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| Wine & Spirits |
Magnum Dreams
Tara Weingarten
07/01/2004
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Phil Ramey, a Los Angeles-based photographer and
collector of aged Champagnes, has watched the value of his cellar skyrocket.
“Five years ago, a magnum of 1961 Krug would have sold for around $1,800,” he
says. “Now you’d pay well over $3,000 for a bottle with known provenance, that
is, if you could even find it.”
Consensus among the vast majority of admirers
is that Krug, with its round, full, yeasty flavor, represents the pinnacle
of Champagne. “It is a Champagne that tells you, ‘I am here,’” says the
not-at-all-biased Remi Krug, the fifth generation scion of his family’s Reims,
France-based house. “It is the definition of complex.” Krug’s nonvintage bubbly
is the most expensive nonvintage Champagne on the market, retailing for about
$110 per bottle. Its vintage Champagnes start at $195, a relative bargain for
the outstanding quality.
The Champagne region of France is blessed with
nearly 4,000 sparkling wine producers—most of them infinitesimally small—yet
fewer than 100 Champagne brands are imported into the United States. Of those
familiar on our shores, just 16 are designated as Grande Marque houses. The
powerhouse companies of the Grande Marque–Perrier Jouët, Moët & Chandon,
Bollinger and Veuve Clicquot among them–dominate the market in this country
because of their size, collectively exporting several million cases each year.
The tragedy is that more than 90 percent of Champagne’s annual export to the
United States is in nonvintage cuvées, the inexpensive blends of inferior years.
Cellar-worthy Champagne is bottled with a vintage-dated label. The trick to
building a valuable collection lies in selecting the bottlings that Champagne
enthusiasts most covet. “Champagne gets more fascinating, more complex as it
ages,” says Serena Sutcliffe, head of Sotheby’s wine department. “At auction, we
occasionally see prices go mad when certain older vintages of Krug, Dom Pérignon
or Bollinger come up.”
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