Apart from Cuvée Hemera, Victor Smart also tasted Brut Souverain, Blanc de Blancs and many others.
There are few hours in life more agreeable than an hour dedicated to sipping wine in the sunny formal garden of one of Champagne’s grand maisons.
We are at Les Aulnois, the eighteenth century home to Champagne Henriot, one of the smaller grand maisons. To ward off the heat we sit beneath an awning, drinking their non-vintage rosé well chilled. The wine seems to have been made expressly for days like this. The composition is 40 per cent Chardonnay, 50 per cent Pinot Noir and 10 per cent Meunier with a dosage of 9g/l.
You will rarely experience a finer example of meticulously controlled acidity in a sparkling wine – the acidity continuously veers towards excess yet is miraculously held in check.
Les Aulnois, in the village of Pierry, is at the foot of the Chardonnay slopes. Not everyone buying the producer’s wines will get the sunshine, or the garden. But, thanks to Laurent Fresnet, its winemaker since 2005, they will be able to savour the grace of its range of wines.
Fresnet won the International Wine Challenge Sparkling Winemaker of the Year award in 2015 and then again in 2016. And now has a big reveal – a cuvée prestige bottled in his first year in the job.
Henriot is one of the few Champagne houses that has stayed in the same family for over 200 years. Although not one of the big names in Champagne (or conceivably because of it) the producer draws a fiercely loyal following among the cognoscenti. It is noted for the proportion of wines from Premier Cru and Grand Cru vineyards, the ageing times and the quantity of reserve wines used in producing each blend.
Laurent Fresnet, Henriot winemaker for the past decade, Pierry, June, 2018
On our trip through the cellar we spy the serried ranks of dusty, unlabelled bottles of vintages going back to 1959. Fresnet can’t resist a moment of theatricality, whipping out a 1985 and performing an impromptu disgorgement on the spot. The wine, which has no dosage, is still deliciously fresh.
More than ten years into the job, Fresnet describes his role as to “clarify the DNA” of Henriot’s wines. The nearest Henriot produces to an everyday Champagne is Brut Souverain. A blend of 50 per cent Chardonnay, 45 per cent Pinot Noir and 5 per cent Meunier with a 8g/l dosage, this has a wonderful freshness and pronounced citrus flavour with marked notes of apricot and pastry.
Our tasting then moves on to the Blanc de Blancs, 100 per cent Chardonnay with 40 per cent reserve wines and a similar dosage to the Souverain, this is a real crowd pleaser. There is a range of salinity on the palate and a good degree of complexity, bright and focused without any sharpness; a quintessence of the varietal.
At the premium end of its range, Henriot has the vintage Enchanteleurs. But back in 2005 the decision was taken to replace this with a new prestige cuvée – the idea being that this would have a stronger familial resemblance to the rest of the wines. Devotees should note that past vintages of Enchanteleurs, will remain on sale while stocks last.
2005 was not a terribly promising harvest in the Champagne region, but Fresnet got to work and is now finally ready to reveal the results. Named Cuvée Hemera, from the ancient Greek goddess of daylight, the new offering has spent 12 year on lees and offers a remarkable liveliness and minerality with layers of complexity. With 50 per cent Chardonnay and 50 per cent Pinot Noir, floral characteristics, notably jasmine, are pronounced. The recommended retail price will be £180.
Henriot has premier cru and grand cru plots throughout the region with vineyard manager Hervé Lourdeaux having stewardship of vines that are up to 60 years old.
And what of the 2018 harvest?
So far this year the weather has been a little too sunny and warm for Lourdeaux’s liking; global warming has brought forward the harvest by a full month. “The grapes have been brought on a little too fast and we will be hoping for some cooler, overcast weather,“ he declares.
No one is crass enough to talk about Henriot’s brand values. Yet if they did, discretion, and subtlety might be the watchwords.
When it came to a pack redesign recently they settled for adding the thinnest of lines at the bottom of the label in brick red, a homage to the brickwork of Les Aulnois. The Henriot style is about precision and elegance and “femininity”. Leave it to others to produce emphatic, more “masculine” styles.
