Gaspard Brochet
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From the first release bearing his name in 2020, Gaspard Brochet has captured the palates and eyes of Champagne collectors lucky enough to come across a bottle. True to the family legacy, Gaspard's wines are wildly complex, textural and full of character. The vineyards in Ecueil and Villers-Aux-Nœuds generate deep-flavored, smoky aromatics, and with Gaspard's preference to harvest the grapes when fully ripe, the wines are expressive and soft without any need for dosage.
Gaspard grew up in wine but worked in graphic design before returning home in 2013. In 2017 he started his own label and in 2019 he took over the full 3.18 ha of the family estate once known as Vincent Brochet. In 2022, all of the wines will be under the Gaspard label.; in the future, Gaspard will include the historic name of the family house, Domaine les Croix on the label; this will appear for the first time with the 2024 release of his Coteaux Champenois.
Although he will completely change the labels, the history of champagne is still going to be an important part of production. One of his vineyards has never been farmed with fertilizers or herbicides. Some of the methods in the vineyard and cellar are completely hands off, something that naturally came from early viticulture in Champagne due to the lack of modern equipment and viticulture tools. When you visit, you truly feel a connection to Champagne and specifically the village of Eceuil. When you taste the wines, they are unlike any champagne you have tasted before. Full of length, depth and precision and a quality that runs throughout the range that makes each wine compelling and able to be recognized as his.
It seems that good winemaking runs in the family; Emmanuel Brochet is his uncle. This makes sense when you learn about the vineyard holdings, spread throughout Ecueil, Sacy, and Villers aux Nœuds. All of the vines are plowed in the winter, have natural grasses and vegetation, and he makes his own fertilizer out of different fungi and natural materials to promote microbial life during the dormant months.
Viticulture and Vinification
Gaspard's method is actually quite simple. His focus is to create an expression of the personality of each terroir, vintage, and varietal. He focuses on single vineyard , single vintage, and varietal bottlings. The grapes are picked at a higher maturity to avoid any need for sugar, the wines spend about 10 months in barrel for vinification. Everything in the cellar is done by gravity and never with pump. The wines are not racked, but stirred about 15-25 times depending on the cuvee. The wines are aged for 24 months then hand riddled in the cellar for about 8 weeks. He Is focused on no-addition winemaking. Fermentation takes place in barrels of various kinds, some from Germany, Burgundy, and family barrels.
With the 2024 release focused on the 2021 vintage, quantities are unfortunately small due to extreme loss from disease pressure throughout the vineyards. As a result, Gaspard created new cuvées and new labels - the animals will sit this year out - as the wines are blended from the best quality grapes of all the vineyard plots within Ecueil and Sacy.
