2016 Champagne Extra Brut les Hauts Meuniers

Brochet's 2016 Extra-Brut Les Hauts Meuniers is indecently good, confirming his status as one of this underrated cépage's most able exponents. Exhibiting aromas of crisp mirabelle plum, yellow apple, almond paste, bread dough and subtle spices, it's medium to full-bodied, fleshy and vinous, with a beautifully pure core of fruit, ripe but racy acids and an attractively pillowy mousse, concluding with a long, saline finish. As readers will remember, this cuvée derives from a parcel of Meunier vines (planted in 1962) at the highest point of Brochet's holdings on the so-called Mont Benoit, a domed outcropping of chalk on the outskirts of Reims.