Serious Red Wine from Champagne: Bollinger La Côte aux Enfants
Last week, I had an exceptional opportunity to drink the rare and tightly allocated 2016 Bollinger “La Cote aux Enfants” at home with dinner. This is a wine that I have only ever had thimble pours of at tastings in the past, and I am not sure when I will have another opportunity to drink it freely again. This special red wine is normally saved for Michelin-starred restaurants—it was quite a thrill to have it with homemade chicken pot pie chez Westby!
Historically, the Champagne region provided red and white still wines to the royalty of France. It is well documented as a favorite of the court of Henri the IV, and no village in the region made a better one than Aÿ, with its steep, chalky, south-facing slopes directly on the Marne River. Now, almost all of the wine that is vinified as red in the region is used to make rosé. It is a huge sacrifice for Bollinger to bottle this separately, as the one bottle that Cinnamon and I drank could have made a case or more of prestige cuvée-level rosé Champagne had it been blended into white wines of quality and then bottle fermented. In fact, this site, the four-hectare La Côte aux Enfants is the very same site that they use for the red wine in their La Grande Année Rosé Champagne. It is composed entirely of Pinot Noir, with one-third fermented in whole cluster and all of it aged in small, old French oak barrels.
We decanted this wine about a half hour before serving it, and drank it out of our Riedel Sommelier Burgundy glasses. These glasses are like a magnifying glass and were wonderful for this complex, super mineral rarity. The color was surprisingly dark, almost like a Beaune or even Pommard, with real violet depth. On the nose it had black cherry power as well as an elusive new leather savor. In the mouth it was medium bodied and had a very fine texture. The big feature of this wine is the incredible chalk character on the finish. It is nearly salty with minerality and has great cut for rich food. I thought that our homemade chicken pot pie would be a good pairing, and it was—this wine needs real food!
If you want to taste the great red from the Champagne region, don’t wait. Our allocation won’t last!
A toast to you,