Bollinger's 2016 Vieilles Vignes Françaises

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It’s a great pleasure to offer the latest, 2016, vintage of Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises – a bona fide icon of Champagne, one of the truly great wines of any region, and as Antonio Galloni puts it; a ‘once in a lifetime treat for most mortals’. While Bollinger remain tight-lipped on production, Antonio Galloni shared that there were fewer than 1000 bottles of the 2013 vintage – clubs don’t come any more exclusive than this.
 
William Kelley – someone who very few on this planet could claim have tasted a greater depth and breadth of the world’s most illustrious wines – professes VVF to be ‘one of my favourite wines, but one I drink all too seldom given its tiny production’, and ‘one of the most powerful, intensely flavoured wines produced in the region’. Antonio Galloni describes the style as somewhere between Champagne and wine, declaring that ‘rather it is an extraordinary and frankly addicting concoction all its own’.
 
Since 2004, and the historic third plot of VVF in Bouzy succumbing to phylloxera, Vieilles Vignes Françaises has been produced from just two tiny clos in the Grand Cru village of Aÿ. The 0.36 hectares combined (small holdings, even by Grand Cru Burgundy standards) are some of the only vines in France to have survived ungrafted through the early 20th centuries phylloxera outbreak, and since 1970 have been selected by Bollinger to pioneer the single-terroir expressions we see in Champagne’s most desired wines today.