The Best Late Disgorged Champagnes to Drink Right Now

About 95 percent of Champagne is nonvintage, a blend of base wines from several years. Vintage Champagnes—the finest bottles—are from a single year’s harvest. And the most exquisite of those vintage examples are called late-disgorged, which often age on the lees (meaning they’re stored in the bottle with the leftover yeast from the secondary fermentation process) for eight to 10 years longer than vintage bottles before the sediment is removed, or disgorged. If vintage Champagne is a limited commodity, late-disgorged bottles are the rarest you can get, representing less than 1 percent of annual production.

So what’s the difference between a vintage bottle aged for a decade and a late-disgorged version from the same year? The corks in your cellar allow oxidation, which forms secondary characteristics in the liquid. But “when it is in our cellar, the yeasts which are transforming the wine into Champagne, they are life, so they are protecting the wine from oxidation,” says Dom Pérignon cellar master Vincent Chaperon, explaining why late-disgorged bottles are often livelier on the palate.

Dom Pérignon, the rare house to produce only vintage Champagne, usually sends its bottles to market after seven to 10 years. It holds back small quantities that are continually tasted and released at two intervals, labeled Plénitude 2 (15 to 20 years of additional aging) and Plénitude 3 (with over 25 years of extra cellar time). In French, the word plénitude means “a moment in life where a person is showing the depth and beauty of their personality,” Chaperon says; the term was chosen because “it is exactly what we are observing” when the wines are retasted.

Gosset just put out a unique late-disgorged nonvintage bottling, which has matured on the lees for 21 years. Cellar master Odilon de Varine tasted it every six months, until it “reached a balance between its freshness and its maturity.” Meanwhile, Louis Roederer chef de cave Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon’s thoughts on Vinothèque, from 2002, may apply to the entire category: “At the end of a long meditation, it emerges as a fresh perspective of Champagne—an even more perfect and exciting vision.” Here, five superlative bottles that might tempt an uncorking.