2007 Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Francaises

100% Pinot Noir, Grand Cru d’Äy. Number 1,269 out of 3,132 bottles. Disgorged October 2017. Deep gold. Dried lemon peel, bitter lemon, hazelnuts, walnut shells, shortbread dipped in tea. Yellow tobacco leaves, still soft. The nose is haunting. So haunting. A wine you could sit with, glass to your nose, just breathing in the aromas in awestruck silence for a very long time. In the mouth, the first impression is power. Tightly coiled, even now. Cashmere-silk complexity. But tannic, too, in an inexplicable way. It has an exquisitely fine bead that feels like running your tongue over thousands and thousands of tiny, tiny pearls silk-stitched into silk organza. The texture is remarkable – like nothing I’ve ever felt before in a champagne. But the wine is brooding, mycorrhizal, understory, under shadows. The outline of citrus, a sense of grilled lemons, salty. Mushrooms, verbena, lemongrass run through my brain and ripple across my tongue but then I shake my head because this is not what this wine is saying. The wine pushes me away as much and as often as it draws me in. It’s truculent then longing. It’s spitting poetry with its palms held high and hard at a stop, then it melts in the same mouthful and pulls as close as a lover. It’s spiced and spliced; a shattering of a million minute diamonds and a weaving of a million golden threads. It's towering. It's magnificent. I've never tasted anything like it. It filled me with awe.

This blanc de noirs is produced with Pinot Noir from two tiny plots of ungrafted vines in grand cru Aÿ that were harvested on 31 August. The first run juice from the press was fermented in cask and aged for eight years before being disgorged with a dosage of 8g/L. The result is beguiling, with aromas that combine ripe pear and citrus with smoke and truffle. The texture is silky and round, yet there is impressive freshness here, hinting at a great ageing potential. The wine should start to open up in the next five years.

Burnished and open-knit, the 2007 Vieilles Vignes Françaises gives the impression it will mature at a faster pace than is the norm here. Orange confit, mint, apricot jam, hazelnut and coffee are all finely-knit in the glass. I would prefer to drink it over the next decade, although it will almost certainly hang on for longer than that. Quite simply, the 2007 Vieilles Vignes Françaises is endowed with extraordinary precision and class, especially within the context of the year.