They are naughty by nature. 
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what were dosage levels in, say, the 1940s etc? much higher?
In France and in other countries, it is slowly, after 1920s, that champagne dosage gave way to brut as we know it today. The proportion of brut champagne reached half of the total shipments at the beginning of the 1950s and kept growing to between 85 to 90% today. A brut champagne has a dosage between 0 to 12 grams of sugar per liter. Champagne’s ten largest brut non-vintage brands have dropped their dosages since 1991 nearly by 2.8g/l, and are all under 11g/l today, with the average at 9g/l. Brut Imperial, the most selling Brut Multi Vintage, from Moet & Chandon lowered its dosage from 12g to 9g.
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But this is a myth IMHO.
Which big house champagnes from 88-04 are consistently great today? Krug is variable to say the least, Goisses of that era are patchy, DP has quite a few misses. Pol Roger poor in the 90s. Which 96s are holding well today? Magnums make the situation better.
It’s probably true that the 90s were a bad patch and things will be different in a few years for 20-30 year old grand marques. Let’s see.
But back to then original question of how low dosage grower wines might age, a valid answer would be who cares? Young and old champagnes are basically different drinks and despite having a cellar with plenty of DP, Krug, Comtes etc. I more often than not reach for a young wine.
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Nope. I’ve had many oxidized Champagnes that have still retained their CO2. Oxygen can get inside bottle without CO2 getting out.
Basically things like pH and/or acidity, the level of dry extract and fruit concentration are things that make a Champagne age well.
Dosage doesn’t help a Champagne to age in itself, it helps Champagne to develop those toasty / caramelized maillard reaction notes people associate with an aged Champagne. Champagnes without any RS can still age wonderfully, they just take another route. (But I myself prefer toasty Champagnes, so I’d rather age Brut than Brut Nature Champagnes, all other things being equal).
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A very decent cork.
My first thought was “not drinking it” 
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I can’t find it but on the Grape Nation podcast they try some pretty old sparkling wine as a “current” release. My brain isn’t working right atm and I think it was many decades old Italian?
I ve bought and drunk a lot of older Champagne - from the 70ies, 80ies, 90ies - often NV and hard to say and mostly non prestige cuvees. Usually the bottles with noticable dosage aged better, definitely!
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I’m down with O.D.P. yeah you know me.
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How long can you cellar most grandes marques NVs? Asking because I never thought of cellaring them but one of the airlines I fly regularly sometimes serves a Laurent-Perrier Brut NV (not La Cuvée but the old label, which I believe they stopped making 7-8 years ago), and it drinks particularly well at altitude.
I keep asking myself why I buy Champagne faster than I can drink it since since I prefer to open it ASAP.
Wine making style is surely also important. I’ve had quite a lot of very old champagnes that were amazing (though of course a completely different drink than a young champagne), whether they have retained their bubbles or not. By far the best have come from producers that were known for a more oxidative style of winemaking, like Bollinger or Krug from the 60s and older. I even had a bunch of half full half bottles of Bollinger 1962 that were all outstanding… maderized or course and had very little in common with a fruity young champagne (or an oxidative one for that matter), but an outstanding drink nonetheless.
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It isn’t just Maillard-like reactions, it’s also the degradation of sugars to furfurals. I think the latter is more important for the really caramelized flavors you get in e.g. old Moët.
Different sugars (cane, beet, MCR) behave quite differently, too.
And ripe fruit in Champagne can certainly lead to RS that isn’t from dosage. There are some zero dosage Champagnes that have 5-10 grams of residual sugar when you analyze them…
In short, it’s a complex question!
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One grower made a demi-sec zero dosage wine. I am not sure it wasnt a mistake though! 
I’ve always wondered the relationship between low/zero dosage and the ripeness of the harvested grapes (plus maybe residual sugar after fermentation).
Broadly speaking, do grapes harvested for low/zero dosage Champagne tend to have higher Brix than grapes harvested for Champagne made in a more traditional Brut style?
And if so, which is the cause and which is the effect? I.e. does the producer decide to make a low/zero Champagne and thus use sites and/or hang time decisions to get riper grapes? Or does the producer have sites that achieve higher ripeness and therefore decide to use less dosage?
I’m sure there isn’t a single answer to those questions, but I wonder if anyone in the know could generalize.
This is why I want to talk to Jean-Baptiste, who now has 25 years experience running Roederer’s cave and makes both a traditionally does tete de cuvee and a zero dosage bottling. I’m less concerned by bias, but I think a lot of growers simply won’t have the experience to answer such a broad question. Agrapart might be another one, he certainly makes some interesting cuvees - the Experience, can be…an experience.
Fermentation gets stuck… Demi-Sec!
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I will ask Amselme Selosse what he thinks about the effect of dosage or lack thereof on aging and report back.
René Collard was releasing low- and non-dosage champagne in the eighties. A trailblazer, he was also releasing some Pinot Meunier bottlings. I don’t know of anyone earlier, but I’d suspect there were some during atypically ripe vintages.
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