Pierre Peters - Brut Reserve NV

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Pierre Peters Description

These are sleek, racy champagnes, expressing a classic character of Côte des Blancs chardonnay. They are marked
by their fine acidity and prominent minerality, yet while they are always brisk and chalky. “We have a lot of acidity
and a lot of minerality in all our wines,” says Rodolphe Péters. “We want to build the structure of our wines around
both acidity and minerality, not acidity alone.

Wine & Spirits: 96 Points

Decanter: 93 Points

Based on the 2018 vintage, this wine includes reserves dating back to 1988. Most of the components come from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger; all grow on chalk. The wine seems to layer that chalk’s seabed heritage into beautiful richness, as it combines different parcels aged in stainless steel, oak barrels or concrete. “It remind me of architecture,” Tina Vaughn of NYC’s The Simone said. “The smell of a building site—granite, concrete, steel beams. Very Ayn Rand.” Or is it the architecture of ancient fossilized soil, along with a softer impression, one that made me smile at the glory of Champagne.

A View from the Cellar: 92 Points

Rodolphe Péters current bottling of Cuvée Réserve is from the base year of 2018, with reserve wines in the blend dating all the way back to 1988! Three quarters of the vins clairs go through malolactic and the wine was disgorged in December of 2020. All of the fruit for this bottling hails from the estate’s parcels in Mesnil-sur-Oger, Cramant, Avize and Oger. The wine delivers a refined bouquet of pear, delicious apple, fresh-baked bread, a fine base of limestone minerality and a topnote of fresh almond. On the palate the wine is young, bright and full, with a superb core of fruit, excellent mineral drive and cut, pinpoint bubbles and a long, beautifully balanced and nascently complex finish. This is a young wine and really deserves at least a few years in the cellar to allow its acids to relax a bit more and the secondary layers of complexity to emerge. It should prove to be a long-lived bottle of non-vintage and will be hitting on all cylinders if given three to five years’ worth of bottle age- though it is certainly quite tasty in its youth.

Vinous: 92 Points

The NV Brut Cuvée de Réserve Grand Cru is open, effusive and a real delight to taste. Soaring aromatics and soft curves give this 2019-base Champagne tons of sheer appeal. Apricot, tangerine peel, spice and dried flowers abound in this racy, open-knit Champagne. The Cuvée de Réserve is rarely this charming at this stage. The slightly lower dosage of 5 grams per liter works so well.