CHARPENTIER MEUNIER ZERO DOSAGE FRENCH

Discover the exquisite Pinot Meunier Zero Dosage from Champagne Charpentier in the Marne Valley. This single-vineyard, single-variety, single-vintage Champagne from the renowned Les Barbottes parcel is grown biodynamically, offering unparalleled depth, purity, and precision. Learn about our unique clay soil and meticulous harvest process, resulting in a pure, zero-dosage wine with perfect aromatic expression and balance. Ideal for connoisseurs seeking exceptional Champagne.
Full English Transcript:
Pinot Meunier Zero Dosage is a single-vineyard cuvée. It is a single-variety, single-vineyard, single-vintage wine. Therefore, a triptych. A special parcel located at the top of the hillside, sprinkled with clay veins. It is the only parcel with a clay vein in the entire estate.
This parcel is called Les Barbottes. It was not the favorite parcel of our great-grandparents, but it has become our favorite parcel where Pinot Meunier, grown biodynamically, produces the best wines with exquisite depth, purity, and precision for this rather fantastic grape variety.
So why Pinot Meunier? This parcel covers 96 ares, almost one hectare. Therefore, we can vinify it in a single-vineyard manner, which we have always done, and we push the maturity of the Pinot Meunier. This is a parcel that we often harvest at the end of the vintage to achieve the best maturity and balance in the grape berries, and we taste the grapes every two days to ensure the right balance, avoiding overly expressive fruit but, above all, ensuring there is no herbaceous aspect, which we obviously reject in our wines.
So, it’s about the right balance, the right harvest date on a clay soil, clay-limestone, but more clayey on this parcel.
Back in the great-grandparents’ days, this parcel was somewhat cursed because it was already far from the main farm, at the top of the hillside, so getting there with horses took a long time, and working the land was very difficult because the wet clay created what we call “lards” - that is, clay that hardens and doesn’t dry out. Today, with biodynamics, the biodynamic preparations we apply to this parcel, as on all the others, produce fantastic results.
This clay almost flocculates and becomes a crumbly structure that is easy to work with a tractor. The deep roots are always supplied with water, unlike other terroirs on the same hillside where water availability is more challenging.
And of course, on this parcel, the roots do not suffer, the vines do not suffer. There is always water supply, which is why we can push the maturity, achieving true physiological maturity of the grape berries.
In this wine, this translates to an expression of Pinot Meunier on clay. An expression of fruit, but on the finesse of the fruit, definitely not on the omnipresence of the fruit. It’s a balance between finesse, precision, purity of the grape variety, and what we seek above all. Thanks to biodynamics, I believe we achieve this, it’s the depth of the wine.
So we are really in a wine, in a Champagne wine, 100% Pinot Meunier, and we push the subject as far as possible, meaning there is no makeup, it’s zero dosage. No sugar added. Zero dosage, it’s a pure wine, in my opinion, perfect in terms of aromatic expression and balance.