Champagne Solera / Perpetual Reserve

Solera (or Perpetuelle) is an important method used by many RM (grower champagne) smallholder wineries to stabilize the annual production quality and increase the complexity

Except for a small number of brands that mainly produce Vintage Champagne (such as Salon), most Champagne houses are mainly producing NV (non vintage), and in the process of producing NV, in addition to In addition to the base wine obtained by fermenting the grapes harvested in the current year, reserve wine from previous years will also be added. The advantage of doing this is that in addition to avoiding bad vintages that are not as good as the base wine and affecting the final quality, it also adds complexity to the wine.

Many wealthy NM wineries will have enough space to keep reserve wine, and some wineries even store different varieties of reserve wine in different plots of each year separately. Entering their wine cellars can be quite amazing. Number of buckets, big or small. And every time a new batch is made, the winemaker team has to find the suitable (or the most suitable winery style) blending ratio from the numerous reserve wines.

To preserve such a huge amount of reserve wine, it is conceivable that a lot of space, time, and manpower are required. It will not be a big problem for large wineries to afford such expenses. However, manpower and material resources are limited, and even for RM with limited grape sources, it will be a big problem. Even in a large winery, the old vintage base wine stored in batches will be useful until there is very little left, and how to avoid the oxidative deterioration of the base wine will be a headache.

Therefore, even large wineries will put all the remaining old vintage base wines into one (or several) reserve wine tanks to solve the problem of base wine preservation once and for all, but the base wine added every year The vintage varieties may not all be consistent. And what about small factories? The more rigorous ones are called Solera or Reserve Perpetuelle. This concept has been brought up again in recent years ( ref #1: Wine Enthusiast , ref #2: Champagne Soleras and Perpetual reserves: the timeless essences of Place and style, by Anne Krebiehl MW), and many famous wineries (eg: Selosse , Devaux, Bruno Paillard, Drappier) are doing just that.

Although it is not a multi-layered criadera like Spanish sherry, but replaced by one (or several) large barrels, more rigorous wineries only use a fixed amount of base wine every year as a good vintage, and according to the proportion of varieties , added to Solera vats, and only a fixed amount of wine is taken from Solera each year for use. The quality of this Solera is guaranteed to be stable over the years, showing the characteristics of the so-called winery and terroir. But in fact, it is unknown whether every winery that makes solera will do this, and some wineries may have more complicated management methods. In Philipponnat's case, not all the base wines of the previous year will be collected. Join the reserve perpetuelle.

This kind of winemaking process was actually done in the early years. For example, Francis Boulard mentioned in Wikipedia Solera . Several brothers and sisters of their family were originally helped by their father Raymond Boulard, but after the separation, only Francis was left to continue his father Raymond from Petraea, a wine made in Solera way since 1997 (but because of the transformation to biodynamic, the whole solera has been restarted in 2012).

But this method is not completely risk-free. For example, this article mentions that if the entire solera barrel is not kept well and accidentally spoils, it will become a catastrophe. One example of this is H. Billiot. For a while, some consumers and experts found that some Solera wines had VA. After all, unlike Spanish sherry, it is not protected by flor or fortified to make it difficult for bad fungi to breed, which also makes some small wineries hesitate to preserve the base wine of Perpetuelle. Therefore, the selection and management of storage containers has become very important. Some wineries use old oak barrels, while others use stainless steel tanks. The latter's airtightness is easy to control with angel share, as well as cleaning and controlling fungi, while the former can increase the complexity of reserve perpetuelle.

As for whether the things in the Solera barrels are good or not? It is difficult to say because there is not much experience in drinking it, and it also depends on how much the winery takes out of the Solera each time. If only some are taken out every year, it means that there are More old-age base wine remains in it, so that the overall flavor will be more mature, otherwise it will have a fresher and livelier aroma.

I recently drank the work of Maurice Grumier, Solera accumulated from 2005 to 2011. In the spring of 2012, the second fermentation in the bottle began, and the residue was removed in the winter of 2018, which is equivalent to staying in the bottle for about six and a half years. It has a very strong aroma of roasted stone fruit, toasted bread, and mushrooms. It has less fresh fruit aroma and more dried fruit (peach, apricot, apple) flavor.

Original link: Phanix's Blog