vertical wooden basket press with only the free-run juice kept. Native yeasts, a stainless ferment, then time in used Burgundy and Champagne barrels with malolactic left to happen where it wants to. No dosage at all. Unfiltered. Roughly a thousand bottles a vintage, riddled and disgorged by hand.

2015 was warm and dry in Champagne, so this is a rounder, riper Avize than the chalk-blade style the village is known for. The Côte des Blancs core is still there — white flowers, lemon pith, that grip of chalk on the finish — but there is more orchard fruit and lees-derived weight sitting over it. With zero dosage the close stays bone dry and saline rather than soft, and there is an unexpected thread of red fruit running through it for a wine made only from Chardonnay.

A hundred pounds for a grower cuvée made in the hundreds of bottles rather than the millions. This is the sort of bottle that turns people into grower-champagne obsessives.

How to Serve

8–10°C, and pour it into a white wine glass rather than a flute. A zero-dosage wine with this much concentration needs the room to open, and it gains for twenty minutes once poured. Don't over-chill it.

Where to Drink It

Noble Rot, where a bottle like this gets understood rather than just served. Scott's in Mayfair with a plate of native oysters. The Wolseley, if you want the room to match the occasion.

Food Pairings

Oysters and a squeeze of lemon is the purest version of it. For something with more weight behind it, turbot on the bone, or a wedge of two-year-old Comté.