The 2025 Vintage in Champagne Benefits from the Gift of Experience
2025 Champagne Vintage Report: Surprisingly Fresh in a Record-Breaking Year
Pharmacy thermometer reading 42°C in Champagne, France, during the 2025 harvest.
Is 2025 a Good Vintage for Champagne?
I recently returned from two weeks in the Champagne region, which I visit every year as K&L’s Champagne Buyer. While I was there, I tasted hundreds of vin clair (the still wine that is made into Champagne after being bottled) from the 2025 vintage. We won’t even see the entry level non-vintage offerings based on this harvest until 2029, and the first of the vintage 2025s won’t arrive until 2031, but I thought it was important to share my impressions. I think that this might be a watershed vintage in Champagne, because we are now really starting to see the results of the work that they are doing there to mitigate against climate change.
How Hot Was the 2025 Champagne Harvest?
To sum up the facts about the 2025 vintage in one short word, I would say hot. In two words, hot again—2015 broke the record for heat previously held by 1852; 2018 broke that of 2015; and 2020, 2022, and 2025 are all somewhere between. When I went to Champagne in July of 2025, I took a photo on the 2nd of a thermometer at a pharmacy reading 42 degrees Celsius—that is 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit! That is incredibly rare and dangerous in a city on the same line of latitude as Winipeg.
Yet, the vin clair that I tasted remained surprisingly fresh, with much better acidity than I expected. The wines were uniformly clean, with no problems with botrytis and, better yet, no problems with herbal or vegetal notes from the vines not being able to ripen flavors in the grapes from heat shock. While a few samples from the Sézanne in the south of Champagne tasted a little too forward and soft, examples from the Côte des Blancs, Mountain of Reims, and Marne Valley all seemed to have the guts, structure and acidity to make very good Champagne. In the cellar, many producers that have dogmatically always done full malolactic have opted to block it, conserving some extra acidity. Perpetual reserve systems, where the blend is done early in large tanks or foudres (giant oak barrels) with many vintages together are also being used more to preserve freshness.
Will There Be Vintage Blanc de Blancs from the 2025 Vintage?
Quality seemed very strong for all three of the main varieties in the region, with only Chardonnay suffering for quantity. Although the set of grapes was great, and the bunches were healthy, they yielded very little juice. This seemed like a problem all over the region, not just in the Côte des Blancs. We shouldn’t hold our breath for big releases of vintage Blanc de Blancs, as what was harvested will likely be needed for non-vintage and reserves for the future.
What About the 2026 Champagne Vintage?
As for 2026, the vintage is hardly off to a good start—massive frosts ravaged the area in March, and multiple smaller frosts hit locally in April. Some producers I visited suspect that they have already lost 90%... And that is in early spring, two seasons away from harvest! Luckily, the system of reserves in Champagne is strong, and we won’t run out from just one bad year. Drink a toast to the producers—they are working hard in the vineyard for us!