Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Blanc de Blancs 2002 Champagne 75cl

Perrier-Jouet History

The Perrier-Jouët brand was created with the marriage of Pierre-Nicolas Perrier, the uncle of Joseph Perrier, and Adèle Jouët in 1811. Pierre-Nicolas soon created a healthy export demand for his product but it was his son, Charles Perrier, who did most to build up the reputation of this Champagne – supplying it to the courts of Napoleon III, King Leopold of the Belgians and Queen Victoria. He built Chateau Perrier opposite Maison Perrier-Jouët in the Avenue de Champagne, which is used today as the local library and museum.

Perrier-Jouët has always been light, elegant and true-brut in style, with heaps of fruit-flavour. The Chardonnay content of Perrier-Jouët champagnes is often thought to be considerably higher than it actually is, because Perrier-Jouët's vineyards in Cramant yield such dominant fruit. Perrier-Jouët was the first Champagne house to display the year of the vintage on its bottles and they also decided that if, as sometimes happens, the harvests do not meet its exacting quality standards, they would not compromise and thus would abandon production and not release a vintage champagne for that year.

Hervé Deschamps became the seventh Perrier-Jouët Cellar Master in 1993. The ten previous years he spent at his predecessor's side helped him master the subtleties of the house style and its unique floral tonality. As a guardian of this knowledge, he turns each cuvée into a unique champagne that expresses all the characteristic elegance and finesse of the house of Perrier-Jouët. "I throw myself into each composition with one combined effort, like the creative flow of an artist, at that moment when intuition, sensitivity and skill somehow inexplicably come together."

Perrier-Jouët’s prestige cuvée Belle Époque was the idea of a previous owner’s associate, Pierre Ernst. He found a dusty old bottle in a cupboard at Perrier-Jouët: the enamel decorated anemones bottle signed by Emile Galle, the great art nouveau glassmaker, who designed it in 1902. Galle had created the design just two years before his death to evoke the Gay Nineties and Ernst thought it would make an ideal bottle to hold a special cuvée. The first vintage to be released in this bottle was 1964, launched in 1969, and it was sold exclusively through Maxim's and Fauchon, the elite grocery store. In the early 1980s, Belle Époque Rosé was launched with the 1976 vintage.

The house owns 27 hectares of Grand Cru plots in Cramant. The two that are most precious to the House are Bourons Leroy and Bourons du Midi, as both plots contain rare pockets of pure chalk soil. Both combine to create the rare cuvée Belle Époque Blanc de Blancs which represents just one percent of the total Belle Époque production. Deschamps has previously commented: “A unique cuvée, Belle Époque Blanc de Blancs reveals the purity and authenticity of the Perrier-Jouët terroir.”