WJ Drinks: Jérôme Prevost

WJ Drinks: Jérôme Prevost

Jérôme Prévost is a master of the Pinot Meunier. and we cannot be more proud to be the exclusive agent for his wines in Singapore and Malaysia. With just 2 hectares of wines, the wines are highly sought after world wide and sell out on a yearly basis. 

The new "ICON &" labels from Jérôme Prévost. The very first release from the Master of Pinot Meunier.

 

Jérôme Prévost

 

NV La Closerie (Jérôme Prévost) • Extra Brut Les Béguines LC 17
The NV Extra Brut Les Béguines LC 17 will be disgorged in October, and it has clearly turned out very well despite the challenging year, wafting from the glass with aromas of citrus oil, candle wax, white flowers, warm bread and spices, with only hints of the further complexity to come. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, lively and concentrated, with a ripe and enveloping core of fruit underpinned by racy acids.

- William Kelley 94

 

Jérôme inherited 2hectares of 40-year old meunier vines, all located within a single vineyard, Les Beguines located in the village of Gueux, from his grandmother, who had previously been renting it out. 

Jérôme was undecided between selling the grapes or making his own Champagne. It was his friend Anselme Selosse (from the King of Growers' Champagne, Jacques Selosse!) who convinced him to start producing his own wines. However, Jérôme  had no cellar at that time and Anselme offered to share a corner of his cellar in Avize! With that, Champagne La Closerie was born! Jérôme continued making his wines in Avize until 2003, when he finally attained his own cellar in Gueux. 

William Kelley - The Wine Advocate
Jérôme Prévost farms just over two hectares of old-vine Pinot Meunier in the village of Gueux, where the soils are a millefeuille of calcareous sands and clays. Working with a variety that's often sneered at, in a village few had heard of and with terroirs that are far removed from the clay-chalk stereotype that dominates discussion of Champagne, Prévost's tiny estate named La Closèrie nonetheless produces some of the most sought-after wines in Champagne.

Jérôme started making his wine in Anselme Selosse's cellar with the 1998 vintage, moving into his own facility in 2003. He harvests late—something that's essential if Pinot Meunier is to have character—and ferments his wine in barrel. Like Selosse, he doesn't top up his barrels while the vins clairs mature, so they often develop a light "voile" or veil of yeasts that lends subtle biologically aged characteristics of sotolon to his wines—though those qualities are much less pronounced than they are in Selosse's wines, it's worth noting. "I wouldn't do that if I were making still wines," he explains, "but I think of the second fermentation in bottle as being like a 'furnace' that enables one to remodel a wine. The base wine may be tired after a year in barrel without topping up, but the fermentation in bottle gives it new life." Dosage is minimal, and Prévost says that in principle he likes working in a non-dosé because "it makes me uncomfortable—it doesn't forgive any faults, there's nowhere to hide."

Powerful but fine-boned and immensely characterful, these are some of my favorite wines in the region, and I intend to make Prévost the subject of a more extensive essay in the near future. While they've become incredibly hard to find, I encourage readers to try them.

Les Beguines
The soils in this area, just west of Reims, are a mix of sand and calcareous elements, due to being a seabed around 45 million years ago, and they’re filled with a number of tiny marine fossils leftover from the Eocene Epoch period. This creates a highly specific terroir that’s distinctively different from other sub-regions of Champagne, and the chalky bedrock that appears prominently in some other areas of the Montagne de Reims is submerged about 20 meters underneath this sedimentary material. With Jerome's 'terroir wine' approach, the Pinot Meunier grape has possibly achieved their fullest potential under the hands of Jerome.

 

 

Viticulture:

  • Emphasis is firmly placed on the vineyards rather than the cellar;
  • Work done according to natural rhythms, without chemical pesticides or herbicides of any sort. 
  • Harvest accoding

Champagne la Closerie Les Beguines:

  • Wines are fermented and aged in 450- to 600-liter barrels with indigenous yeasts
  • dosage - 2g/l 
  • Bottled with a minimum amount of sulfur and without fining, filtering or cold-stabilization. 
  • The bottles are all disgorged at once, and spend a total of three years sur lattes before release.

Champagne la Closerie Les Beguines Fac Simile, Rose

  • 1st in the 2007 vintage. 
  • This was made with red wine from a small section of Les Béguines that is affected with court-noué, which stunts the flowering and concentrates the juice in the small quantity of grapes that remain. 
  • The rosé, called Fac-simile, is based on the same wine as the blanc yet the addition of red wine changes its character dramatically, making for a fascinating comparison.

The Collector's item!

  

 

 




 

 

 

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