Where The Walls Talk: Secrets Of Champagne's Closed Vineyards
Most words sound better in French, and clos is no exception. It broadly translates to "closed" (pronounced klo, like Chloé), but its meaning shifts depending on context; it can also mean enclosed, shut, or fenced off. Clos isn't an everyday word in French (fermé is more common), but in wine, a clos refers to a walled vineyard.
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France has many clos vineyards, but the walls don’t necessarily yield superior grapes - plenty of unremarkable champagne hails from clos vineyards. Ultimately, it is the champagne from within the walls, that must do the talking. The vines, the soil, the position of the plot, the expertise of the house, the kindness of the weather in any given year, and a hundred other factors all affect the quality of the output.
But when the grapes in these vineyards are exceptional year after year, a Champagne clos can become legendary, enough so that a vigneron might choose to make a single champagne from that defined plot, rather than mixing it with grapes from other vineyards and from other vintages, as is often the case. It’s then that the vineyard’s walls add exclusivity and prestige. But these champagne’s also offer something more - a sense of place, a deep-rooted history that comes from the knowing exactly where the vines are and exactly when they were harvested.
In Champagne, these vineyards are as much about their stories as they are about their wines.
Krug: King of the Champagne Clos?
Clos du Mesnil
Krug's Clos du Mesnil is arguably one of the best-known and revered champagnes in the world today. In the early 1970s, fifth-generation Krug brothers Rémi and Henri Krug purchased six hectares of vines across 15 plots around the Chardonnay village of Mesnil-sur-Oger. Plots in such celebrated Champagne country seldom come up for sale, and the Krug brothers moved quickly to secure the them, committing to the purchase in just a single telephone call. Their purchase included what was then Clos Tarin, a walled vineyard of just 1.85 acres in the heart of the village. The previous owner, Jules Tarin, had previously sold the grapes from the vineyard to Salon for their Cuvée S.
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It's undoubtedly House Krug and it’s savvy growing, production and marketing of the Clos du Mesnil that have made the vineyard famous today. However, it was two relatively unknown men - Claude Jannin and Pierre Dehée Metoen who probably cemented the foundations of this extraordinary champagne when they built the wall around the Clos du Mesnil in 1698. Little is known about Claude or Pierre, but it's a reasonable assumption that both men were probably local and involved in viticulture. What's lost is their reasoning for walling the plot. Was it potential they saw more than 270 years ago, prompting them to wall the parcel of land? Even then, were the grapes extraordinary enough to merit a wall to separate and distinguish them from other vineyards? Or did they simply want to experiment or protect the vines from the elements? Nobody knows. It was Claude's son, Gaspard, who planted the first vines in the plot. The three men effectively added their signature to the vineyard, etching into the wall: "In the year 1698, this wall was built by Claude Jannin and Pierre Dehée Metoen, and in the same year, the vines were planted by Gaspard Jannin, son of Claude."
Low production and high quality naturally lend themselves to exclusivity, but in this case, the vineyard wall also makes Clos du Mesnil figuratively and literally (a single bottle will start well into the four figures) out of reach for the masses. The grapes are exceptional, but the wall apparently also helps to create a microclimate by protecting them from harsh weather. The minerality of the soil, the vineyard's aspect, and, ultimately - House Krug's savoir-faire - in and outside of the vineyard - have allowed them to take the Clos du Mesnil stratospheric since they bought it, and it’s today one of the most revered champagnes in the world.
Clos d'Ambonnay
In the 1980s, spurred by the success of their chardonnay clos, Remi and Henri looked for a way to pay homage to Pinot Noir using the same formula: a champagne created from one variety of grape - this time Pinot Noir - from a single vineyard in a single year.
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Good things come to those who wait. In 1991 after a seven-year search, the brothers discovered the 0.68 hectare Clos d'Ambonnay on the edge of the Pinot Noir village of Ambonnay. The origins of the clos go back more than two hundred years, with the first walls going up around the vineyard in around 1766, when France still had Kings and Versailles was the centre of Court life. Much of the clos’ early history is unrecorded, but as recently as the 1970s, what's today one of champagne's most precious vineyards was probably the private garden of the Petitjean family, who later sold their champagne business to Charles Heidsek.
The small plot could only ever produce enough grapes to make a few thousand bottles of champagne in any given year, and even then, not every year would the grapes make the grade.
But the possibility that in some years, the stars (or the sun and the rains and the earth) would align and the Clos d'Ambonnay grapes would be good enough to make some of the finest champagne in the world was all House Krug needed. The vineyard was secured in 1991, and the company turned its attention to tending the vines, and they managed to buy the vineyard in 1994. The 1995 vintage launched in 2007 to great fanfare - Clos d'Ambonnay was an immediate success. There have been just five other vintages produced, the last being the 2006 vintage, released in 2019.
Make It A Double: Bollinger’s Two Clos
Les Vieilles Vignes Françaises is an ode to one of Champagne’s Grand Dames—Lily Bollinger. She commissioned the champagne to mark her 70th birthday. Today, the champagne is made only using Pinot Noir grapes from two of Bollinger’s walled vineyards: Clos des Chaudes Terres and Clos St. Jacques. Both vineyards are exceptionally small—totalling just 31 acres (12.5 hectares)—with Clos des Chaudes Terres sitting in what is essentially the back garden of the Bollinger Château.
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Most champagne vineyards, Bollinger’s included, feature horizontally trained vines grown in evenly spaced, pristine rows. The Vieilles Vignes Françaises clos vineyards are quite the opposite: riotous and unkempt. The distinction is deliberate; the vines are grown ‘en foule’ (meaning in a crowd). The vines are so dense that they cannot be worked with modern machinery—everything must be done by hand.
Bollinger’s Les Vieilles Vignes Françaises clos are not only remarkable because the vines are grown en foule. The vines within these two clos are the only champagne vines to have survived the phylloxera invasion, which wiped out most of Europe’s vineyards in the early 1900s. The invasion ultimately required a near-complete replanting of all European vines onto American rootstock, which is resistant to phylloxera. (To make European vines resistant to phylloxera, the vine root (rootstock) is usually American. The upper part of the vine, which in France is native to Europe (this part fruits and is known as the scion), is grafted onto the American rootstock. Over time, the top and bottom parts of the plant fuse into a singular fruiting vine resistant to the parasite).
More vineyards were once planted en foule before the phylloxera outbreak, with vineyard rows being a more recent adaptation to support vine grafting and facilitate vineyard work. The two Bollinger clos are so densely planted that a draft horse is still used for the heavy work, rather than mechanical machinery.
No one knows why Clos des Chaudes Terres and Clos St. Jacques have remained resistant to phylloxera. The walls are thought to help keep the parasite out, but other clos vineyards have succumbed, making their apparent resistance something of a mystery. (A third walled vineyard that used to produce grapes for the cuvée has already been lost). In theory, phylloxera could invade the two remaining Vieilles Vignes Françaises vineyards at any time, wiping out the existing vines. Therefore, every vintage produced from these vineyards is almost an anomaly, making it all the more special because it could, in theory, be the last vintage ever produced.
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Some Champagne clos, like Krug’s, are icons because they produce exceptional but singular wines: one type of grape, grown and harvested in one year, from one vineyard. But Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises is unique in a different way. The two Bollinger clos defy time against all odds, preserving a traditional way of growing on native French vines, all while yielding something extraordinary.
The cuvée was first introduced in 1969. A formidable grande dame of Champagne, Lily Bollinger became president of Bollinger in 1941 after her husband’s death. She remained president until 1971 when her nephews took over, but her legacy endures to this day. She commemorated her 70th birthday with the launch of Vieilles Vignes Françaises. The champagne is apparently complex, rich on the palate, and intensely coloured, and it was an instant sensation. It has remained a coveted rarity ever since.
The Legacy of the Champange Clos
Traditions, harvests, expertise, experiments, and the whims of sun, wind, and rain shape the champagne. But so do the stories: a vintner and his son who built a wall, a cuvée to celebrate a milestone birthday, going against the grain to make a one-vineyard champagne, a fortuitous phone call to secure a legendary plot of land. The world’s most famous clos vineyards are about more than just vines and grapes and the champagne - they put stories, history and legacy into a bottle.
There are too many wonderful quotes about champagne to have a favourite, but Lily Bollinger must nearly have found it when she said, "I drink Champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise, I never touch it-unless I'm thirsty."