Who Loves Champagne's 'Black Sheep' Grape?
The rise of great 100-percent meunier sparkling wines shows the region's "workhorse" grape is all killer no filler.
Very excited today to introduce Sarah Parker Jang as a new contributor to Everyday Drinking. I’ve worked with Sarah at The New Wine Review, and she’s now studying for her WSET Level 4 Diploma. Sarah will be writing every month, with more articles forthcoming on Champagne, Beaujolais, Jura, Texas, and elsewhere.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I celebrated his birthday over lunch at one of our favorite restaurants in downtown Manhattan, a trendy Michelin-starred restaurant with a smart, natural-leaning wine list. We ordered a bottle of Champagne, and when the waiter brought it to our table, he pointed to the varietal breakdown on the label. “Fifty percent chardonnay, fifty percent pinot noir. No meunier!” he said, emphatically. His message to us was clear: the wine was better without Champagne’s “third wheel” grape in the blend.
Practically every conventional wine education text or wine reference book will tell you that, when it comes to Champagne, chardonnay adds “finesse” and “longevity,” while pinot noir brings “depth” and “weight.” And meunier, the black sheep of Champagne’s traditional grape trio? Meunier, we are taught, is solely for blending—“fruity,” “youthful,” a “workhorse grape” probably sourced from the herbicide-ridden monoculture of the Marne Valley, lacking in structure, and best deployed in padding non-vintage wines not intended for long aging.
The official Wine and Spirits Education Trust Level 4 textbook for sparkling wines singles it out in an example of how producers can increase volume and keep wines affordable, yet marketable, by blending “prestigious” grapes like chardonnay and pinot noir with “cheaper grape varieties like Meunier.” Damn, WSET, tell us how you really feel.
It’s an oversimplification so endlessly repeated that even at said trendy Michelin-starred restaurant with a smart, natural-leaning wine list—with hard-to-find, new-wave producers and “obscure” grape varieties—the professional opinion, still, is that meunier is just filler.
If you accept this canned wisdom at face value, you’ll overlook some of the most singular wines coming out of Champagne right now: 100-percent meunier from grower-producers working old-vine parcels, often on long-overlooked terroir.
Meunier is a black grape that’s a mutation of pinot noir. It’s sometimes still referred to as pinot meunier outside of France, but the regulatory body for Champagne and the region’s producers refer to it simply as “meunier.” The word means “miller” in French, because of what looks like a dusting of flour on the underside of its leaves. Meunier was once planted all over northern France, but it’s now found almost exclusively in Champagne. It buds later and ripens earlier than chardonnay and pinot noir, making it well-suited to the chilly, wet climate. It thrives in the frost-prone clay soils of the Marne Valley, which is planted to a whopping 72 percent meunier.
No one ever sang meunier’s praises—even though it accounted for half of all plantings in Champagne as recently as the mid-20th century. In the past, many Champagne houses wouldn’t even admit to including meunier in their blends, and most of the biggest houses still rarely use the grape in their top wines. Instead, Champagne houses lean on meunier to fill out non-vintage blends at the bottom of their range. Krug’s inclusion of meunier in its Grande Cuvée, for instance, is more the longstanding exception that proves the rule.
Champagne’s grower-producers were the first to cast meunier in the lead role. Although they’ve been few in number, there are some 100-percent meunier Champagnes from iconic growers like Egly-Ouriet, Georges Laval, and Jérôme Prévost that bubbleheads have chased over the years. But more and more meunier cuvées are emerging, with the change centered on the Marne Valley, where growers are turning away from selling grapes to the big houses and converting to organic and biodynamic farming.
Éric Taillet’s family has farmed meunier in the Marne Valley since 1890. He is a fourth-generation producer, working six hectares of vines organically in Baslieux-sous-Châtillon. His oldest meunier vines were planted in 1902, and he makes several 100-percent meunier Champagnes. I met Taillet at a tasting of his wines in New York this spring. He carries the sword and shield for meunier (though he is equally passionate about improved farming methods). In my email exchange with him, he refers to the grape as “mon roi” (“my king”). The variety is his self-professed life’s work, and in 2015, he co-founded the Meunier Institut, an association of winemakers with a mission to elevate the variety’s reputation.
“Meunier allows you to explore another side of Champagne, far from traditional blends, with more daring and original cuvées,” he tells me.
Part of Taillet’s work at the Meunier Institut is cataloging old-vine meunier plots in Champagne. Taillet says that there are some parcels in the Marne Valley that are 60 years old, or more. Their lower, consistent yields produce concentrated grapes, and their adaptation to their environment makes organic farming easier. “We often find deeper and more evolved aromas in these wines—ripe fruit, smoky notes, spices, and even hints of truffle with aging,” Taillet says.
Some of the most exciting Champagnes I’ve had in the last year are from producers working old-vine meunier plots, or making 100-percent meunier wines, or both. Several are from families who have farmed meunier for generations, but they were the ones to make the switch to organic or biodynamic farming.
Most of these producers are growing grapes in tiny, uncelebrated villages in the Marne Valley, although some are in the Petite Montagne or Coteaux sud d’Épernay. Their wines are a kaleidoscope of expressions of meunier across Champagne’s soil types.
Flavien Nowack, one of the most experimental vignerons in Champagne right now, biodynamically farms his family’s old-vine meunier plots in Vandières. Benoît Déhu makes his single-vineyard, single-vintage meunier from a parcel on clay and limestone in Fossoy that he farms biodynamically (and ploughs with his horse, Violette). Aurélien Laherte of Laherte Frères in Chavot in the Coteaux sud d’Épernay produces his Les Vignes d’Autrefois cuvée from vines planted in the 1940s. Chartogne-Taillet’s Les Barres is made from rare ungrafted vines on sandy soils over chalk in Merfy near Massif de Saint-Thierry, which brings a freshness to the wine. Jérôme Blin produces his meunier Champagnes from sandy soils in Vincelles. André Heucq’s mineral-driven wines are from vines on a rare green clay in Cuisles. Vincent Lagille works on calcareous clay in Treslon in the Montagne de Reims to produce broad, savory wines. (Blin, Heucq, and Lagille are also Meunier Institut members.)
The best meunier Champagnes are aromatic, rich, “vinous” (a winey wine—not a tautology, in this context, but rather meaning a Champagne with intense and deep fruit and more like a serious white wine, à la Burgundy, but with bubbles). They have notes of ripe stone fruit, red fruit, and even tropical fruit, but they also have a vibrant freshness from sapidity, with salty and savory flavors that carry on the finish. With time in bottle they can develop notes of honey, mushroom, and dried fruit. They’re wines that are immediately enjoyable, especially with food, but they gain a savory complexity with age.
One hundred-percent meunier Champagne still isn’t exactly easy to find (and like all good Champagne, it isn’t cheap). But these expressions are well worth the trouble of seeking out—and importing.
Thirteen 100% Meunier Champagnes
A baker’s dozen recommendations for paid subscribers only.
