A Tiara in a Warm Year

Rare is the cuvée Piper-Heidsieck makes when it decides a year is worth it, which has happened only a dozen or so times since the first vintage in 1976. The bottle is unmistakable: black glass with a gilded lattice around its base, a tiara drawn by the jeweller Van Cleef & Arpels, which sounds louder than it is. The story of the cuvée’s beginnings — and its debut timed to the bicentenary of the house’s Champagne being presented to Marie Antoinette — is told alongside the 1988 elsewhere in this archive.

The 2002 was made under Régis Camus, the cellar master who ran Piper-Heidsieck’s blending for two decades and who treated Rare as a Chardonnay-led wine: roughly seven parts Chardonnay to three of Pinot Noir, from grand cru and premier cru villages across the Montagne de Reims and the Côte des Blancs, and a long rest on its lees in the cellars at Reims before release. The house has since set Rare up as a label of its own, with a separate identity, but the wine has not changed its shape.

2002

2002 is one of the reference vintages of modern Champagne. A dry, warm late summer with a north wind that concentrated the grapes on the vine produced wines of unusual richness and ripeness held up by good acidity — a year that made generous, structured Champagnes that have aged slowly and well, and that most houses declared without hesitation. In the Chardonnay villages it gave weight to a grape that in cooler years can be all angles.

In the Glass

Opened at nineteen years, at a counter dinner where it stood among five still wines — a Colin-Morey Meursault, a Leroy Nuits-Saint-Georges, a Vosne-Romanée from Bellene, a Grand-Puy-Lacoste 1990 and a Stag’s Leap Fay 1992. The cork beside it had done its work.

The colour was pale gold, still bright, with a fine and persistent mousse. The nose was expressive from the start: candied lemon and yellow apple, a light tropical note of pineapple, then brioche and toasted almond, a suggestion of honey and a chalky, mineral undertone that kept the richness from turning heavy.

The palate was full for a Chardonnay-led Champagne — the vintage’s ripeness showing as breadth in the middle — but the acidity ran clean through it and the texture was silky rather than creamy. A long finish, toasty and citrus-edged, with a saline note at the very end.

At nineteen the wine was in the early part of its maturity, the autolytic notes fully developed but the fruit still fresh; the deep-gold, nutty phase that the 1988 had reached was still some years off. Rare from a warm year is a different proposition from Rare in a taut one — more immediate, more generous, and none the worse for it. For the same vintage from other houses in these pages: Dom Pérignon 2002, Bollinger La Grande Année 2002 and its R.D..