David - I agree that a well balanced demi-sec is a lovely wine, but the current geek trend is Brut Nature/zero dosage.
David,
I thought I recognized you and Laura, but for some reason it didn’t connect and the swirl of the crowds had me bouncing around. Did Joe take that picture of the two of you which you posed on FB? I saw him with a camera and bumped into Beth as well.
I’m glad you tasted some of the things I missed, and I was at the Egly table early on and really liked the wines although some of them are now pretty pricey…I’m guessing you must have been fatigued if they didn’t register.
Yes, Joe took the photo. Egly was near the end for us. We had just finished the Gimonnet table, with a ton of blazing, Chardonnay based wines that blew out our tired palates.
Same kind of thing for me. I thought I saw you, but the place was crazy, and when I turned around you must have moved on to another table.
David, I think the issue for many is that the liqueur d’expédition contains either sugar or concentrated grape must (usually from Languedoc), as opposed to a pradikat Riesling or a moelleux Chenin Blanc where the RS came from the grape. So, once you get above Brut level RS you start to lose the connection to terroir. In the words of Vincent Laval: “what you are adding is not wine.”
wonderful write up. I was going to go this, but it just didn’t work out this year.
Still pissed 
Personally I’ve never been an Egly Ouriet fan.
Ah, makes sense. Had no idea it was an ideological thing, and I actually prefer higher dosage champers as I find it can round them out a bit.
I don’t buy this argument. Focusing in on dosage as covering up or not allowing terroir to come through is a very short sighted view IMO. It is just easy to grab on to and trendy so folks do it be they consumers or winemakers. With all that Champagne can go through, how in the world could the dosage level all of a sudden make you lose the connection to the terroir? Dosage changes in the 0-15 g/L range can affect the flavor of the wine, but it is no where near the biggest factor IMO.
Champagne goes through a second fermentation where you add sugar and yeast; a lot of folks age in oak of various age, shapes, and size. Then there is clay or enamel or steel or glass to consider. Also, there is the one year vs. blend of specific years vs. perpetual blend. What about grafted vs. ungrafted? How about the way the vines are trained? How did you prune or look at reducing or not reducing yield? What about malolactic? How long did you leave your wines in oak or clay or steel or glass?
Vintages dominating terroir and the vessel/time chosen to ferment and age have way, way more effect on connection to terroir than dosage IMO.
Dosage is a finishing touch or a highlight to the big patches of color. People focus and worry about it way too much. It should be worried about and paid attention to, but only after carefully looking at everything else. If dosage is in the driver’s seat then I am worried as it means not as much focus is being put on more important aspects.
This is where Anselme Selosse is a great example. He doses based on tasting the wine and doesn’t over worry about it. He makes the wine, tastes and says this is what it should be and he has wines from 0-20 g/L from both dosage and residual sugar. No rules, no borders, just what is best at a particular time for his vision.
This reminds me of two debates in German wines - dry vs. off-dry, and whether it is better to make off-dry wines by stopping fermentation or by adding sussreserve.
Re: dosage - what Brad said. It’s about the final wine and the many techniques to get there. Right now it’s trendy to focus on dosage/no-dosage and everything in between. Malo vs. no-malo was a big topic of discussion with the winemakers on our recent trip to Champagne.
People will always find some factor to validate the wines they like and invalidate the wines they do not like. We’ve ALL done it at one time or another. I know I have.
I’ll agree. I’ve had plenty of great dosage and non-dosage wines. For a while I tasted a bunch of harsh nd wines so I was a bit off the category but more recently I’ve had many fantastic ones (Benoit Lahaye, 2006 Roederer, etc.) and realize how good they can be.
The string of warmer summers in Europe b/w 2003 and 2011ish probably hasn’t hurt that. Going to be interesting to see what people make of some of the more recent cooler summers with the flip of the predominant signal of the NAO.
Brad, thanks for your detailed post. I agree that excessive focus on dosage levels is a distraction from more important factors. Many of the producers at the mineral-focused/austere end of the spectrum use a small and reasonable amount of dosage to great results (Chartogne-Taillet comes to mind immediately). In the ideal case, the dosage is finishing touch that does not stick out in any way. However, when you start talking about demi-sec levels of sweetness (David’s original question), the dosage is now part of the flavor of the wine, and that part of the flavor is not coming from grapes grown in Champagne.
For the really dogmatic, even the sugar added for the second fermentation is a problem. As far as I know, Agrapart’s Experience is the only wine where juice from the same vineyard is used in the second fermentation, and even in that case those grapes were produced in a different year. If you are really crazy, you could even envision a winemaker reserving part of the grape must from the vintage for both the second fermentation and the dosage, in order to avoid introducing anything other than the pressed juice of grapes from a single vineyard in a single vintage.
I’m not really a fan of dogma for dogma’s sake, but it would definitely be interesting to try a wine like that.
Also, don’t dare ask how many fans of no-dosage Champagnes also enjoy chaptalized red burgs…
Ross,
I completely agree that dosage level can affect the flavor of the wine, but even at the Sec or Demi-Sec level, I think that oak and other winemaking decisions (such as vintages) can have a greater influence. I’m not saying dosage is not influential. I just think that other aspects are more influential even at higher dosage levels. Dosage is just easy to single out because it something that is seen as fairly unique to the sparkling wine world.
As for using your own musts and trying to really isolate things down to a year and vineyard, there are a lot of experiments going on with musts, years, yeasts, etc… to try and see what can be done if you get all the materials from the same place/time as the grapes. Roederer has done the most in this area and a number of small producers are looking into things too. Does it improve the end product? From what I have had, I would say no, but there isn’t a large sample to build on. I kind of see it like I view blending. Blending different plots, villages, years, etc… can often be superior to a vintage wine or a single village/vineyard wine. Lots of variables to play with and isolation doesn’t always lead to the brightest star.