The Magnum Was Right

Salon is the house defined by the number one. One region — the Côte des Blancs. One village — Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. One grape — Chardonnay. One vintage at a time, with no non-vintage, no second label; in years that fall short, the fruit goes quietly to sister house Delamotte and Salon simply does not exist. Since Eugène-Aimé Salon — a Paris fur magnate who made his first wine in 1905 for himself and his friends, going commercial only with the 1921 — the house has declared barely forty-odd vintages in a hundred and twenty years. The 1988 was the thirty-second.

The winemaking explains the wine’s famous temperament: no malolactic fermentation, roughly a decade on the lees before release, disgorged à la volée with no dosage. Young Salon is notoriously shut and searingly acidic — a wine sold years before it is ready and often opened decades before it forgives you.

An Honest Confession

Here is the truth from this table: Salon and I have rarely gotten along. The young bottles have been all blade and no door; the old 750s have too often been tired or outright gone. A house this uncompromising leaves little middle ground — and my luck had run consistently to the wrong side of it.

The answer, it turns out, was format. This 1988 spent its life in magnum, and the larger bottle’s slower breathing changed the entire arithmetic.

In the Glass

The label had mostly surrendered to the cellar; the wine had surrendered nothing. Deep gold without a trace of fatigue. Candied lemon peel, hazelnut, smoke, licorice and anise built the frame; butter-sautéed mushroom, honey and toffee layered the age on top. Dense — and yet the acid, that famous unforgiving Salon acid, still ran taut down the middle, driving the finish home. 1988, the most structured and longest-lived of Champagne’s 88-89-90 trio, in the format built to prove it.

The best Salon of my life — not by a nose, by a length. The lesson leaves with the empty bottle: old Salon, magnum only, from now on and without exception. It opened an evening that went on to Dujac’s Bonnes-Mares 2007 and d’Auvenay’s Chevalier — and it was the argument the rest of the night had to answer.