2016 Ulysse Collin Champagne Les Pierrieres
It’s been a bit of journey to this particular bottle of wine. I had my first taste of Ulysse Collin in 2019 at the now defunct Ambonnay champagne bar in Portland. That bottle - also Les Pierrieres from the less-than-ideal 2011 vintage and enthusiastically recommended by the owner as being an inheritor of the Selosse style - was distinctly unappetizing, featuring a distinct green note and overt, screechy acidity, neither of which were mitigated by patience and lots of swirling in glass. I thereafter avoided Ulysse Collin, and so it has been with dazed wonderment that I’ve witnessed the price soar through the stratosphere these past few months.
This whole time there had been lurking, in the back of mind, the possibility that I’d prematurely passed judgement on Ulysse Collin by over-extrapolating from a marginal bottle in an unrepresentative vintage. Why else would all these people be paying $400-600 at retail?
So it was a stroke of providence when I found myself at a restaurant with a wine list featuring the 2016 Ulysse Collin Les Pierrieres (disgorged December 2020) for a fraction of the retail price today. Finally, an opportunity to taste a second bottle, from a good-ish vintage, to test if I had overreacted to my first taste of Ulysse Collin all those years ago.
The first glass was poured while the bottle was at cellar temperature - hence a trifle warmer than ideal - and straight away the wine hit me between the eyes with that same green note. It was not a light and lifted herbal green the way Condrieu can be (cf. Georges Vernay; thank you Alan), but rather a dark, earthy, sort of dried Oregano foresty green. Not too unpleasant, but not something you look forward to smelling in a glass of Champagne.
Coming right behind the green, though, as if hurrying over to erase the stain of the green note, was an impressive mineral line, layered and complex and admirable, accompanied by some offhanded fruit notes, peeking shyly out in the manner of a younger sister hiding behind their older sister’s dress. These fruit notes - and they were so reticent I failed to identify them as being of one kind or other - are just about the only concession the wine makes to drinking pleasure. Finally there is a bit of an oxidative flourish towards the end, a sort of cidery note that combines with the fruit in a way that reminds me of Ganevat, which ought to be a good thing and yet feels weirdly tacked on and unintegrated.
The Pierrieres is big and wide and uncompromising in its sensibilities on the palate, with a crushed rock sort of savoriness in abundance. I find the balance shifted as far towards the battery-acid end of the spectrum as is it will go without actually being unbalanced. It is not exactly unpleasant to drink, but is so busy impressing you with its scale and the amplitude of its mineral character that it forgets to leave room for much else. My dining companion says we might as well be drinking a sour beer and they are right, for there is none of the pleasure here for us that we usually find in wine, even in the very most humble wines.
It is thus left to the food to rescue the wine: an opportunity for the Epoisses Cheeseburger, cunningly designed by this restaurant’s proprietor to flatter even the most indifferent wine, to have its moment in the sun. And shine it does, for the rich, savory beef + Epoisses juices (and a dab of caramelized onion) meld seamlessly with the Pierrieres, rounding its edges, and the whole thing pops into focus for a brief, stunning moment. In that moment the Pierrieres is magisterial as it ever was, but also velvety and sensual, and you are suddenly free to ride wave after glorious wave of minerality to their vanishing point on the infinite horizon. But the cheeseburger is as finite as the horizon isn’t and soon we are left with crumbs, a dauntingly half-full bottle, and the memory of what could have been.
There are many excuses still to be deployed here. Perhaps we should have given this a lengthy decant instead of popping and pouring at the restaurant - even thirty minutes of air did this a power of good. Perhaps age will tame the angularity of the Pierrieres, transmuting rock into flesh. Perhaps we should have been more careful with our food choices and eaten nothing but cheeseburger for dinner. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
The mental image that the Pierrieres leaves me with is Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, flexing at himself in the mirror, a hermetic, closed loop, and a monument to self-absorption. And so it is to my (and my pocketbook’s) great relief that I now change the channel. Decent plus
![[grin.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/5/53ba06e9b6e4b370ae7e3d7b3702ad1bda0a2d8e.gif "grin"){kind=small}
. Somehow I missed getting a millesime designation.