The first course of my meal at Arbane, a new restaurant that opened last year in Reims, was meticulously arranged on the table in front of me. Seven small dishes, each with different brightly colored ingredients representing a different grape variety: celery and kiwi for chardonnay, beetroot and strawberry for pinot noir, radish and raspberry for meunier, mushrooms for pinot gris, Chaource cheese and rhubarb for pinot blanc, white asparagus and grape for petit meslier, and cucumber and yuzu for arbane (after which, as you can guess, the restaurant is named).
This dish is Chef Philippe Mille’s homage to the seven grape varieties that are permitted in Champagne. Those first three grapes—chardonnay, pinot noir, and meunier—are well-known to wine drinkers as the “traditional” Champagne varieties, but the last four are more difficult to remember, even for some bubble enthusiasts.
Arbane (sometimes spelled “arbanne”), petit meslier, fromenteau (aka pinot gris), and blanc vrai (the local name for pinot blanc) are four “forgotten” varieties that can legally go into Champagne under the AOC rules. They’re all white grapes, and they’re just a miniscule fraction of plantings in the region at less than 0.3 percent. Champagnes made using these varieties have been considered “niche cuvées” by critics and consumers—rare, to be sure, but still just oddities.
But the revival of these varieties is more than a micro trend: it’s a facet of the grower-led movement in Champagne to craft wines of place. With a sense of place comes an appreciation of history, and that of the forgotten four varieties in Champagne goes back for centuries. Arbane, petit meslier, pinot gris, and pinot blanc were grown in significant quantities in the region until phylloxera decimated Champagne in the late 19th century. With a postwar focus on quantity over quality in the region, those four varieties were abandoned primarily because ripening was poor and yields were too low. But now, with a warming climate and some vignerons pivoting away from the high yields of industrial winemaking, what was once a disadvantage can be a virtue.
But perhaps a bigger question is, how do these four varieties impact the taste of Champagne? For a better understanding of that, I had to go to one of the few estates where they are still grown. I drove through Bar-sur-Aube, in southern Champagne, to meet with Michel Drappier, who runs his family’s domaine in Urville with his children, Charline, Hugo, and Antoine. Champagne Drappier was founded in the early 19th century, and it’s one of the most forward-thinking estates in the region, with an early commitment to organic farming and sustainability. It became the first carbon-neutral Champagne producer in 2015.
It is also one of the few estates to have plantings of all seven permitted varieties. Michel planted arbane, petit meslier, and pinot gris on the estate, beginning in 2000. His motivation was purely conservation. “The idea was to preserve history, to preserve biodiversity,” Michel told me, likening it to raising heritage horse breeds like the local Ardennais—the very breed that plows the Drappier vineyard planted to arbane and petit meslier.
While preserving heirloom varieties may have been the original intention, it has since proved useful to have more choice in the vineyards in a region with notoriously fickle weather. “Champagne has a very inconsistent climate. Last year, we had weather like the west coast of Ireland all year, and you see today, it’s like Morocco,” Michel chuckled and gestured to the bright, cloudless sky of a sweltering summer day. “If you have a number of varieties, you can cope with that.”
Take Arbane, for example. “Arbane is a lot more traditional than chardonnay and pinot. It was here in Champagne 700 years before those grapes,” Michel told me. It is indigenous to Champagne, of unknown parentage, with no identified siblings or offspring. It’s also the rarest of the seven varieties in Champagne, and Drappier has the most plantings. Arbane is a high-acid variety that’s very late ripening. That’s probably the reason it was abandoned, but this former weakness is now a strength in the face of hotter growing seasons.
But beyond just history and a new tool against climate change, the four forgotten grapes contribute unique qualities to the blend. Arbane, for instance, with its herbal and savory aromas, “has finesse, elegance, and interesting notes that are not typical for Champagne,” Drappier said. These four grapes, he said, are “a way of building something new with something old.”
That “something new” includes Drappier’s Quattuor cuvée—a blend of equal parts arbane, petit meslier, pinot blanc, and chardonnay—and “Trop M’en Faut!”, a bottling of 100 percent pinot gris. It’s important to note that the pinot blanc and pinot gris in these wines are also varieties that are unique to Champagne; this is not the pinot blanc you’ll find in Alsace or Burgundy, or the pinot grigio growing in Italy. As Michel explained to me, it’s planting material that has grown here for centuries and is adapted to the region.
Experimentation with these four forgotten varieties is concentrated among Champagne’s artisanal winemakers—vignerons, like Drappier, typically associated with the grower-Champagne movement. Etienne Calsac, Agrapart et Fils, Tarlant, and Geoffroy all make blends with these grapes. Cédric Bouchard makes a single-varietal bottling from rare old-vine pinot blanc, called La Bolorée. Moutard and Olivier Horiot in the Aube both make very rare bottlings of 100-percent arbane. Meanwhile, Lelarge-Pugeot just planted an experimental vineyard of pinot gris this year.
It’s rare for a single producer to have plantings of all seven varieties in Champagne, as Drappier does. Another producer that can make that claim is Laherte Frères, in the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay. Laherte Frères is a family domaine with 13 hectares of vines, mostly in Chavot, and Aurélian Laherte is the seventh generation to run the estate.
Aurélian is one of the few winemakers in Champagne with a keen interest in petit meslier. The domaine has a single plot with all seven varieties, planted in 2003 by Aurélian’s father Thierry, from which Aurélian makes a blended cuvée called Les 7. Inspired by monovarietal bottlings of petit meslier from other winemakers (including Olivier Horiot), Aurélian made massal selections of that variety from the Les 7 plot to plant more of it.
“It gave me a sensation that I had never had before from Champagne,” Aurélian said. “It was so fresh, so energetic.” Petit meslier has concentrated fruit flavors that can show tropical notes when fully ripe—a delicious “pineapple sorbet” note, as Aurélian described it.
But for Aurélian it’s also the performance of the variety in the vineyard, too. Petit meslier needs to ripen fully to avoid herbaceous flavors, but it retains high acidity like its parent savagnin—a boon when facing rising temperatures. As Aurélian put it, “sometimes the things from the past can be used for the future.”
Laherte Frères’ popular entry-level cuvée, Ultradition, is a blend of meunier, chardonnay, and pinot noir, but soon it will include petit meslier. Starting with the 2024 bottling, the blend will include 3 percent of the variety to add freshness and complexity. And from those massal selection vines planted in 2014 in Chavot, Aurélian now bottles a 100-percent petit meslier Champagne.
But this is an experiment that takes a long time; rehabilitating a variety is not as easy as just planting more of it. A vigneron working with these varieties is a bit like a zookeeper trying to figure out how to care for an animal thought to be long-extinct. “It’s such an old variety, more or less lost, that we don’t have enough knowledge about it now. We have to restart,” Aurélian told me. He is growing the variety on chalky and clay soils, to see how the resulting wines differ and develop. The bottle he poured for me to taste is only the fourth edition of the cuvée, and he continues to experiment and make adjustments with the grape growing and winemaking. Ultimately, he said, “what I want is that people enjoy it for the discovery and to explore different tastes in Champagne, different possibilities.”
He poured more of the domaine’s wines for me to taste, including Les 7, a blend of all seven varieties from the single plot in Chavot. Half of the blend was from 2021, and half was from a true, sherry-style solera dating back to 2005. “It’s the opposite of a vintage,” Aurélian said. “The idea is that all the grapes together bring out a bit of each variety, bring some personality.” It’s one of those wines that behaves like a kaleidoscope. Each time I returned to the glass, a new, precise aroma or flavor appeared. Each variety emerged from the blend, yet it was seamless—the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is probably as close as you can get to tasting what Champagne was like 200 years ago.
There’s a movement in some legacy wine regions—like in Jerez and Bordeaux—to permit the use of new or long-forgotten native grape varieties, to give producers freer rein in the face of climate change, disease pressure, and declining consumption. With the discussion of legalization of more grape varieties there can be a lot of hand-wringing over what that means for “typicity” in a legacy region—whether a wine tastes like it originated from that particular place.
Champagne might be lucky to avoid debate at the regulatory level, inasmuch as these varieties are already permitted by the AOC. But because of their scarcity, they will still be unfamiliar to most Champagne drinkers. Are the qualities that these grape varieties bring to a wine “typical” of Champagne? No, and that’s part of what makes them so important. Reviving old grapes and changing styles in Champagne—or Bordeaux, or Jerez, or any legacy wine region—can attract new consumers and feed the creative energy of new-wave vignerons.
After my meeting with Aurélian Laherte, I thought about the taste of Les 7, and about my first night in Reims. I happened to be there for Fête de la Musique, an annual music festival that takes place on the streets and in public spaces, free for all to enjoy. It felt like every person in Reims and the surrounding towns under the age of 30 was in the streets, packing the city center.
I broke free from the crowds on Place Drouet-d’Erlon and headed toward Reims Cathedral, the 13th-century Gothic structure at the heart of the city, where the kings of France were crowned. Over the centuries, it has survived fire, revolution, and war. As I walked up, a light show projected on the façade of the cathedral was just beginning. Washes of color cascaded and radiated over the stained glass, the tracery, over each carved saint, angel, and demon. A crowd had gathered in the plaza in front of the cathedral to watch the show—teenagers, families with small children, elderly couples—all of them gazing up in wonder at an 800-year-old structure, seeing it in a new light. We can still be awed by history, by the past. Rather than being hidebound by it, we can take inspiration from it, find solutions from it, and build something new.
A few days later, in Urville, I was in the Drappier winery’s reception hall, looking at family photos hung on the walls and propped on the fireplace mantel. Photos of André Drappier and his wife Micheline, their son Michel, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. André would have turned 99 years old after this year’s harvest, but he passed away in March. Michel told me that his father had enjoyed a daily glass of Champagne. (Neo-prohibitionists and teetotalers, take note.) “He was my best customer,” Michel said with a smile. “My best argument for drinking Champagne every day.”
It was obvious from the family photos that André had delighted in the company of his great-grandchildren—among them a little girl, born in the summer of 2022. She was named after a grape ripening on her family’s estate when she came into the world, an ancient vine with a promising future: Arbanne.
Finding Forgotten Grapes: 10 Unique Champagnes
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