The Solar Vintage

Among the Dom Pérignon vintages of the last thirty years, 2002 is the sunny one. The season began with a spring frost and a late flowering, and then turned warm, dry and bright for the whole of the summer; August was hot and very dry, rain at the turn of September freshened the vines and pushed the final ripening, and the harvest came in under fine late-September skies. It was called the best Champagne year since 1996 almost at once, and the wines were ripe in a way that Champagne rarely is — so ripe that Richard Geoffroy, who made this wine, later conceded that some of the Chardonnay had come in over-mature, and his successor has said plainly that the house picked its 2002 Chardonnay too late. The result is the DP that tastes, more than any other, of orchard fruit and butter.

The blend was the house’s usual balance of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in roughly equal halves, with a dosage around six grams. It spent seven years on its lees and was released in the autumn of 2009; the second release, the P2, followed nine years after that.

Nineteen Years On

The wine’s reputation has moved with it. In its first years it was intensely floral — jasmine and white blossom — and then, as the decade turned, it went into a broader, richer phase: apricot and white peach, tangerine oil, cooked apple, brioche, a buttery weight on the palate that some tasters adored and others found a little too much. The critical view has been remarkably steady through all of it, and the drinking window most of them give runs into the late 2030s. Whether one prefers the 2002 to the tighter, more mineral years around it — the 2004, say, or the 2009 that was released out of sequence — is a matter of temperament rather than quality.

In the Glass

Opened first, at a counter, ahead of two Chenin Blancs from California — a Rhys from a brand-new site in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a Wind Gap from the North Coast. Nineteen years from the harvest, twelve from disgorgement.

Deep gold, the mousse fine and unhurried. The nose was in the middle of its rich phase: honey and toffee apple, buttered toast, white peach and mandarin, dried flowers, a trace of aniseed, and under it the faint struck-match, flinty edge that the house’s wines carry at this age. The palate was broad and oily in texture, almost Burgundian in weight, but the acidity that the late-August rain preserved was still running underneath and kept it from turning heavy. Long, honeyed, and finishing on toast and citrus peel rather than on sweetness.

A Champagne from a year that gave more than most, at the point where all of it was on show. For the same house at other stages, the archive has the Œnothèque 1985, the P2 2000 and the P2 2008, and the Rosé 1993.