Champagne Fluteau Blanc de Blancs Millésime Extra Brut 2016

Some of our Last Bubbles team have had the great privilege of visiting Champagne Fluteau and discovered this house has even more to offer than stunning vineyards and exquisite Champagnes. With an ever-reverent approach to winemaking, the folks at Fluteau honor their family history and tend the land with great care. The serene village of Gyé-sur-Seine has been home to the Fluteau estate since 1935, and the family still produces their wines in the original winery. Jeremy Fluteau leads the winemaking efforts here in a most practical, black-and-white sense, with his sister, Adeline Fluteau, heading up the admin and sales. Jeremy may be as straightforward as it gets. No waxing poetic about land and beauty, and he appears almost as though he’s an engineer destined to crack the code for producing the most high-quality Champagnes possible (with great success on that front, might we add). Although his personality leans more stoic, his wines may be the very opposite: expressive, enticing, and exuberant in every way. He seems to effortlessly balance time-honored techniques with the integration of newer technologies to craft his incredible selection of small-production cuvees. This grand Extra Brut Champagne is a 100% Chardonnay wine with all fruit harvested in 2016 from a blend of the family’s three Chardonnay plots, each located in a separate village: Neuville-Sur-Seine, Gye-Sur-Seine, and Courteron. It pours a soft gold in color, and on the palate, there’s toasted brioche, pear chutney, orange peel, Red Delicious apple, brie, white pepper, and nutmeg. This Fluteau has a rather vinous quality – it’s soft, round, and more savory than sweet, but you can feel the wonderful tinges of acid poking through its vinosity. It really is so incredibly structured and pure, with super fine and relentless bubbles, and would be incredible with many different foods. Make sure you grab some perfectly aged, pristinely crafted vintage Champagne for your near and distant special occasions… or next Friday night!