LES BELLES VOYES
2015 Blanc de Blancs Brut Grand Cru Oger Champagne Franck Bonville
| Grapes | Chardonnay |
| Colour | White |
| Origin | France, Champagne |
| Village | Oger |
| Classification | Grand Cru |
| ABV | 12.5% |
100% Chardonnay from a single 0.8-ha vineyard planted at the top of Oger, close to the border of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. Their only cuvée vinified with any oak. Fermented in 55 oak barrels – each year they include five new barrels (ie 10% are new) and the rest range between one and eight years old. Disgorged February 2023. Dosage 5 g/l.
A startling contrast to their other wines. The nose is spice and nuts, cloves, allspice and aniseed. The wine is darkly savoury, almost growling. Rye-seed bread, toasted chia. Strikingly unusual with a long, long, brass-gong tang. Broad and powerful but precise and chiselled. Pickled lemon and pickled ginger. Complex, bold, and so gastronomic! It feels like I’m crunching on toasted seeds and chewing lemons. Just wonderful. Drinking range: 2024 - 2033 Rating: 18 Tamlyn Currin - www.JancisRobinson.com (May 2024)
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*Case price discount: Mix any 12 bottles of wine (or 9 litre equivalent) or 6 bottles of Champagne, Spirits, Sweet Wine or Fortified (4.5 litres) to get the discounted 'case price' for each bottle.
This has aromas of crushed almond, honeycomb, lemon peel and chalk, plus walnut and brioche. Rich and tasty on the palate with soft bubbles. Lots of ripe fruit and brioche. Flavourful. Drink now or hold. Rating: 94 James Suckling, www.jamessuckling.com (Sept 2024)
Disgorged with a dosage of five grams per liter in April 2023, the 2015 Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Les Belles Voyes comes from the estate’s oldest vines in the village of Oger. It delivers a smoky, deep bouquet with aromas of flowers, lemon oil, ripe orchard fruit and pastry combined with a slightly reductive character. Mineral and vinous, the Champagne on the palate is medium to full-bodied with a mouthwatering, phenolic and chalk-driven finish. It promises graceful aging over the forthcoming five to eight years. Drinking range: 2023 - 2040 Rating: 95 Yohan Castaing, www.robertparker.com (Nov 2023)
The 2015 Extra Brut Les Belles Voyes Grand Cru is a blanc de blancs picked in Oger and vinified in oak. This accounts for the immediate creaminess on the nose which comes with an overtone of soy and white miso. The golden wine is brisk and has lively bubbles and shows proper tension, an achievement in 2015. There is a lovely chalky backdrop and immense, bright freshness and no overt oak flavor. The lip-smacking lemony finish is lasting, so clean and super-chalky - just what you want from a blanc de blancs. Dosage is 5gr/L. Disgorged: February, 2023. Drinking range: 2023 - 2035 Rating: 94 Anne Krebiehl MW, Vinous.com (Oct 2023)
Champagne Franck Bonville
Domaine Franck Bonville has around 15 hectares of vines in 77 parcels of vines spread across three Grand Cru Côte des Blancs villages, Avize (9ha), Oger (4.5ha) and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger (.5ha). Already certified Haute Valeur Environmentale, the vineyards are gradually being converted to fully organic viticulture.
The origins of the domaine go back to Alfred Bonville, who from around 1900 bought up parcels of land in the years following phylloxera, always within reach by horse of his home in Oger. Despite the wars he continued to invest after the birth of his son Franck, and in 1937 they bought a house in Avize complete with press and barrel cellar. From the end of the war, Franck began to sell Champagnes under his own name.
Franck's son Gilles and his wife Ingrid continued the work, replacing the old casks with stainless steel for a more precise vinification. Their son Olivier trained as an oenologist and joined the domaine in 1996 after working in Germany and Corsica. Olivier has focused his attention on sustainable viticulture and purity of expression, so that the wines offer 'the aromatic complexity and elegance of Chardonnay', as well as 'the authenticity of the Cote des Blancs terroir and the minerality of the chalky sub-soil'. All the wines go through malolactic fermentation, and apart from the barrel-aged Belles Voyes cuvée, all are made in stainless steel.
Now joined by his son-in-law, Ferdinand Ruelle-Dudel, Olivier is free to concentrate on the vineyards and wine-making, and this estate, which has been on an upward quality trajectory for some years, is rapidly becoming one of the reference points of the Côte des Blancs.
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