This past week I was told of someone who had the opportunity to acquire some “vintage” wines and they needed some advice. Let me make an attempt to clear up the confusion around the use of the term vintage.

Vintage, the year that is usually written on the bottle, is the year that the grapes were harvested – that’s it. The importance of vintage stems from the foundation belief that really great wine is made in the vineyard, so the right location, soil, weather conditions and micro-climate matter. Each year some of these components change, thus affecting the quality of the crop that makes the wine. In the past it was easy; perfect weather conditions equated to great growing conditions for the grapes and so they made amazing wines (a great vintage); the opposite was also suggested (bad vintage=bad wine), but that’s not true. It is said that great wine makers work much harder to make better wines when they have a bad vintage – they play the hand that they are dealt in the best way they can. These days technology in the industry is making it very difficult to make bad wine. Wine collectors, however, make a very big deal out of doing detailed research on ensuring that the wines they buy for long-term storage are from the very best vintages, as the industry values these wines based on the published vintage ratings for all the primary wine regions in the world.

Vintage Champagne – that’s another matter.

While most wines will have a date year (the vintage) on the bottle, most Champagnes do not. Champagne plays by its own rules and the majority sold are a blend of wines from many different years in order to create a consistent product every year. In exceptional years, a number of producers will consult each other and declare that year to be a “vintage” year. So while they will still go ahead and produce the “house” Champagne, they will also use grapes harvested from that vintage year to make a vintage Champagne. In other words, vintage Champagne is only made in the best years. To take it to another level, some producers have very special parcels of land where the soil and wine-growing conditions are exceptional, and so in those very good “vintage” years, they will make a very special bottling referred to as the Prestige cuvée or Tête de cuvée. Têtes de cuvée or Prestige Cuvées represent the pinnacle of Champagne, and are usually the most expensive cuvées sold by producers. These Champagnes are made from the finest vineyards (premier cru and grand cru) and only during the best vintage years. Grapes are often handpicked and sorted, ensuring the quality of the fruit. Moreover, prestige cuvées spend more time ageing, resulting in greater complexity and integration.

Once in a lifetime Veuve Clicquot Tasting

Recently we had the fantastic opportunity to taste, not one, not two, but three vintage Champagnes and more importantly two Tête de cuvée Champagnes, all produced by Veuve Clicquot. It might have been by chance that we already had a wine tasting organised when we found out that Geoffrey Bouilly Moët Hennessy, market manager Caribbean, was on The Rock. Moët Hennessy distributes a number of its brands locally through Wray & Nephew. Bouilly was kind enough to take us through the wines of Cloudy Bay, Terrazas de Los Andes and what I referred to as a “once in a lifetime Veuve Clicquot tasting”, never before experienced in Jamaica tasting two Veuve Clicquot prestige cuvées – La Grande Dame 1998, La Grande Dame Rosé 1998. The small gathering also sampled the 2004 Veuve Clicquot, the Veuve Clicquot Rosé and the world-famous yellow label Veuve Clicquot.

Now this was indeed a “vintage” tasting !

Christopher Reckord – Entrepreneur & Wine Enthusiast. Send your questions and comments to creckord@gmail.com. Instagram: @chrisreckord Twitter: @Reckord