A favorite of Napa Valley's wine industry, this Champagne has been poured countless times by winemakers and sommeliers—and it’s delicious every time. Champagne Vilmart has been making wine from its own vines in the Montagne de Reims since 1890, now tended by the family’s fifth generation. With a firm foothold in the region, they farm some of the finest vineyards. Produced from their most exceptional sites, the 2016 release spent 10 months in barrel and 72 months aging in bottle. It's pale gold with silver highlights, displaying fine bubbles and offering floral hints of honeysuckle, orange blossom, fresh apple, peach, and pear. With secondary notes of toasted almonds and butter biscuits, it shows maturity on the palate with flavors of acacia honey, apricot jam, and hazelnut, finishing with impressive minerality and length.
Vilmart & Cie. is not only one of the greatest grower-estates in Champagne, but one of the finest champagne producers of any type in the region. Vilmart & Cie. traces its history back to 1890, when it was founded by Désiré Vilmart, and from the beginning, Vilmart & Cie. has always been a grower Champagne house, making wine exclusively from estate-owned vines. Since 1989 the estate has been in the hands of Laurent Champs, the fifth generation of the family to take the helm of the house. Vilmart's Laurent Champs farms 11 hectares of vines and enjoys a rare advantage in this highly morcellated region: those 11 hectares are divided into merely 12 plots. All are close to the winery in Rilly-la-Montagne and oriented south or southeast, and all their soils are rich in chalk. A partisan of barrel fermentation and élevage—working exclusively with Meursault's tonnellerie Damy since 1992—Vilmart is a source of powerful, vinous wines that are invariably polished and racy. Recent releases have demonstrated an increasingly adept mastery of oak, its influence remaining firmly in the background, and they're developing more slowly. "This is one of Champagne's top estates, and the wines reviewed here come warmly recommended." -Robert Parker.
