Truth be told, we’ve wanted to offer Lilbert-Fils’ classic Blanc de Blancs from the moment SommSelect’s first email went out. After all, it’s one of the brightest stars in the grower Champagne firmament, and one of those rare Grand Cru Champagnes that’ll make you sit back and declare “they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
Covering just 3.5 hectares, the historic micro-estate of Lilbert is a masterful marriage of prime Côte des Blancs terroir and rigorous artisanal craft, so it’s a given that production here is vanishingly small, especially when said production is largely divvied out to an involved “cult” following the world over. Crammed with Chardonnay-on-chalk cut and overflowing with dynamic swells of ripe orchard fruit, this is an object lesson in the balance of power and precision, a top-flight bottling for not just Champagne drinkers but any lover of incisive, soil-transparent wines. Sighting Lilbert tends to be a bittersweet moment because while we know we’re in for a dynamite bottle, that experience is generally not shareable on a larger scale. Today it is—enjoy the magic of Lilbert while you can!
The rapid rise of grower Champagne—Champagne made by the people who grow the grapes, rather than by a large house who purchases fruit—over the past two decades may make it seem like a recent phenomenon. But the Lilberts are one of the few families who’ve followed the grower model for over a century. In 1907, they stopped selling off their fruit and instead bottled their own wine for sale, an extreme rarity at the time. I’d like to think that even back then they knew they had truly special raw material.
These days, Bertrand Lilbert heads the estate, but his octogenarian father George can still be found in the cellar, lending a helping hand. Maybe most remarkably, over the past 100+ years, the Lilberts resisted the pressure to expand and modernize. Today, they still farm 3.5 hectares of vines, they still riddle the entire production by hand, and they still disgorge each wine manually. This is a family dedicated to the details, to perfecting the countless hands-on decisions that separate the merely good Champagne producers from the truly great. This is a wine to be placed next to the transparent masterworks of Sommselect favorites like Diebolt-Vallois and Pierre Péters.
Bertrand’s Blanc des Blancs is a single-bottle encapsulation of what makes this tiny corner of the wine world so special. It’s a blend of his holdings in Cramant, Chouilly, and Oiry—all three Grand Cru villages prized for the structured and steely Chardonnay they produce. His vineyards are perched atop a ridge outside Épernay, all facing east. That might sound familiar: it’s the same orientation as the Grand Crus in Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. But whereas a site like Montrachet is based on marl and limestone, here, the terroir is pure chalky limestone, perfect for imbuing Chardonnay with laser-like chisel and vigor.
Lilbert’s current “Blanc des Blancs” iteration utilizes the 2019 vintage as its base with a whopping 50% reserve wine blended in. Fermentation occurred entirely in stainless steel to maintain that chalky rigor and, after transferring into bottle, the champagne matured sur lie for ~30 months. It was disgorged in the Spring of 2022 with a three-gram dosage.
It pours a faint straw yellow with a very fine and delicate stream of bubbles. The nose sings with purity and precision: crushed chalk, limestone, pear skin, lemon zest, and hawthorne are joined by creamed apple, white almonds, just-ripe apricot, and a hint of ginger as it warms. The palate is racy, powerful, and vibrantly mineral with that judicious addition of sugar providing breadth to its orchard fruit flavors. It’s timeless and classic in its proportions, the sort of Grand Cru Blanc des Blancs all other bottlings can be measured against—one of those bottles that deserve a spot in every wine lover’s cellar!
