Champagne Paul Lebrun, Blanc de Blancs Brut "L'Irremplaçable"

This Champagne is a stunning Blanc de Blancs from two of the region's best zones for white grapes. A perfect balance of richness and fresh crispness, the wine is complex and mineral with notes of almond, fresh apple, peach and citrus fruit with a zesty yet filling mouthfeel that carries the fruit and almond flavours, leading to a long, saline finish. 

It is a stunning wine for the value and is the perfect example of how and why Grower Champagne like this is just so wonderful with really good food. Throw it against any high-class restaurant-like cuisine and you'll be in for a really wonderful treat.

Paul Lebrun was one of the first wine-makers in Champagne to break away from supplying the big houses and négociants, just after the First World War, establishing his own house in 1931. With vineyards in three of the top villages in the Côte des Blancs, the winery was always set to produce really high quality wines. The fact that three of the villages are Grand Crus and two are Premier Crus just affirms the provenance of seriously high-grade Chardonnay. Based in Cramant, one of the most-sought-after of all Côte des Blancs villages, the winery now has 16.5 hectares of vines in both Côte des Blancs and the Côte de Sézanne, where it is run by Paul's granddaughter, Nathalie and her son Joseph.

They make wines in a very traditional method with three years minimum of less ageing and fermentation in stainless steel tanks, choosing to highlight vineyard characteristics with minimum of winery intervention. The Côte de Sézanne offers riper and fuller fruit characteristics, while the homestead of Cramant in the Côte des Blancs gives scintillating minerality and complex flavours that often develop over years of ageing.

Grower Champagne is now firmly established as a source of great, individual wines that offer something different to the established brands (Grandes Marques) that have dominated sales and production in the region for so long. The concept of owning, farming and then making wine is not a stretch in most regions (and, indeed, many of the larger houses in Champagne own at least some vineyards from which they make wine), but the focus on quality of fruit and effort in the vineyard to produce high quality sparkling wine is the essence of these wines.