What the Sharp Year Left Behind

1996 was a contradiction of a year in Champagne. The grapes came in with high sugar and high acidity together, two things that are not supposed to arrive in the same season. The first reaction, from a good many people, was that the acidity was simply too much.

Thirty years later the sentence has been rewritten. The acidity that looked like a flaw is now the thing holding these wines up, and Cristal 1996 is the bottle most often produced as evidence.

The Original Release

Cristal is Pinot-led — 55 Pinot Noir to 45 Chardonnay in this vintage — and Roederer, unusually for a large house, farms most of its own vineyards. The spine of the wine is grand cru Pinot from the Montagne de Reims and the Marne, and it shows.

There are two ways to meet the 1996. Roederer later released a Vinothèque version, disgorged years afterwards with a lower dosage. This bottle was the other one: the standard release, the wine as it was first sent out, thirty years under its original cork with nothing done to it since. The Cristal Rosé Vinothèque 1999 has already been here; this is the plainer, and in some ways the more honest, way of seeing what the year became.

Thirty Years On

Bright gold with a silver cast, the bead fine and persistent. The nose opened on candied citrus, honey and acacia, then moved into roasted hazelnut and pastry, white peach, pink grapefruit, and a single thread of smoke. With air, a suggestion of clove.

On the palate the 1996 acidity is still entirely present. Beneath it a chalky minerality is laid down with real precision, and the texture is creamy without ever going soft — the Pinot keeps it pulled taut. The concentration is honeyed but the wine is not heavy; that is the trick of the year, and this bottle performs it cleanly.

The finish is long and closes on salt and toasted nuts.

At thirty, this is a wine that is fully mature and still young at the same time, which ought not to be possible. It is at its best now and has the reserves to go on. Whatever happened to the people who worried about the acidity, they were drinking the wrong argument.