2007 Rene Geoffroy Empreinte

The 2007 Brut Empreinte is drop-dead gorgeous. Rich, layered, intense and beautiful, the 2007 impresses for its texture and volume. Nothing at all sticks out in a Champagne endowed with superb richness and layer after layer of flavor. Dried flowers, hazelnuts and spices add complexity on the finish, but the 2007 is a wine of texture above all else. This is a great showing. The Empreinte is 76% Pinot Noir, 13% Chardonnay and 11% Pinot Meunier, mostly done in large neutral oak. This bottle was disgorged in May 2013. Dosage was 10 grams/liter.

(76% pinot noir, 13% chardonnay and 11% pinot meunier; made from fruit grown in Cumieres; aged for 60 months on its lees and disgorged in May of 2013): Light yellow. Smoky, intensely perfumed aromas of pear skin, strawberry, melon and fresh flowers. Toasty and precise on the palate, offering vibrant orchard fruit and blood orange flavors with a touch of bitter herbs. The floral note clings nicely on the finish, which shows excellent clarity and energy. This sexy Champagne has a dosage of 10 g/l but there's no way that I'd have guessed it.

The Geoffroy 2007 Empreinte Premier Cru Brut mingles nearly equal parts Chardonnay and Meunier with three-quarters Pinot, and is matured in older barrels. Alkaline and saline, with scents and mouthwatering flavors of oyster liquor, and garlanded with iris and violets, this bright, palpably extract-rich cuvée evokes cassis and huckleberry as well as fresh apple, finishing with a persistent and invigorating brightness as well as with at once adamant and mouthwatering mineral manifestations, but in no way betraying its ten grams of residual sugar. Feel free to follow it for several years. (A fundamentally bright 2004 vintage extra brut, also of just two grams residual sugar and tasted alongside, was a bit too resinous and dried out from the effects of used barriques to more than modestly recommend.) Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, who recently moved from Cumieres two villages over into a new, gravity-fed cellar in Ay, deserves kudos for having staged or otherwise facilitated for the benefit of wine journalists and tradespeople numerous blind re-enactments of dosage trials, which inter alia serve to combat such wrongheaded beliefs as that sense of sweetness linearly tracks residual sugar or that differences in residual sugar cash out, when at all, solely in terms of perceived sweetness. Since 2008, incidentally, Geoffroy has vinified a parcel he planted mixed with Arbanne and Petit Meslier as well as the familiar trio of cépage, but thus far he has not deemed any wine from that plot ready for release.