Vieille Vignes Francaises

Vieilles Vignes Françaises comes from two walled Grand Cru plots at the top of Aÿ — Clos Saint-Jacques and Clos Chaudes-Terres — planted with vines that were never grafted onto American rootstock, the old way every vine in Champagne was grown before phylloxera arrived.

Until the mid-2000s there was a third source: a plot at Croix Rouge in Bouzy, the largest of the three. It fought off phylloxera for years, a battle Bollinger had been waging since 1998, before finally losing it in 2004. 2005 was the first vintage made purely from the two Aÿ plots, and the ungrafted vineyard shrank by more than a third overnight.

The vines that remain are still propagated the pre-phylloxera way, using provignage: a cane from an existing vine is bent down and buried until it roots into a new plant, rather than grafted onto rootstock at all. It's slow and labour-intensive, and it's exactly how Champagne was made before the epidemic changed the region forever.

The cuvée itself is younger than the vines. English wine writer Cyril Ray suggested the idea to Lily Bollinger in the 1960s, and the first vintage, picked the day before her 70th birthday, appeared in 1969. It has never been a big wine by volume — a generous year might yield around 5,000 bottles, a lean one barely 1,000, and the 2001 vintage was judged not good enough to release at all, its 2,964 bottles never sold. Across the board it comes to roughly 0.1% of the house's total production, and a recent vintage will run north of 500 euros a bottle.

It is also, by most serious accounts, worth every cent of that. Acker's John Kapon calls it one of Champagne's original cult wines, and more than one critic has called it the finest blanc de noirs Champagne ever produced, full stop. At a legendary tasting that gathered all 21 vintages in one room, the standout pours were the oldest ones — 1982 and 1973 — which hints at where this wine is actually headed: give it enough time in a cellar, and a serious case can be made that VVF ends up remembered as the best Champagne ever made, of any house, any style.