NV Henri Champliau Authentique Brut Cremant de Bourgogne France 750 ml

Champliau’s Brut is fresh off a 96-point score at Decanter’s World Wine Awards—the highest scoring Crémant in the history of the competition. This is a bubbly that belongs in the upper echelon of this category. It comes from one of the most important Crémant de Bourgogne producers to know, and it has become one of our best-selling wines.

From a family-owned winery in Burgundy’s Côte Chalonnaise region, Henri Champliau is named for founder Alexandre Graffard’s grandfather. Graffard started his label in 2016 after discovering that the vineyards his grandfather had purchased around Mercurey produced grapes with acid levels closer to Champagne than to their still-wine cousins in Burgundy. Naturally, he decided to make traditional-method sparkling wine, and has been turning heads with his crémant ever since.

Graffard is obsessive about quality: Even though all the estate’s grapes are hand-harvested in order to ensure that the quality of his Brut always far exceeds its price, he still rejects almost two-thirds of them.

For his Crémant de Bourgogne, he oversees the meticulous vinification of multiple lots of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, all of which are gently pressed, fermented in bottle, and undergo 15 months of aging sur lie—painstaking processes that are nearly identical to those undertaken in Champagne. Pinot Noir was his grandfather’s favorite grape, so there is always an especially high percentage (85%) of it in this Brut, paying homage to the original Henri Champliau.