Grand Terroirs is Champagne Palmer’s highest quality of Vintage Champagne – i.e. vintage champagne. The house’s top Prestige Cuvée ‘Amazone’ is a unique product of an old Solera and therefore without vintage, so Grand Terroirs takes the place as the house’s best vintage wine, which is only made in particularly good vintages. The first vintage was the majestic 2003 only in magnum and now follows the second release, which is 2012 only in magnum and 2015 in regular 75cl bottle. In other words, it is very far between Grand Terroirs being declared.
Grand Terroirs is a rare expression of Champagne that only a few producers would be able to make. It encapsulates to an unprecedented degree the unique terroir of the Montagne de Reims in northern Champagne, where you will find many of Champagne’s best fields, especially when it comes to Pinot Noir, for which the area is particularly renowned. However, some Chardonnay is also grown here, and it takes on a slightly different expression here than it does in the Cote des Blancs. The fields in the Montagne de Reims mainly face north to maintain coolness and freshness, so Chardonnay from here is typically taller, steelier and crisper than from the Cote des Blancs district, where the fields are mainly east-facing. Compared to other houses, Palmer is rarely in possession of a large number of Montagne de Reims’ best fields of Chardonnay. It is important when it comes to understanding this wine. In addition, Palmer also has some of the best fields in the Montagne de Reims with Pinot Meunier. By best fields is meant for all the grape varieties that all fields for this wine must be either Grand Cru or Premier Cru classified, including the fields with Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. In this way, Palmer has a unique opportunity to capture Montage de Reims’ overall character and ability from the best fields, in the best vintages, in one wine. The result is this.
Briefly summarized: Grand Terroir is a unique blend of Champagne’s three grape varieties from the best Grand Cru and Premier Cru fields in the Montagne de Reims in the greatest vintages with, for a top wine from the Montagne de Reims, an unusually high emphasis on Chardonnay.
Grapes: Chardonnay (50%) & Pinot Noir (38%) & Pinot Meunier (12%)
The 2015 vintage played out perfectly for Champagne Palmer. After a mild and wet winter, large parts of the growing season were characterized by sun, heat and quite a bit of precipitation, but not problematic. In August, the night temperatures dropped so that the overall ripening of the grapes was close to perfect with intact acidity. The wines from 2015 are rich but well-balanced.
In 2015, approx. 20,000 bottles of Grand Vintage of 75cl. The grape composition in 2015 is 50% Chardonnay, 38% Pinot Noir and 12% Pinot Meunier. Dosage is 7 g/L.
Colour: Beautiful straw gold.
Smell: Beautiful and elegant smell with acacia and orange blossom, crisp citrus and a little fresh apple, morels, yellow plums, peach and almost a little ripe pineapple. Quite subtly, there are also deeper notes of almond, cinnamon, clove and brioche with a slight whiff of the scent of freshly ground coffee beans.
Tasting notes: The taste is just as nice and straight as you can expect from the smell. The crisp citrus notes mingle with brioche and the richer notes of yellow and lightly dried fruits. Intense, seductive, deep and elegant.
Serving suggestion: Can be enjoyed on its own and is at the same time sufficiently rich and intense to go with most food. The completely cheeky use is to take it well chilled for an aperitif, slightly warmer for the starter and a few degrees warmer for the main course. It’s a great Champagne evening, where you get to know the many layers that a truly complex Champagne has to offer.
Palmer & Co is a Champagne house based in Reims. The company started as a cooperative between 7 winegrowers in 1947, and Palmer quickly became the favorite of the distinguished houses when they bought wines and grapes from abroad for the big cuvées. Since then, the enterprise has grown exponentially and today they work with 415 hectares, of which approximately 200 are classified as Grand or Premier Cru.
The philosophy of the winery is to find the perfect balance between tradition and scientific advancement methods. For example, Palmer & Co has, as something quite unique, adopted the solera system known from Jerez in Champagne. For 35 years, they have used it to give the reserve wines depth. Xavier Berdin, oenologist at Palmer, calls it “an everlasting blend, the old wine ‘educating’ the new, the young wine feeding the old”. Every year, the upper “layer” of the solera, consisting of oak barrels, is refreshed with wines from the new vintage. Later, this wine is transferred to stainless steel tanks, from where it is used as reserve in wines such as Brut Reserve and Palmer Blanc de Noirs.
Palmer & Co also has a deep cellar with a particularly large stock of older vintage champagnes for sale.
