Bollinger - Grand Année Brut Champagne 2012

Bollinger’s prestige champagne is produced only when the harvest reaches a perfect balance.

La Grande Année is the embodiment of the carefully preserved traditional expertise of the Bollinger Champagne House. The wine is therefore exclusively vinified in small aged oak barrels. Champagne Bollinger has never abandoned this traditional craft method, which helps develop aromas of great finesse. After a prolonged ageing on its lees, even today every bottle of La Grande Année is riddled and disgorged by hand.

Disgorged in July 2019, Bollinger's 2012 Brut La Grande Année is showing well, offering up an incipiently complex bouquet of crisp yellow orchard fruit, fresh peach, orange oil, toasted walnuts and dried apricot that's still quite reserved with less than a year on cork. Full-bodied, deep and muscular, the 2012 is blockier and broader-shouldered than its 2008 predecessor, with a weightier and even more concentrated palate built around a bright spine of acidity, concluding with a chalky finish that carries appreciably dry extract. This isn't quite as elegant as the exquisite 2008, but it is a superb effort and obviously built to age.