Most Admired Champagne Brands 2017: 1-15

10. GOSSET

That Gosset’s star is in the ascendency comes as no surprise. Its first top-10 finish in the World’s Most Admired Champagne Brands survey suggests that word is getting around about the high quality-to-price ratio evident across the range. A deeply traditional house, making table wine in Aÿ even before Ruinart was established, its champagnes have a rich, aromatic character that makes them work particularly well with food.

Sadly long-time cellarmaster since 1983 Jean-Pierre Mareigner died in May 2016, but his number two, Odilon de Varine, who worked in tandem with Mareigner for a decade, has taken up the reins, assuring continuity of the Gosset style. It’s a style best defined by its flagship multi-vintage Grande Réserve, always a blend of three different years that’s aged for significantly longer than most non-vintage cuvées. With impressive complexity, concentration and length, this cuvée regularly outperforms many big-name vintage champagnes.

Its partner, Grand Blanc de Blancs NV, also a three-vintage blend of Côtes des Blancs villages such as Avize, Chouilly, Cramant, Oger, Mesnil-sur-Oger and Cuis with Côtes des Noirs Chardonnay from Tour-sur-Marne, Trépail and Villers-Marmery, was first launched in 2011. Grand Rosé is a lovely fragrant, fruity, delicately hued pink of serious class.

While I’ve always had a slight personal preference for the vintage wines Gosset sells under its Grand Millesimé label, its prestige Cuvée Celebris, which can seem quite austere on release in its youth, ages into something impressive over time as a recent tasting in London of all six vintages so far released – 1988, 1990, 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2004 – demonstrated to good effect. The 2002 also performed very well in a vertical tasting of ’02 of prestige cuvées overseen by Jancis Robinson, outscoring many more expensive marques.