Champagne Paul Lebrun, Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut "Jules", 2012

This Vintage Blanc de Blancs Champagne comes from a superb Grower and offers thrills that many other houses would charge double the price to achieve. 

Made from 70% Côtes de Blancs Chardonnay, this is one of the top wines made by Paul Lebrun and is complex, bright and utterly delicious. Citrus, stone-fruit and developing notes of roasted nuts, toast and honey lead to a palate that is incredibly fresh, vibrant and complex. The finish is dry, flavour-filled, textural and zesty: a lovely and really wonderful expression of the terroir and grape variety. This is complex Champagne that is in pristine condition - you'll thank yourself for it. 

This wine is aged for 9 years on its lees before disgorgement and bottling. The wine is predominantly Côte des Blancs, giving incredible finesse, with 30% from the Côte de Sézanne, which gives beautiful ripeness and structure to its fruit. The fermentation of the wine is traditional to a point, but with a bout a third of the grapes fermenting in various sizes of oak barrels where the wines then age in these vessels for seven months to give extra complexity, texture and depth.

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 normally make wines in a very traditional method with three years minimum of less ageing and fermentation in stainless steel tanks (though this wine is an exception to this, of course), 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.