Brut mature

Vintage Champagne matching

Older vintage champagne might not be the easiest of sells, but it can give you amazing options for food matching. Particularly, says Margaret Rand, with trickier dishes

I don’t remember the man, I don’t remember the restaurant – but I remember the wine. It was Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque of a vintage some 20 years old, and it was being poured into my glass to accompany hot foie gras. The combination seemed at first improbable, then magical. It was the start of a realisation that old vintage champagne is the bees’ knees when it comes to dealing with awkward food. Throw an old champagne some garlic or nam pla or even a bit of chilli, and it picks up its skirts and dances.

This runs contrary to the traditional Champenois thinking, which agrees that champagne is pretty useful with food, but which strongly warns one off putting it with anything too eggy, salty, fatty or garlicky.

OLDER & WISER

Age is the key. Young vintage champagne is far too tight to match easily with food, and is best kept for classic European dishes. But champagne with secondary and tertiary characteristics is umami-friendly and can match fusion food or food of the Blumenthal school. You need to be careful of the chilli, but you don’t need to avoid it.

How old is old depends on the house and the vintage. Non-oxidative wines like Dom Pérignon are less expressive in their youth than bigger, richer wines like Bollinger or Krug. Recent tastings of DP with different foods, from Italian to Thai, French to Indian, revealed the 1976 and 1978 DP Œnothèque wines to be good all-rounders; here you have the extra freshness that comes from late disgorgement.

Young vintage champagne is far too tight to match easily with food, but
champagne with secondary and tertiarycharacteristics is umami-friendly

With Krug you might be looking at the 1990 or older. Lanson, because it doesn’t undergo the malolactic, stays young for longer, though this doesn’t necessarily mean it lives longer.

Late-disgorged wines like DP’s Œnothèque or Bollinger’s RD age differently to wines disgorged at the standard time, of course: they have extra freshness, but will improve in bottle for less time once disgorged. They always taste different, with a different balance of youth and depth, and this gives them huge advantages with food. They’ve got those tertiary characteristics, but they have vim and vigour, too.

FUSION MATCHES

It’s difficult to be precise about what the equivalent might be among champagnes disgorged at the standard time: sometimes it might be a younger wine, sometimes an older one, depending on the year. And generally, among most vintage champagnes from good houses, one would be looking at vintages from the 1980s or before to go with fusion food.

Rosé champagne is not made to live as long, but has extra weight. Can the extra weight of rosé be a substitute for bottle age? Not really. You still need those secondary and tertiary flavours, the brioche and caramel, tobacco and cherry that appear with maturity, plus the honey and mushrooms, coffee and toast that come with age. But what the extra weight of rosé can do is move the weight of food up a notch or two: to red meat, extra creaminess, or more spice.

But even here, it’s difficult to generalise: each wine, each vintage, is an individual. It is this detail that is the delight of matching food with old vintage champagne: it makes it more difficult, but more satisfying.

These are wines that will not work in every restaurant, however – and the problem is not the wine or the food, but the customers.

TAKING A RISK

Consumers do not necessarily understand old champagne. It tastes different and it has less fizz: Xavier Rousset of Texture says that he’s had glasses sent back because the customer said they were flat, and he’d only just opened the bottle. He’s found that old vintage works best with a large table; ‘you can discuss it with them, and warn them what it will be like, and without being patronising, say “Are you ready for it?” People are often happy to try a glass if they’re in a group. A bottle for two, if they don’t enjoy it, is a lot, but people are more willing to experiment in a larger number, and the mood is upbeat.’ He warns against trying this with business lunches, however: ‘Diners are less likely to take risks’.

Old vintage works best with a large table –
people are more willing to experiment as a group

Specific wine dinners can also work, and give an opportunity to explain the wine. They also have the advantage that you know the budget in advance, and so do they: because the other point to watch out for is that old friend, cost.

Every sommelier says the same thing: you need to finish the bottle the same day, ideally. You can keep it on ice in the fridge for a couple of days at the most, but you can’t have it hanging around longer than that.

And you have to be able to price it properly. When Rousset was at Le Manoir, he found that £20 was the most that people would pay for a glass, and six times that for a bottle that probably cost £70-100 is not going to keep the bean-counters happy. As another leading sommelier says on the subject: ‘It’s not the easiest thing to do, but when it works, it’s beautiful.’

The beautiful game: matches with mature Dom Pérignon
At a recent tasting, a number of high-profile chefs came together to cook dishes to match with various vintages of Dom Pérignon Œnothèque and Rosé. A dish of crab tortellini cooked by Angela Hartnett went well with both Dom Pérignon Rosé 1998 and 1988 Œnothèque; the freshness of the wines matching the fennel, tarragon, basil and chervil in the dish. Sweetbreads skewered on cinnamon sticks and deglazed with vin jaune and butter, prepared by Andrew Fairlie, matched the 1998 Rosé again but also the 1976 Œnothèque. The dish needed creaminess in the wine, and not too much acidity. 1998 Rosé was fabulous with Atul Kochhar’s deep-fried John Dory with garlic and cumin peas, emphasising those earthy flavours, but Andrew Fairlie’s twice-cooked Anjou squab (roasted breast, confit legs) with mixed spices and mango purée needed a 1978 Rosé in magnum. The Pinot Noir suited the pigeon perfectly: it was light and silky. David Thompson’s Thai braised pork belly with peanuts – a robust dish with notes of cassia, white pepper, anise and slight bitterness in the Thai peanuts – needed the richness and breadth of 1976 and 1978 Œnothèque, while John Campbell’s smoked rump of veal needed more bottle age: the power of 1969 Œnothèque, to be precise.

The beautiful game: matches with mature Dom Pérignon

At a recent tasting, a number of high-profile chefs came together to cook dishes to match with various vintages of Dom Pérignon Œnothèque and Rosé.

A dish of crab tortellini cooked by Angela Hartnett went well with both Dom Pérignon Rosé 1998 and 1988 Œnothèque; the freshness of the wines matching the fennel, tarragon, basil and chervil in the dish.

Sweetbreads skewered on cinnamon sticks and deglazed with vin jaune and butter, prepared by Andrew Fairlie, matched the 1998 Rosé again but also the 1976 Œnothèque. The dish needed creaminess in the wine, and not too much acidity.

1998 Rosé was fabulous with Atul Kochhar’s deep-fried John Dory with garlic and cumin peas, emphasising those earthy flavours, but Andrew Fairlie’s twice-cooked Anjou squab (roasted breast, confit legs) with mixed spices and mango purée needed a 1978 Rosé in magnum. The Pinot Noir suited the pigeon perfectly: it was light and silky.

David Thompson’s Thai braised pork belly with peanuts – a robust dish with notes of cassia, white pepper, anise and slight bitterness in the Thai peanuts – needed the richness and breadth of 1976 and 1978 Œnothèque, while John Campbell’s smoked rump of veal needed more bottle age: the power of 1969 Œnothèque, to be precise.

FROM THE FLOOR Sarment’s Christopher Delalonde picks out his food matches for older vintage champagne:
SALON 1971 with langoustine tails roasted with Parmesan gnocchi, truffle butter and truffles. ‘What amazed me is the freshness of the champagne with its citrus, mineral palate, but also its truffley, earthy middle-palate.’ BOLLINGER RD 1983 with pan-fried scallops and lightly curried celeriac purée. ‘The meatiness of the wine and its fresh acidity cut through the texture of the scallops and balanced the heat of the curry flavours.’ CRISTAL 1976 with tarte fine of free-range chicken with sweetcorn sauce and ceps. ‘This match is all about weight and ripeness. The mushroom flavours and the very fine bubbles lift the sweetness of the corn and chicken/pastry combination.’

FROM THE FLOOR

Sarment’s Christopher Delalonde picks out his food matches for older vintage champagne:

SALON 1971 with langoustine tails roasted with Parmesan gnocchi, truffle butter and truffles. ‘What amazed me is the freshness of the champagne with its citrus, mineral palate, but also its truffley, earthy middle-palate.’

BOLLINGER RD 1983 with pan-fried scallops and lightly curried celeriac purée. ‘The meatiness of the wine and its fresh acidity cut through the texture of the scallops and balanced the heat of the curry flavours.’

CRISTAL 1976 with tarte fine of free-range chicken with sweetcorn sauce and ceps. ‘This match is all about weight and ripeness. The mushroom flavours and the very fine bubbles lift the sweetness of the corn and chicken/pastry combination.’

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine - January / February 2010