2008 H. Blin Champagne Millesime Brut 750 ml

10-Year-Old Champagne, Knockout Vintage

The savvy Champagne collector knows to have a bright non-vintage sparkler at the ready at all times, and a bubbly like the 2008 H. Blin Champagne Millésime Brut stashed with the future in mind. Only produced in stellar vintages, this Wine Spectator 94-pointer hails from Vincelles, a village known as “le Petit Äy” for the essential role it plays in the Pinot Meunier-rich Vallée de la Marne. Six years on the lees — a period that goes way beyond the minimum for vintage Champagne — imbue the wine with the complex toasty and nutty characteristics that define great vintage Champagne. The 2008 season was rated 5/5 by Decanter, which called it “one of the best two vintages of this decade.” At this price, a bubbly-stunner like this with a decade of age and the legs to go longer deserves a spot in your cellar.

In Champagne, nothing is more consequential or controversial than village grape-growing politics: The prices a village can charge for its fruit are determined where the locality sits on the hierarchical Échelle des Crus, and one of the region’s defining historical events — the infamous Champagne riots of 1911 — was precipitated by on region’s exclusion from the Champagne AOC.

H. Blin, in the tiny riverside village of Vincelles, was founded after a similar snub. In 1947, amid the economic turmoil of post-WWII France, the grape growers of Vincelles found themselves excluded from the trade group that provided fruit to the grandes marques of Champagne — a blow that could have been fatal to the town’s economy. But Henri Blin seized upon the moment, rallying 28 spurned local growers and winemakers together to purchase a press house of their own. Out of that potentially disastrous time, H. Blin was born.

Now headed by Henri’s grandson Simon, H. Blin incorporates the work of 110 Vincelles winemakers and growers whose expertise reaches back eight generations. The village is located on the Marne’s rive droite, where the vineyards slope down toward the river and give the vines a coveted southern exposure. Only produced in stellar vintages, the Millésime consists of equal parts Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay that are rested for a staggering six years on the lees. Now with another several years under its belt, the 2008 H. Blin Champagne Millésime Brut is bursting with the hard-won character and complexity that makes vintage Champagne truly unique. A bubbly of this pedigree — at this price — is not to be missed.

- Wine Access Wine Team