Benoît Gouez has spent 20 years deciding exactly when a Moët & Chandon Champagne is ready to drink. His verdict on that special bottle you've been holding onto might surprise you, and so might his advice on how to serve it and what to eat alongside it.
It has been raining on and off all day, and as I sit down with Benoît Gouez at Capella Sydney’s McRae Bar, a storm rolls in. Gouez pours with the ease of a man who has done it a few hundred thousand times. In front of us sits a line of glasses that runs from the Champagne almost everyone knows to the pinnacle in the range, and over the next hour the chef de cave of Moët & Chandon sets out to answer the questions people rarely get the chance to ask him. How does Champagne age, and when should you actually open it? What lifts one year above another? Mostly, though, how to get more joy from a bottle than you are now.
He is a generous teacher. Gouez came to Champagne from the outside, born in Brittany and raised in Normandy, with no family in wine and, as he cheerfully puts it, an innate flair for the job. He studied agronomy and oenology, cut his teeth advising cooperatives in the south of France, and joined Moët in the late 1990s after a single decisive conversation with the house’s then director of oenology. In 2005 he was handed the keys to the cellars. Twenty years on, he is the man responsible for the way one of the world’s most recognisable champagnes tastes.
To understand how he thinks, it helps to know about what he calls his ‘Van Gogh moment.’ As a student he visited the painter’s museum in Amsterdam expecting the sunflowers and the southern light, and found instead a room of dark, technically flawless Dutch portraits from early in Van Gogh’s career. The lesson stuck. “You can’t be consistently creative without a technical base,” he says. He runs his cellars the same way, with labs and data underpinning everything, then sets all of it aside the moment he starts to taste. Technique keeps the wine good. Sensitivity is what makes it great. Each year he tastes around a thousand base wines, at least three times each, before the work he considers the heart of the job: the blending, which he likens to conducting an orchestra.
Champagne that is designed to be enjoyed in the moment
Which brings us to that bottle you are saving. Here is the most freeing thing Gouez says all afternoon: the house has already done the waiting for you. Every Champagne Moët releases has been aged in its cellars until he judges it ready, then sent out into the world at the point he wants you to drink it. Brut Impérial rests for two to three years before you ever see it. Grand Vintage gets six to seven. Collection Impériale, the summit of the range, takes eight to ten.
“There is no need to age it further,” he says. Cellaring a special bottle for a birthday or an anniversary is a lovely thing to do, and he is all for it, but you are keeping it for the occasion, not improving the wine. Brut Impérial is at its most joyful young, all bright orchard fruit and fresh brioche, and that is exactly how he wants you to catch it. So the answer to when should I open this is simple. Soon. Ideally with people you like.
The story in a great vintage
If Brut Impérial is the house’s constant, Grand Vintage is its diary. A vintage is declared only when a single year has a story worth telling, and 2016 had a good one. The season tested the growers, a very wet winter followed by frost and mildew in spring, before a dry summer and a timely August heatwave brought the survivors to ripeness. Gouez has a phrase for the wine that came out the other side: excellence born from turbulence.
Outside, the storm has settled in. You can taste the year in it. Grand Vintage 2016 opens with warm toasted bread and hazelnut, mellows into gingerbread and almond paste, then lifts on a fresh, citrusy finish of clementine and grapefruit. Gouez calls it, almost affectionately, a super ‘Brut Impérial,’ the same bright character with more intensity behind it and a longer finish. For the table he steers it towards a little richness, a fat-leaning fish or white meat with a sauce, something creamy or slightly buttery to sit alongside that seamless texture.
Haute couture in a bottle
The last glass is the pinnacle of the range. Collection Impériale Création N°1 is Gouez’s proudest creation and, he freely admits, his baby. He talks about it the way a couturier talks about a gown, and the comparison is deliberate. Built to mark 280 years of the house, it blends seven vintages reaching back to 2000, some matured in steel to stay bright and some in oak for depth, with one component resting a full decade on its lees. Bringing those worlds together in a single blend had never been done in Champagne. It carries no added sugar at all, and finishes on a savoury, almost saline note of smoke and liquorice.
This is a Champagne to sit down with. In the cellars they build whole meals around it, and the theme is slow. Gouez loves cooking in a crust, a whole chicken sealed in bread or a turbot wrapped in seaweed, cooked gently and low so the juices stay in and the flavours concentrate. At a restaurant, he says, steer clear of red meat and reach instead for earthy ingredients like mushrooms and roots, or anything with a briny, iodine-like edge.
He is just as excited about a wine not yet released. The next Grand Vintage, the 2018, is due to be available next year, and where 2016 is serenity wrung from a difficult year, 2018 is all generosity, an abundant harvest of rare quality. Worth clearing a space in the diary for.
The small things that lift every glass
A few of Gouez’s habits are easy to steal. On temperature, most of us pour too cold. A fridge sits around 4 degrees, colder than Champagne wants to be. He drinks Brut Impérial closer to 8 degrees and vintage at 10 to 12, warm enough to let the aromas open.
On glassware he is gently firm. The traditional flute, designed to show off a rising thread of bubbles, is too narrow for a fine Champagne to breathe, and the wide coupe lets the aromas escape entirely. His advice for home could not be simpler: pour it into a white wine glass, especially anything with a little age, and let it open the way a good wine should.
The point: for the pleasure of it
Ask Gouez what two decades at the top has taught him and he does not reach for technique. What he keeps coming back to is pleasure, and the privilege of making something that brings people together. “When you have the privilege to offer people joy and good times, that is rewarding.” After 20 years, the responsibility he once felt has softened into something closer to gratitude.
Which is the note the afternoon ends on. I admit I have a 2013 Grand Vintage sitting at home, saved for a reason good enough to justify it. Gouez has more or less convinced me the reason is the next time the people I love are gathered around the table. Champagne, in his hands, is not a trophy to be guarded. It is made to be opened and shared, well before you think the moment is grand enough. So the next time your favourite people are in the room, pour it. That, he would tell you, is occasion enough.
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