Champagne Summit #1: The Billecart Dinner

Last night, Clément Calleja of Champagne Billecart-Salmon kicked off our annual staff Champagne Summit with a big bang. He hosted a comprehensive tasting of their line paired with sushi from Kanpai at Cinnamon’s and my home in Menlo Park. The wines were unforgettable. 

Clément was joined by his team from Chambers and Chambers, Eric Lecours and Alex Schroeder (yes—the Alex that used to work for K&L!) as well as our entire Champagne team: Scott Beckerley from San Francisco, Giovanni Bueno from Hollywood, and Michael Benoit from Redwood City. We tasted five current releases and two long-since sold-out cuvées from the vault.

Champagne Billecart-Salmon is the oldest house to be continuously run by the same family—they just celebrated their 204th birthday. Although they have access to 300 hectares of vines, they only keep enough to make 2 million bottles per year, focusing on the 15 miles surrounding their base in Mareuil-sur-Aÿ. All of the second press is sold; they only use cuvée, the first and most elegant juice for their wines. In fact, they sell even some of that cuvée, selecting only the plots that meet their high standards both for quality and style.

We started off with the new Billecart-Salmon Brut Réserve Champagne, which is now made with 2018 base wine and about 55% reserve wine. They chose to make this with a Meunier base and then added reserves of roughly even parts Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from 2016, 2017, and 2015. The long, slow, cold-fermented style of the house is on great display here, with incredible freshness and scintillating minerality.

We then moved on to the Billecart-Salmon Blanc de Blancs Champagne, which is entirely Grand Cru and based on 2016. The main village in the blend is Chouilly, the furthest north of the Côte des Blancs and closest to Mareuil. The blend also includes Mesnil, Cramant, and Avize. This ultra-clean, racy style really came alive with the sushi, and showed off the immense pairing potential of this house’s wines. This is a wonderfully subtle and nuanced example of an all-Chardonnay Champagne, with more chalk and refreshing acidity than most.

After that, we enjoyed all-Meunier Billecart-Salmon Rendevous #1 Champagne and the all–Pinot Noir Billecart-Salmon Rendevous #2 Champagne, which both showed spectacularly, but are both long-since sold out. Both were made in only 10,000-bottle quantities, all stainless-steel fermented and dosed very low, even for Extra Brut, at 1 gram per liter. The #1 had the spiced pear of great-quality Meunier, but stayed clean and focused thanks to the cold fermentation. The #2 had great hazelnut aromas typical of Verzenay, the Grand Cru from which it was harvested. What a treat!

Moving on to the Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé Champagne, it was clear to all of us why this delicate pink Champagne is so well-loved: high-quality Chardonnay keeps it light and refreshing, while old-vine Pinot Noir gives it depth that one can never get tired of. The break-out bottle of the night for me was the Billecart-Salmon Sous Bois Brut Champagne, their entirely barrique-fermented, long-aged non-vintage cuvée. The current batch is based on 2013 and has seen over seven years of ageing on the lees. They used barrels that average 15 years old and they block malolactic fermentation, yielding a wine with great freshness and vivacity, but more texture and complexity than one finds in an all-stainless wine. If you haven’t had it, this is one to get!

We ended the evening with the monumental 2008 Billecart-Salmon “Louis Salmon” Blanc de Blancs Champagne, which, for me, will vie with the 2008 Krug for wine of the vintage for generations to come. They did not squander their opportunity with the best vintage of my career, and this entirely Grand Cru, 25% barrel-fermented masterpiece is an example of purity, longevity, and concentration that will go down in history as one of the greatest Champagnes ever made. This wine is still star bright, even green in color, and has an electric personality, framed by subtle white peach fruit and loaded on the back end with chalk carried by a line of acid that seems to go off to infinity. At 14 years old, it is just starting to drink!

A toast to you!

- Gary Westby, Champagne Buyer