Roederer Cristal: The Inside Story, Vertically and Horizontally

It was another busy day for the JamesSuckling.com tasting team in the Champagne region in early July. It was also a hot day and we all felt tired by the end of it. It might surprise some readers, but that’s the reason that we prefer not to spend every evening on the road hanging with famous winemakers. However, an invitation to dinner from Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, the chief winemaker of Louis Roederer, was too good to turn down.

When we sat down at the dining table at Roederer’s luxurious guesthouse in the city of Reims and looked at the menu card, my jaw dropped, because the wine with dinner was an extensive vertical tasting of Roederer’s famous prestige cuvee, Cristal.

Not only does Cristal have the reputation of being one of the finest prestige cuvee Champagnes, when I was a teenager back in the late 1970s I knew that Cristal was what Grace Jones and Bianca Jagger drank at New York’s legendary Studio 54 night club! But as the Rolling Stones famously sang, “you can’t always get what you want.”

Of course, the world has changed a lot since then, and prestige Champagnes like Cristal are now consumed in many countries where they weren’t previously available. They are now global luxury brands, and their production has developed dramatically.

READ MORE CHAMPAGNE ANNUAL REPORT: FRESHNESS AND ENERGY COME TO THE TABLE

For example, Dom Perignon used to be the top Champagne of Moet & Chandon but it is now an independent brand in the LVMH stable of Champagnes, and its production has grown several-fold to five or six million bottles per vintage, according to industry sources. Of course, the quality of the finished product is a completely different issue than those of scale and marketing strategy.

In contrast, Cristal continues to display the name of Louis Roederer and the production remains between 300,000 and 500,000 bottles per vintage. Furthermore, Louis Roederer is owned by the Rouzaud family, descendants of Madame Camille Olry-Roederer, the CEO from 1933 to 1974. Her great-grandson Frédéric Rouzaud is the current CEO. However, this continuity doesn’t mean that Cristal hasn’t undergone a series of reorientations.

When I first visited Roederer 25 years ago there were separate directors for the vineyards and the cellar, Christophe Coppolani and Michel Pansu, respectively. Lecaillon became the chef de cave in 1999, and since 2011 he has done both jobs. “My belief is that you craft the wine through the grapes,” he said, “this is how we are taking Roederer and Cristal to the next level.”

Lecaillon is a charismatic winemaker who expresses complex ideas in easily comprehensible terms. The day after the vertical tasting, when he showed me around the labyrinthine cellars, he explained that the company has almost 250 hectares of vineyards, divided into 415 plots. They account for 70 percent of the company’s total production, the rest being from bought-in grapes. A total of 450 fermentation vessels enable each parcel to be vinified separately.

Cristal comes from the same 45 plots each year and is 100 percent estate grown. Like all of Roederer’s vineyards, they have been biodynamically cultivated since 2012. If the vintage is not up to scratch then Cristal is not produced, as most recently in 2011. “Tasting each vineyard parcel year in and year out gives us an understanding of all the different terroirs, and that enables us to fine-tune the farming,” Lecaillon explained.

In the cellar, the winemaking is surprisingly simple. “I don’t chaptalize, and I don’t do malolactic fermentation, so the main decision is whether to ferment a wine into stainless steel or into wood,” Lécaillon said. “Oak gives elegance to the powerful wines – my big boys!”

Both the oak cuvees and many of the stainless steel tanks have a boxy form that was developed by Lecaillon’s predecessor, Pansu.

Cristal is typically 60 percent pinot noir and 40 percent chardonnay, and there are some important differences between the base wines from these grapes. Cristal Rosé, first produced in 1974, is typically 55 percent pinot noir and 45 percent chardonnay.

“Chardonnay is the most resilient grape in the face of climate change and it is usually picked last,” Lecaillon said. “With pinot noir we need to watch the maturation of the grapes very carefully and pick before the acidity drops too far.” That would not be good for the balance and could make Cristal taste broad and heavy.

Cristal has plenty of acidity, with the pH (an accurate measure of the intensity of acidity) usually lying at a low 2.9 to 3.0. The pinot noir components of the cuvee generally lie slightly higher in pH than the chardonnay lots.

As young wines, the two grapes are also different. “We do the blending of the young pinot noir wines in January and February, but chardonnay is blended after Easter,” Lecaillon continued. “Before Easter the wines are closed and you only get half the story.”

The blending of Cristal and the other Roederer Champagnes is done by a team of six winemakers, ranging from 27 to 55 years of age, four of them men and two of them women. “I don’t want them to follow me,” Lecaillon said of his team. “I want to know what their feelings are! I want a diversity of viewpoints when making decisions.”

Another thing that makes Cristal stand out is the pressure in the bottle, which determines the intensity of the mousse, or bubbles. Six atmospheres of pressure is the industry standard, but Lecaillon tailors the pressure of carbon dioxide from the second fermentation to each specific wine. For example, the Louis Roederer Blanc de Blanc vintage has just 4.5 atmospheres pressure, while Cristal has 5.5. “The riper and richer the wine, the more pressure you need for lightness,” Lecaillon said. “We adapt pressure to vintage, too.”

Cristal spends fully six years on the lees in the bottle, because this is how long it takes for autolysis – the slow breakdown of the dead yeast cells – to complete. This process releases a wealth of compounds into the Champagne, ranging from aromas to the so-called mannoproteins that give Champagne the creaminess that plays such a vital role in harmonizing the acidity. After disgorgement, the wine rests for a further eight months before release.

2015 is the latest vintage of Cristal to be released, and like other young Cristals it’s a powerful and structured Champagne that’s properly dry with a pronounced acidity. This works so well because of the tremendous aromatic and textural richness, with the very fine mousse completing the whole picture. It tastes very bright in spite of eight years of aging.

Read the tasting notes below and you will see that as Cristal ages it slowly mellows and develops an entire spectrum of mature aromas, such as white chocolate, blood orange and dried fruits.

Vinotheque is a special, extra-aged version of Cristal that spends years longer on the lees before being disgorged. Lecaillon prefers that at least part of the extra aging is done with the bottles “á point” – that is, upside down, rather than lying down. I was able to get a shot of him with a rack of Jeroboams (double magnums) of Cristal Vinotheque that demonstrates how this reduces the contact area between the decomposed yeast deposit and the wine.

A few words on vintages are necessary. Cristal 2008 is one of our favorite Champagnes of modern times, but this was a late-ripening, high-acidity vintage similar to 1996. Another vintage of that kind hasn’t been seen since 2013. Instead, vintages with more or less early harvests and moderate acidity have dominated.

Of course, this is due to climate change. Lecaillon also has strong opinions on this subject. “We must embrace the new conditions instead of fighting against them,” he said. So Cristal slowly changes, but definitely not for the worse!

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor