Piollot: The Grower Champagne You've Never Heard Of
You've Never Heard of This Champagne. That's the Point.
While the big houses spend millions on marketing, a handful of family growers in Champagne quietly make some of the most interesting bottles in the region. Piollot is one of them.
The Piollot family has been growing vines in the Côte des Bar since the 19th century, five generations on the same land. Today Roland, his wife Dominique, and their daughter Jeanne farm 8.5 hectares organically and biodynamically, producing small-batch champagnes that are the opposite of everything you associate with big-brand bubbles.
A vineyard built from the best vines
The Val Colas Robin vineyard was planted in 1955 by Roland's father Robert using a traditional method called sélection massale. Instead of buying vines from a nursery, where every plant is an identical copy of the same vine, Robert walked his vineyards, identified the individual plants producing the best fruit year after year, and took cuttings from those specific vines to plant the new plot. Every vine in the Colas Robin parcel descends from a plant that was chosen because it was exceptional. The result is a vineyard with natural genetic diversity, where each vine contributes something slightly different to the final wine.
Why old vines matter
Those vines are now nearly 70 years old, and age changes everything about how a vine behaves. Young vines are vigorous: they produce lots of grapes, but the flavour is spread thin. As vines age, they naturally slow down and produce fewer and fewer bunches. Less fruit might sound like a bad thing, but it means the vine can concentrate all of its energy into a smaller number of grapes, resulting in juice that is far more intense and flavourful.
Old vines also develop root systems that reach deep underground, accessing water and minerals from different layers of soil and rock that younger vines simply cannot reach. That depth is what gives old-vine wines their extra complexity, a richness and mineral quality you just don't get from younger plantings.
A grape that almost nobody grows
The Colas Robin cuvée is made from 100% Pinot Blanc, a grape that accounts for less than 1% of all champagne production. It is a genuine rarity, not as a novelty, but as a deliberate choice by a family who have always farmed differently from their neighbours.
It is also a Brut Nature, meaning absolutely no sugar has been added at any stage. Most champagnes have sugar added after ageing to round out the flavour and smooth any rough edges. Brut Nature skips that entirely, so what you are tasting is the pure expression of the grape, the soil, and the winemaking. It takes serious confidence in your fruit quality to make a champagne this way, because there is nothing to hide behind.
A decade in the making
The wine spends five years resting on its lees, the spent yeast cells left over from fermentation, which slowly break down and release flavours of brioche, toasted nuts, and cream. That is already far longer than most champagnes, which typically spend 15 months to three years. The 2014 vintage has now been ageing for over a decade. The result is a champagne of real depth: stone fruit, marzipan, honey, and a long mineral finish that keeps evolving in the glass.
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Only 4,000 bottles are made each year. To put that in perspective, Moët & Chandon produces around 30 million. Gault & Millau, one of France's most respected food and wine authorities, scored it 94 out of 100, the same score they give to Dom Pérignon Vintage 2013. |
You have probably never heard of Piollot. That is exactly why it is worth paying attention to.
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Champagne Piollot Cuvée Colas Robin Brut Nature 2014 £39.95
100% Pinot Blanc. Brut Nature. 10 years aged.
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