What Is Non Vintage Champagne

Vintage champagne must be made 100 from the year indicated on the label.

What is non vintage champagne.

The goal is to produce a wine that is the same every year despite differences in grapes grown during different seasons due to differences such as rainfall hail sun temperature and more. By comparison non vintage champagne has a 15 month minimum. Vintage doesn t actually mean that the champagne is old just that it s made from grapes from one single year. What is non vintage champagne.

The champagne houses and growers provide a continuous house style through the blending of various vintages to create the yearly non vintage champagne. Non vintage or nv champagnes are made by blending some of these reserve wines with wines from the most recent harvest enabling subtle fine tuning to achieve a house style that reflects the philosophy of the producer. Whereas a good quality year will produce a typically fuller deeper champagne making it a vintage year. Three years is actually standard and some houses including laurent perrier age their non vintage champagne for even longer.

Every year producers hold back a proportion of wine to maintain their stocks of reserve wines. A wine that is labeled as vintage refers to a wine produced with varietals of a particular harvest year thus a non vintage wines is the opposite. Speaking to insider alongside francoise peretti founder of peretti communications and director of the champagne bureau uk le mailloux said what you probably have sitting on your shelf is a non vintage champagne which is a blend of several different harvests. Non vintage champagne on the other hand is a blend from harvests from different years.

Non vintage champagne is simply made from grapes from a variety of vintages or growth years.