2012 Billecart-Salmon Louis Salmon Blanc de Blancs and Elisabeth Salmon Rosé

We do not put our ancestors’ names lightly on a bottle,” said Mathieu Roland-Billecart of Champagne Billecart-Salmon. The seventh generation of his family to run the Mareuil-sur-Aÿ-based Champagne house, he was in London to launch two of Billecart-Salmon’s founders’ cuvées: the 2012 Elisabeth Salmon Rosé, named in honor of Elisabeth Salmon, co-founder of the house in 1818 with her husband Nicolas François Billecart, and the 2012 Louis Salmon Blanc de Blancs, named after Elisabeth’s brother Louis Salmon, who was the first cellar master of Champagne Billecart-Salmon.

With numerous 2012 Vintage Champagnes already released, Roland-Billecart only sketched the year briefly. He said that these 2012 wines were like “a glimmer of hope” for growers who then, as now, have to contend with the ever-changing challenges of radically different and increasingly unpredictable growing seasons: “From what was a pretty terrible beginning of the season, with frost, dryness… Hell… the lot, we managed to pull a great vintage, because as we say, août fait le moût, or August makes the must. We had lower yields and harvested in the second part of September.” What he describes is a year that saw a wet beginning, spring frosts and even hail, followed by a warm summer punctuated by heat spikes and a gentler September. In the end, August and September spelled both ripeness and fine acidity. “2012 sits somewhere between 2002 and 2008,” Roland-Billecart said. “It is not a monster of leanness, like 2008, or of concentration, like 2002. It has more meat on the bone than 2008 on release.”