Posted Sep 30, 2022 6:05 AM
Forty years later, it comes back roaring, as if emerging from the night of time, this time when a legend was not born every year but one every decade. In Champagne as in Bordeaux and other vineyard regions, the Indian summer of the beautiful season of 1982 gave birth to great big cats. Monsters of seduction, mature and generous, cut to span the generations. For all the men of wine, they marked the entry into this modern era of winemaking where extreme attention is paid to temperatures. Le Sauvage hadn’t been talked about since the late 1980s, when Piper-Heidsieck ceased, for some mysterious reason, to produce this vintage extra-brut. Inspired by its brilliant cellar master, the young Emilien Boutillat, the house is now bringing out of the shadows 500 bottles of Sauvage 1982, disgorged thirty years ago.
Chef’s surprise
Here, understanding the myth requires a bit of technique. A vintage champagne can age in two ways. First on its cork stopper, after disgorging, an operation which consists in expelling the deposit of yeast accumulated in the neck during the long period when the bottles are kept and stirred on their tip. Or on its lees before a later disgorgement. The cellar master’s surprise is not only to bring Sauvage back to life in its original version. It is to offer, in a diptych box adorned with these lenticular prints that were very fashionable at the time, this same 1982 aged thirty-nine years on its lees.
Sauvage (disgorged in 1992) and Hors-Série (disgorged in January 2022) thus offer a rare opportunity to taste two expressions of the same marvelous cuvée, fruit of 60% Pinot Noir and 40% Chardonnay. Scent of black plum, warm notes of brioche and reassuring touches of honey, the first presents the creamy, sensual and delicate face of this vintage. Exhaling mirabelle plum and quince, a hint of saffron and rosemary, the second impresses above all on the palate with its tension and mineral imprint. Rather than differences, nuances distinguish them, without separating them. Like two brothers who complement each other.
Champagne Piper-Heidsieck, Sauvage 1982 and Hors-Série 1982 in a diptych box. €1,590. Special Edition 1982 in solo box €590. Lafayette Gourmet, 35 boulevard Haussmann, 75009 Paris.
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